The Return to the Archive

Dénes Miklósi November 2017

In order to serve as a public archive, the materiality of the cluster of images stored by Făclia and Igazság newspapers in the form of darkened photographic negatives had to be transferred into another medium by means of technology.^[1] This defined a certain opening of the body of images, which acted also as a connection between the past and the present, between the various authors of the photographs. Today, a few years after the beginning of this transfer process, the issue of the author, which in the beginning could be felt like an obstacle in the appropriation of images and which could hinder the development of the archive at any time, no longer seems as conspicuous as it was at that time. Perhaps this is also due to an ideological sublimation.

The return to the archive may, however, represent an alternative to the manner of transcribing past experiences, evidences as it can shed light on a series of questions pertinent for the present. The opinion according to which the archive can be burnt or destroyed, beyond the logic of archive legitimation, was overcame; the archive is not stripped of its functionality as soon as the post-Communist discourse becomes publicly obsolete. The Minerva image archive is awaits, most probably, as a document a possible analysis, a statistical clarification which could reveal a different quality related to the individual and to society. Most photographs from the archive have remained unpublished and were not included in the pages of the Socialist press, remaining an apparently incoherent accumulation of images, like a large number of snapshots fated to fade into oblivion.

In order to layout this visual script, I included unpublished images. The two components of the selection envisage and associate, on one hand, the snapshots and the journalistic directions of the images produced by the press photographers of Făclia and Igazság newspapers and, on the other hand, images from my personal stock of images taken in my years as a student and in the years immediately after that time.

During the school practice, the theme of the poster with political commitment recurrently appeared next to the independent graphical image. This was the political, ideological expectation; yet, I somehow remember that these topics have never been introduced or explained. They were not placed in real or historical contexts. Nonetheless, formally impeccable works were produced at the level of the school.

In this context, I made the poster Voilà un homme, which I do not remember specifically whether it represented the topic of peace or the topic of disarmament. The wording of the poster was taken from The Egyptian Book of the Dead. One of the summer practice locations was Poligrafia from Sibiu. There, after the originals, I printed an A0 offset format poster with the help of some master typographers. Because the liberation poster was part of my degree diploma, it’s defending caused controversies.

Dénes Miklósi, born in Odorheiu Secuiesc in 1960, lives and works in Cluj where he teaches at the University of Art and Design. He is one of the founding members of the digital archive project The Minerva Press Photography Collection from Cluj and member of the Tranzit House, Cluj. Miklósi is interested in investigating, with the help of photography, the unintegrated activities, closely connected to the individual, the community and the institutional system. His recent projects investigate the relationship between memory and history and explore the finality of the photographic process as an apparatus of power.

Slide. The detail of an outdoor political poster that I photographed in Dresden, the former German Democratic Republic during 1982, documenting the passers-by intervention.

The film “Events of the Week,” news broadcasted before the screening of a movie in the cinema.

Action together with Zoltán László, around 1984. With the films sold at the time at the Oser flea market in Cluj, we made screenings with a 35 mm manual projector. The manual projector allowed a screening in all directions. The screenings were not public.

Political poster, offset, 1983. The text is quoted from the “Egyptian Book of the Dead”. Je n’ai pas commis l’iniquité contre les hommes; je n’ai pas maltraité les bestiaux; je n’ai pas toléré de voir le mal; je n’ai pas fait pleurer; je n’ai pas tué; je n’ai pas donné d’ordre á un tueur.

“23 August 1944–1985. 40 years from the social and national liberation Revolution, anti-fascist and anti-imperialistic.” Political poster with fluorescent pigment (part of the diploma work), 1984

Labels, 1985 demonstraţie, demonstration, elevi, lozincă, mass, mulţime, propaganda, jelmondat, pupils, tanulók, tömeg, tüntetés, watchword

Found postcard outline. Stamp with ETNA inscription, which often appeared on mailings with friends in the 1980s. At the beginning of the 1990s, it became the logo of the Etna Foundation in Sfântu Gheorghe.

Slide. Adriatic Sea. On the occasion of the participation and visit to the Biennial of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana in 1985. One could already sense at that time the loss of relevance of the multiplied graphic in the frame of the Biennial.

Stencil found on the gate of the cellar at the History Museum of Pharmacy, Sibiu, in 1986. On the occasion of the “Colloquium of Visual Arts and Young Art Criticism.” Maybe it was the sign for “cleared of rats.”

Image with the slate “The Inspectorate of Realities” in 1983. Summer practice of the Graphic Art Department of the Institute of Fine Arts Cluj at the Sibiu Printing House.

Slide. One of the Bottomless Lakes on the Târnavei Mari Valley. Together with László Zoltán during the 1980s. We were interested in how the circle of the plants’ web gradually covered the lake mirror.

Drawing representing Biró Gábor, the most “non-aligned” person. We spent plenty of time together in the 1980s.

Demonstration for disarmation, Cluj, 1982

In Imre Baász’s studio in Sfântu Gheorghe, in the 1980s.

Double-sided projection. A proposal of an installation for the exhibition “Projection,” The Art Gallery from Târgu Mureș, 1998

^[1] The Minerva collection of press photographs contains negatives made by reporters of Făclia and Igazság newspapers between 1965 and 1993. The archive, comprising over 30000 of 6”x6”negatives, was saved immediately after 1989 and records the various “achievements” of the former regime used as propaganda—documents that today, consciously or not, are fated to oblivion.

Until 2014, the collection was preserved by The Centre for Media Research of the Minerva Cultural Association and was, to a large extent, invisible, as the two newspapers had published only few of the images of the time. In the process of building the digital archive the aim was to preserve the integrity of blocks of documents from the original collection. Starting from 2014, in the workshop that functioned within the framework of the conset projet at the Tranzit House in Cluj, the process of scanning the negatives and of transforming them into positives has made visible this huge conglomerate of images. The workshop aimed at bringing together a series of institutional, personal and professional interests in order to initiate a potential research infrastructure.

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