This weekend marks two years since I set out on this project, yet it feels like it’s gone by in a blink.
When I first started on Archivorum Ark, I was nervous about the responsibility of building an archive from scratch that accurately reflected an artist’s practice. However, I never expect it to become such a personal process of reflection. What began as a professional placement gradually turned into a mirror, which revealed how I think, collaborate, and understand the relationship between art and memory.
Specifically how working on the archive of Belén Uriel was an exercise in empathy and interpretation. Through the past few weeks reflecting, I was reminded that archives are never static repositories. They are shaped by the sensibilities and decisions of everyone who touches them.
Beyond meeting Belén, my team and fellow students were essential to this experience. What could have been a lonely, solitary task became a community, with people who reminded me that archiving is as much about connection as it is about preservation. Every conversation and collaboration reinforced how much archival work depends on dialogue and trust. If you had told this kid from Florida two years ago that he’d be visiting Paris, Lisbon, and Geneva, he never would have believed you.
These trips offered more than cultural exchange, they deepened my sense of shared purpose, revealing how archives across different contexts are united by a common desire to make art’s afterlife visible and accessible. From this experience, I understood that the human connections behind the project were what gave it life.
As someone who moves between artistic and archival practices, this project also reshaped how I think about authorship. In documenting Belén’s process, I began to understand my own. The act of organizing, and to self-archive, is itself a form of creation. Translating artistic processes into archival language may be impossible: I often still feel the weight of how my current decisions will determine how others will encounter the work in the future. Yet the challenges of the project became opportunities to rethink what preservation can mean. Rather than forcing art into rigid systems, I learned to let the archive remain open, yet responsive. I’m hopeful that my attempt was an archive that evolves rather than concludes.
As the project reaches its end, I’m left with a lasting sense of gratitude and direction. I’ve come to see archival work not as a technical practice but as a deeply human one. It’s about listening: to artists, to materials, and to the contexts that give them meaning. What Archivorum Ark has given me most is a clearer understanding of where I want to go next. I hope to continue bridging the space between art-making and archiving, exploring how memory can be activated rather than stored. The lessons in collaboration and curiosity will guide whatever comes next. And perhaps the greatest lesson of all is that archives, like the people who build them, are never truly finished. They grow and shift with time, transforming with each new encounter.
Remembering back to my first time in Belén’s studio, and how anxious I was from the possibility of what the archive would become, not knowing that the space would become a site of translation between material and meaning. With this in mind, I’ll leave you with the beginning paragraph of my writing for the critical publication:
The midday sun angled low across the yard, its light catching in the waxy leaves above me, casting slow-moving shadows over the table. It was late May, and tucked behind the atelier, this garden felt far removed from a city’s usual rhythms. Still jetlagged from arriving a few days earlier, I let my third espresso grow cold on the table. The cup sat untouched beside my laptop, as my fingers traced and retraced a crease in the edge of my notebook and topic guide. I was focused, somewhere between calm and anxious. There was a tension I had come to recognize: the pressure to ask something real before the moment passed. This wasn’t a casual studio visit. It marked the beginning of something more formal, something meant to last. I had once again come to Lisboa to speak with Belén Uriel, not as a passive observer, but as someone attempting to document her process as thoughtfully as she constructs the work itself.
Here’s to the archive.
Best,
Stephen
Babs Haenen
Wonderful