The Archive of Destruction includes a series of commissioned essays by writers, artists, curators, and academics. For this event, Jes Fernie is joined by three of the contributors to discuss their response to archive, and the texts they have contributed.
Eloise Hawser is an artist living and working in London. Her Archive of Destruction text considers the bizarre story of the destruction of Giacomo Balla’s Futurist Suit in 1914. Designed to incite the Italian public to join the Nazis in pursuit of a violent, nationalist politics, the suit was torn to shreds by angry students and lecturers at Rome’s Institute for Civil Law.
Marysia Lewandowska is an artist living and working in London. She makes the case for acts of destruction to be embedded within public discourse, archives and collective memory, and for these modes of knowledge production to be openly accessible, exploratory and disruptive.
Vanessa Onwuemezi is a writer based in London. Destroyed in Love is an experimental reflection on time, colonial history, destruction and decreation, using the removal of the Edward Colston statue in Bristol as an evocative focal point.
Image: Giacomo Balla’s Futurist Suit, ca. 1913–1918.