Sleeping Archive, (280x140x140cm, recovered wood, fabric, steel) Humanities Campus, University of Copenhagen, Islands Brygge, Copenhagen, curated by Trine Friis Sørensen

The Sleeping Archive was a commissioned installation in the main building of the new Humanities campus of the University of Copenhagen. Extending from the Archive Building Workshop, this work stems from what Stiegler kinks out from his rigorous problem of individuation, of how the ubiquity of memory prosthetics, as hypomnemata (Stiegler, 2006) seem to alter our abilities to build memory, to retain and retrieve it. These prosthetic devices, by way of digital memory, transform the once-inseparable aspects of psyche, the self, and the social. In this sense, the Sleeping Archive is situated in public space as a sculptural object with a particular, oscillating (Dombois, 1992) material economy: as a present figure it is composed of recovered steel, wood, and curtain fabrics appropriated from the university’s demolished campus buildings; the main component is suspended between steel triangular prisms as a past reference to the first “image” of the hammock, as it emerges when the Spanish arrived to the Caribbean in the late 15th century to find it a worthy indigenous technology; and sets forth a future representing a slight resistance where sleep is not only sleep as memory-building, but also sleep as a counter-cultural manifest against neo-liberal modalities. It reminds a present colonial memory that is not to be forgotten to the forces instilled by neo-colonial, consumerist ideologies.

Interview with Anne Kølbæk Iversen "The Memory is the Matter and the Matter is the Memory" in the Social Design Reader (Angewandte, Vienna, 2013)