Futurity from Frictions. The Photothek of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz as a Laboratory

Photo-archival futurity emanates precisely from the frictions within a photographic archive. It might be a question mark on the mount board, or some wordings in the captions: these and similar occurrences reveal cracks offering starting points to disrupt even apparently unbiased archives, changing their future from simple repositories to places of critical inquiry. In this chapter I will engage with the Photothek of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, a seemingly innocuous archive providing art historians with photographic documentation of Italy’s artistic heritage since 1897. Looking closer, its foundation in Florence by German scholars reveals asymmetries and cultural appropriation; its classification system embodies tensions between different national concepts. Ongoing scholarly and artistic activities challenge the KHI’s past and present photo-archival practices. Especially the project “Encounters in an Archive” with artist Massimo Ricciardo created productive short-circuits introducing some objects left over by migrant people in Sicily into the ordered space of the Photothek. These frictions were discussed and reenacted by African cultural mediators active in Florence. Such moments of intense exchange generate co-responsibility and go even beyond the re-activation of photographic archives as places for the production of knowledge and memory: they reinvent the archive space into a laboratory for exploring futurity.