Expensive Energy, Priceless Time

From March until June, the Body Archive will take up space under a new guise named KARLA. KARLA is a node for review and open-ended configuration based on authenticity. Body Archive will take on interdisciplinary approaches on exchanges and exhibition with the intention of centering those who do their own thing – defined as but are not limited to independently navigating their respected spaces, authentically.

Find out here what Body Archive is working on in the interdisciplinary exhibition process.

Reflections on Authenticity by Jazmina Figueroa
About five years ago, I attempted to formalize some ideas on the embodied experiences that happen alongside technology, a critical look at the racist and ableist systemic biases that inform data collection and digital networks. This attempt resulted in my first published essay «Methods of Representation». In retrospect, I have come to understand this work as a counteraction concerned with authentic experiences as marginal, abstracted forms of affected information, and the impossibility of thinking through such forms as objective. That means objectivity is in a constant state of disagreement with authenticity.

Thinking about authenticity within the framework of the Body Archive named KARLA at «Karl der Grosse» implies a correlation between selfhood, the individual archive, and notions of the coherent authentic. Taking place at this debate house in Zurich, it is fundamental to first consider why this place was established and how the space functions as a site for deliberation and debate, the practice of seeking factual accuracy through logical argumentation.

Whether the authentic self is a pursuit for amelioration or the authentic experience functions as another Western categorization of the Other, authenticity is ultimately not up for debate. Authenticity can only be felt, like a bond, through the semiotics of belonging. Authenticity, in this sense, is transient and sincere. Being short-lived, any moment or thing that is recognized as authentic sparks an encapsulation, into memory, and into being, the key term here is ‘into’. The authentic as an internal process.