HISTORIOTHEQUE: The Witness-Box of The Heart

The Historiotheque is the official title of my Atelier or Art Studio. It is the result of 20 years of laborious efforts at building the perfect Workspace for my interdisciplinary art and independent research practice. In many ways, the Historiotheque is an ideal which I have been striving towards and it is also a type of mobile vanguard.

That is to say, in the last 20 years, I have had to move my “art operations” at least 13 times. This has made it very difficult for me to build the “perfect workspace”. In fact, it has been impossible until now.

What happened, though, is that over the years I began formally studying my own workspace, in an attempt to optimize it in terms of the little space that I had, and the fact that I never seemed able to live in one place for longer than a couple of years.

What I ended up doing, out of necessity, was to innovate. What I did was formalize the “art operation” as well as the workspace, which is now a fully functional “modular workspace” or to borrow a phrase, a workspace “with variable geometry”.

What I have now come to realize is that the true Historiotheque may never exist in the way that I IMAGINE it. That is why I am not capitulating and accepting that if the Historiotheque as I imagine it never exists, then at least I can be consoled by the fact that it has always existed in my heart of hearts. And so now I believe in a new concept, The Historiotheque of The Heart, the Witness-Box of the Soul.

It is both mortal prison and tabernacle. So be it. It is where I work the magic of my interdisciplinary art-based research practice, the home of my art operations, the trampoline of my current artistic project, The Archives-Project. Amen to that!

A.G. © 2016. All Rights Reserved.