The Acts of St Lawrence
What do pupils, students, cooks, confectioners, beer brewers, innkeepers, fire fighters and laundresses have in common? And above all, what connects them all to librarians?
They have a common patron saint, St. Lawrence.
In the end, he distributed the Vaticans money among the parishioners so that he didnt have to hand it over to Emperor Valerian. This earned him torture and execution and a permanent place in history.
If you consider something valuable but cannot preserve it on your own, generalization is a possible way forward.
It creates space and security in distribution, it makes access more difficult for censors, and it leaves the preservation to those who need it most.
In 20 years, over 200 people have built a social meeting place – free of charge. In the first 40 years it provided space, shelter and food to well over 2000 guests, for a night, a week, a month, for years.
Slides tell the story of this project and its people. This becomes part of contemporary history. And whoever keeps the slides carries this idea forward and becomes a librarian.
The CASAdelDRAGON is located in the province of Castellon, the land of Valencia, Spain. And the young man found his teacher, who went with him to Rome, St. Lawrence.
In 1826 J. N. Niepce developed the first photograph. The copper plate coated with asphalt, iodine and silver required several hours of exposure time. In 1936, Godowsky Jr. and Mannes developed the first slide film for the Eastman Kodak Company.
In 1986, the founders of CASAdelDRAGON in Spain, Antje Schultz and Juan Petry, began documenting the progress of the reconstruction of the artists residence using slides. This method was chosen for cost reasons. People who were interested in visiting and helping with the construction work looked at these photos on „slide evenings“ to get an impression of what it would be like to help rebuild an old stone house in eastern Spain.
33 years later, the art project ARTSURPRISE developed into the idea of founding a contemporary museum MUARCO and in 2024 this museum started its project „The eternal archive MUARCO“. Just as the aim of founding the museum was to explore new forms of museum work, the aim was also to take an innovative approach to the task of archiving the museum holdings.
If one of the museums tasks is to scientifically process contemporary art and make it durable – and therefore accessible – then the question was where and how contemporary art should be stored. MUARCO decided to distribute the art around the world. For small formats, postal delivery was chosen.
The artist Juan Petry donated his slide collection with photos from 1980 to 1997 to the museum. The museum processed this donation and distributed it to mail art artists and art lovers. Some of them were published as a series as part of the ARTSURPRISE project.
„Images in the head often fade faster than those on film. Just the latest methods of preserving information quickly disappear from focus. The digital attracts and devours everything, and will be able to give back less and less. Material chemistry hinders memory, politics even more so. How limited are the options for a contemporary artist. Its good to let go and give to the community in liberation. What the community receives are the artifacts of its own history. How it deals with them should be left up to it.“
WWW.MUARCO.ORG
WWW.PETRY.EU/TAOSL
The image is given to you under the Creative Commons license type CC BY-SA. For details have a look at CC-BY-SA.
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