The archive: between individual memory and collective memory

There is a confrontation between memory and history that denotes the eagerness of the human being for not assuming its perishable character. Regarding the capacity to remember, different authors express their different points of view, since not all consider memory as a social construction that is shaped by an individual part. This confrontation between the collective and the individual of memory arises from the degree of objectivity that may occur in each of the points of view that derive from a particular event. In this way, we find that on the one hand, history has been associating with the memory objectified by taking charge of recovering a past from a series of vestiges preserved and belonging to a collective. And on the other hand, autobiographical memory participates in subjectivity because events are dissected and recomposed because of personal interests. Between these two extremes, we find how many artistic representations have tried to preserve and record memory, aided by writing and recording, and which occur in both analog and digital modalities. For this they have used one of the paradigms of 20th and 21st century art considered by the art historian Benjamin Buchloh: the archive. Various authors will work from this practice to perform artistic reconstructions whose field of action will cover both the social and the individual, without getting to face these two areas. To do this we will use the work done by Hans-Peter Feldman, Zoe Leonard or Christian Boltanski who move between these two levels.