An archive that will have moved: on an exemplary artistic intervention in the archive Fritzpunkt, its relation to the Marianne Fritz archive in Vienna and its conceptual ramifications

Abstract In 2023, the Agency for Indispensability Justifications (AGFU) sent shredded objects to 271 archives worldwide. This was part of a larger project of developing an Aufhebekunst [art of sublation] by engaging with the remains of the former artist collective Fritzpunkt , namely: the Archive Fritzpunkt. For years, Fritzpunkt had performed The Fortress , a neo-avant-garde work by Austrian author Marianne Fritz about Galicia during World War I, in what is today Ukraine and Poland. Inspired by Fritz’s writing, Aufhebekunst subsequently performed the Archive Fritzpunkt , ultimately causing it to disappear. This article does not only situate the AGFU’s provocative ventures within the tradition of archive arts. Building on Mikhail Bakhtin’s methodology, this article understands the AGFU’s artistic performance as a transfer from the particular linguistic performance developed in The Fortress to the Archive Fritzpunkt. Therefore, the AGFU’s engagement with concepts associated with the archival turn are compared with strategies by which these concepts are applied to poetic texts. Particular attention is devoted to Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever, whose underlying linguistic concept is contrasted with the demands that The Fortress places on its own reception. Finally, a case study investigates the poetic structure of The Fortress in regard to Fritz’s appropriation of archival records from the Austrian State Archives. Thus, the article argues that Fritz’s poetic practice includes a particular mode of reading archival records. The AGFU’s Aufhebekunst applies it to archiving itself and thus addresses as well as provokes the archival ethos.