Much aesthetic thought in the 20th century has been devoted to the conditions of reception for the products and actions of the human being. The fundamental relation between the archive and the museum is their nature as a receptacle for objects, regardless of their support. But it is also the great difference: potentially, the archive contains everything about the part of reality it represents, whilst the museum makes public a selection of reality and houses it in its rooms. If the creation of these gateways, pretexts and arrangements of access to the object of human interest is the way Western culture understands, organises and possesses its reality – or someone else’s –, the next step will be their use as a support in narrations, whether documentary or fictional. That dissolves the apparent border between the creation of the document, its exhibition in any medium and most of all between reality, story and fiction.

Archive Cultures is a guided narration through documents, a tour around the archive and its repercussions on ways of recreating and understanding reality through methods of organisation and access to information. The project runs through fragments of contemporary culture and art involved in the processes of production of reality generated by the archive. It tells and represents aspects of the dialectic between the creation and exhibition of documents, of their discovery and publication. It reflects part of the debate about their repressive nature, while showing direct interventions by narrators and artists whose intentions are not marked by the positivism that underlies any archive, document or documentary gaze.