Sensible Encounters is an artistic project that explores and combines several creative practices related to the topics of archives, public spaces, memory, everyday life, urban derive, garbage and speculative narratives.

For two months in 2019, the Moabit neighbourhood in Berlin was the stage for systematic walks that Marcos Vidal realized across the area. During these walks, he went around collecting abandoned objects and approaching urban furniture and monuments from a tactile perspective. This repertory of private and collective traces will be used to set up a cognitive mapping of Moabit that activates the memory contained in these objects, thereby linking and imagining the past and the future together.  

Inspired by the urban dérive of the French situationists, Marcos Vidal acts as a contemporary flaneur who experiences unexpected encounters with all kind of materials laying on the streets. These found materials range from industrial residues, discarded goods made in China, fast food packages, vegetal life to everyday objects which don’t fulfil their original functionality anymore, among others. All of these elements have been detached from their context for reasons we can only imagine and have ended up as orphan objects, floating in the quiet limbo of the public space until the city cleaning services remove them for good. Through Vidal’s intervention, this congregation of disseminated non-objects is worthy of recognition and becomes highlighted from the continuum of the urban landscape.

While the walking follows different itineraries, the activity situates itself somewhere between a systemic process with protocols and an event of randomness with aleatory discovers. This oscillating logic permeates the growing and dynamic collection of objects and experiences resulting from the urban drifting and leads to the creation of a sort of archive. However, when reflecting on its variation or even its deviation from traditional archival practices, it would be more accurate to assume that an anarchive will emerge, thus challenging and subverting the archival logic and expanding its function.

These non-objects are now becoming part of a new system of relations that are able to produce other meanings, and thus to open paths for alternative knowledge about the neighbourhood. In order to contribute to an (an)archival practice, that is, to produce a surplus value of the archive, they will experience some material and cognitive shifts. On one hand, the elements will be carefully catalogued following an apparently well-structured logic, echoing the taxonomies and classification systems of archival procedures. However, the applied criteria will subversively praise their incompleteness, their dysfunctionality, their fragility and their abandon as a meaningful status. Index cards, descriptions, etiquettes and signatures correspond to an order fully imagined by the artist. As a result, they will be challenging the inclusion / exclusion dialectic of every archival practice, as well as its the power and control strategies.

This invisible performance of classifying, describing and creating order among the materials raises questions about the symbolic and material processes involved when a discarded object, or garbage or debris - briefly a non-object, becomes a document and turns into archivable matter that elevates it to the category of a potential knowledge producer. 

On the other hand, if those rescued objects are per-sé traces of the neighbourhood life and have entered the realm of possible archival records through a further artistic intervention, they will still experience a second shift in their way of existence. The shape and texture of these objects was printed directly with black ink onto rice paper, so that they produce their own material trace. The sedimented life, as well as the inherent vulnerability contained on them, will be stamped on two-dimensional artworks, which makes possible a resignification process and a new constellation of relations among the objects.

From non-object to document and from document to artwork, not only can these objects be brought back into life, but they can also become part of an interconnected and open (an)archival system. A system that now allows for the re-readings and re-writings, instead of serving its mere storage function. It is now a place of production. These non-objects are shifting into active agents, platforms or even springboards for new activations within the archive where further sensible encounters can take place.

Looking for a shared and situated (an)archival practice, the information and knowledge contained in these objects aims to be accessible, exchangeable and open for new interpretations. Rethinking archival arrangements hrough speculative micronarratives, which alternate fictional events with real places and individual stories with historical events, is an essential part of the project and strives to constantly create new relations.

Sensible Encounters aims to create a dynamic, collective and non-institutional imagery based on little gestures towards consumerism and oblivion as well as desire and abandon. As an anarchive it shows the dispersed fragments of life, apparently irrelevant objects and unheroic moments. The work as a whole becomes a commemoration of everyday life. 

(Maria Morata)

“Objects that have a symbolic and familiar value to the people. Souvenirs, bricks, plants, abandoned goods, domestic objects, garbage made in china, industrial memories...and so on. Those things I want you to found them in the area, for our printing workshop in Plovdiv.   Sharing experiences and an ancient hand print technique, we can build a collective memory. Printing those objects that each participant will bring from his walk in Plovdiv, we will do a kind of image mapping of that area. Translating the language of those objects in black and white images”.