The Elusive Archive is a project in collaboration with Levi Lanser for The New Masters, a project by Dift for Bienale Interieur 2018, Kortrijk.

We were asked to re-interpret the printed archive (over 300 magazines and newspapers) of the 50 year old Biennale Interieur. 

We wanted to (re)shape, (re)interpret, (re)invent the given archive by simply publishing actual scans coming from the publications. 

We wanted to approach a rational content in an intuitive way, with just a couple of parameters to get us started. We didn’t know in what this would result, therefore we called this our elusive archive. 

Elusive — meaning difficult to find, catch, or achieve. 

When we talk about archiving, we often think about organizing and structure. But mostly, people think about using the brain, the reasoning to do this.

Archiving isn’t exactly connotated with intuition, since this is the ability to understand something instinctively, without the need for conscious reasoning. 

These were our paramaters:
1. Intuitive action (Picking the magazine)
2. Structured action (Setting the timeframe)
3. Structured action (The 3 Scans)
4. Intuitive action (The personal Scan)

With the content we gathered, we created this publication. There are 40 posters, so the archive can be shown in a page/poster per page/poster way or as a whole. This publication is based on the following system: The cover has a full list of the used magazines. We provide the following info per scan: name of magazine, publishing date and the type of content (inside, cover or spine). We also made some illustrations based upon interior objects or forms and shapes we’ve found in our selection. In the middle you can read a long email conversation between us about archiving. The original archive and our work is shown during the Biënnale (18 - 22 October) and until 4 November 2018. It’s a printed edition of 300 by @stockmansinspiredby on Munken Print White 150 g.