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  • Jasper Rigole’s Quixotic Art Experiments with Home Movies and Archival PracticesThe International Institute for the Conservation, Archiving, and Distribution of Other People’s Memories (IICADOM)
  • Gerda Cammaer (bio)

As they move from attics to archives, from private use to public reclamation, home movies transform into public memory, mobilizing history as something particular, local, specific. What was fictional can transform into fact; what was factual can suggest a new fictional alchemy.

Patricia Zimmermann, “ The Home movie movement: Excavations, Artifacts, minings”

Belgian Artist Jasper Rigole is the founder and conservator of the (fictitious) International Institute for the Conservation, Archiving, and Distribution of Other People’s Memories (2004), hereinafter referred to as IICADOM. This ongoing multimedia project is an original and lively collection of linear films and multimedia art projects created out of found films, photographs, and documents the artist has gathered over the years.1 As an ongoing artistic project, it is in itself a constantly growing virtual archive for the images Rigole has recycled, a fraction of the huge analog film archive Rigole has built from anonymous 8mm images he has collected at auctions, in secondhand stores, and at flea markets. He uses these found home movies to make imaginary films that situate these images from the past in a contemporary context and aesthetic, combining elements from both literary and referential genres.2 His style can best be described as a filmic form of experimental life-writing that calls to mind the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Georges Perec, two important sources of inspiration for Rigole.

Building on Patricia Zimmermann’s ideas, this article aims to illustrate how Rigole creates a “new fictional alchemy” for the home movies in his collection, “mobilizing history as something particular, local, specific” and yet, at the same time, embracing the universal quality of home movies by “transforming them into public memory.”3 Rigole assembles other people’s home movies, creating a surrealist filmic world for them that is as universal as it is particular. With his distinct compilation style, Rigole has found an imaginative way to interrogate the way archives work, to explore the complex dialogue between memory and history, and to study the language of home movies in particular.

Creative Musings on the Archive and on History

Among the large body of found-footage films that reflect on the fleeting nature of moving images and memories, Rigole’s work is notable for the manner in which it references the workings of official archives to help shape a fictional archive. This practice supports the concept that any archive, real or fictional, is knowable only according to the particular situations in which they are used. What users do with archives is as crucial as how they are constructed: both processes are manifestations of the urge to collect and select. Rigole’s work is ultimately defined by his investigation of the archive as a creative site: collection and selection become a creative activity, and the language and signs of the archive are used for their artistic potential rather than their original function. In this manner, Rigole’s work recalls the unfinished archive of Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project (1927–1940). The collection of notes and ideas that form Benjamin’s mnemonic research for an archive of the Arcade is one of the foremost expressions of the archive [End Page 42] as a creative activity. However, to suggest that Benjamin and Rigole see the archive as a creative locus is not to suggest that their work abandons intellectual curiosity or rigor. Instead, their work affords opportunities for using the creative archive as a method to explore and express cultural history. As Benjamin once posited, collecting is a primal characteristic of study: “the student collects knowledge.”4 Benjamin was inspired by Baudelaire’s description of the poet as ragpicker, collecting and cataloging the refuse of the city, and used this image for his methodology as a cultural historian. He was particularly interested in the ephemeral and the overlooked parts of culture. The aim was “to create history with the very detritus of history.”5 This intent and methodology is echoed in Rigole’s work, in particular, in his film Temps Mort (2010), a miniature example...

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