Deferred Archive

2013 CIFO Grants & Commissions Program Exhibition

CIFO Art Space, Miami │ August 28 - October 27, 2013

The Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO) is proud to announce as this year’s Grants & Commissions Program exhibition. As it is customary, the winners are part of the annual exhibition dedicated to the program at the CIFO Art Space. Deferred Archive is the eleventh edition of CIFO’s Grants & Commissions Program featuring newly commissioned works by Jorge Mendez Blake, Milena Bonilla, Miguel Calderón, Antonio Caro, Benvenuto Chavajay, José Gabriel Fernández, Sofía Olascoaga, Manuela Ribadeneira, Laureana Toledo and Santiago Villanueva.

Deferred Archive refers to the idea that memory is constructed retrospectively – not from past to future, but from future to past, so that the events that we experience are not fixed in time, but fleeting from one subject to the other. In Hal Foster’s Return of the Real, he looks to Freudian theory of deferred action to recover psychoanalysis as a model to understand how we construct the history of avant-garde art. According to Foster, Freud’s theory of deferred action is seen as an event that is recorded as traumatic when a subsequent event retroactively recodes it.

Foster, in turn, proposes that the significance of the events of the avant-garde occurs in a similar way by a complex alternation of anticipation and reconstruction. Thus we see what happens when artists work with the idea of the archive. The archive becomes a distinct model in understanding how memory is constructed.

The idea of the deferred archive represents the artist looking back, activating past events and classifying them in order to understand a particular moment, as if revisiting the event with the perspective of today gives it the opportunity to really exist; a type of documentation that allows for memory to be created within the now – or, memory according to a later experience. The artist uses this model as a way of recognizing that memory is always something in the making. By looking to the past, the artists participating in CIFO’s 2013 Grants & Commissions Program are not searching for a memory, but rather creating a memory through documentation/archiving. The act of post-event documentation (or belated documentation) therefore becomes the deferred archive. 

This year, CIFO has partnered with Cannonball, an Artist Residency based in Downtown Miami, to award one of the artists in the Grants & Commissions Program with a two month residency. CIFO’s Board of Directors selected Benvenuto Chavajay from Guatemala for the residency where he spent the months leading up to the exhibition focusing on creating his project.