Life is strangely made. The further I go in my still young existence, the more its connective nature becomes more and more obvious to me: no encounter can ever be in vain. By “encounter,” I mean whatever comes our way, whatever suddenly, material or immaterial, appears before our eyes, expected or not: a book, a friend, a word, a dream, an idea, a pencil, a letter, an animal, a lover. I do not know whether the link is forged before or after the encounter, but life always seems to weave a thread between the things that reach us. Sometimes a flash of illumination, sometimes a curious accident makes this thread appear, visible for a moment. There it is, clear as day, black on white: the childhood book you cherished was written by your longtime neighbor, the cashier at the local bakery turns out to be your former babysitter’s mother, the novel you are reading right now mirrors precisely your own situation. Nothing happens for nothing. Everything locks into place, just like the brilliant scenario of Slumdog Millionaire.
You probably remember the film: Jamal Malik, eighteen years old, an orphan from the slums of Bombay, is about to win twenty million rupees on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?. Only one question stands between him and victory when the police arrest him, suspecting fraud. How could a boy from such a background possibly know all the answers? Pressed to explain himself, Jamal recounts where his knowledge came from, summoning precise memories, fragments of life that years later resurfaced and whispered the right answers in his ear. On that television stage, his thread appeared taut and luminous. All those seemingly trivial moments had in fact prepared him.
I evoke this possible destiny, and Slumdog Millionaire offers me a way to introduce my most recent encounter with a dear friend: the artist Luc Courchesne. I have already spoken of his work here. A pioneer of digital arts in Quebec, fascinated by the virtual and immersive technologies, I first met him in 2021 during a museology seminar at UQAM. I wrote once on his work, and more recently he called me back to ask if I would write the introduction to his next exhibition at Pierre François Ouellette’s gallery. To discuss this, and to reconnect now that I am on the other side of the Atlantic, Luc invited me to an improvised dinner. Corn, green salad, cod fritters, apple pie and white wine. A summer afternoon that slid gently into evening, simple, warm, refreshing despite the heat wave. We spoke of Nil, of the project, of the steps ahead. Luc asked me many questions about my experience working alongside such a remarkable artist. And I told him how lucky and honored I feel. Little did he know that, like Nil, I consider Luc one of those names that will leave a lasting imprint on the art world, and that I feel absolutely honored to count as a friend.
Speaking of Nil, Luc asked if I knew Anarchive. The name rang instantly familiar: of course I did, I had even written a blog post about those artist archive book-CDs. Initiated by Anne Marie Duguet, the project had left a mark on me, and I had suggested to the Archivorum team that it might serve as a source of inspiration. Seeing my excitement, Luc excused himself, disappeared briefly, and returned with two volumes from the series: Michael Snow’s, his former professor, and Thierry Kuntzel’s. I was delighted to hold them in my hands. Beautifully produced editions, worthy of each artist’s work. The only drawback — and we spoke at length about this — is that the discs no longer function. In other words, the very aim of the initiative has been undermined by the impossibility of reading the CD-Roms. The archives are inaccessible. A concern that has haunted us too from the beginning of our own project: what if one day our Cloud could no longer be opened? What if our hard drives became unreadable? Anarchive, despite opening a pioneering path, fell victim to the very risk we fear ourselves — technological obsolescence. The archives sought permanence, yet their medium betrayed them.
Still in our conversation on archives, Luc brought out another book that quickly became my coup de cœur of the evening: Imponderable: The Archives of Tony Oursler (2017). A monumental volume, less about the artist’s own work than about the overflowing collection of objects, images, and documents that nourished it. More than 2,500 items gathered into a social, spiritual, and intellectual history stretching back to the eighteenth century. For Oursler, archives were a visual resource, a historical inquiry, and, more mysteriously, a family memory. This book was a beautiful reminder of the archive as a tool for creation, a kind of reservoir of imaginaries, where accumulation fuels thought and future works. I feel Archivorum shares this same intuition: to treat the archive not as relic but as springboard. In both cases, the archive is active, operative, performative. Magnetism, electricity, invisible energies: the “imponderable” refers to that which cannot be precisely determined. This archive book spans spirit photography, demonology, cryptozoology, optics, mesmerism, hypnotism, cults, color theory, UFOs. For someone like me, with an endless love of horror and contemporary pop culture, it was pure joy flipping through it.
We ended our summer dinner speaking of Luc Courchesne’s own archives. In his living room, dozens of notebooks are stacked neatly, filled with notes, sketches, reminders. Carefully preserved since (at least) the 1980s, they have yet to be digitized. As I left, I told him with a smile: “You have, right there in your living room, a tremendous archiving project.”
And in truth, that was the most beautiful echo of Archivorum: to see that the archive begins in the simplest form, in a hand-scribbled notebook, and that the challenge is not merely to preserve but to circulate and to transmit it. In Luc’s home, as in our project, it stands at the threshold between intimate memory and collective legacy.
Anne-Marie Auger
So interesting !