HARABEL Contemporary Art hosted on Friday, April 20th 2018, at its premises in Tirana, an open talk for artists, curators and art historians, focusing the discussion on the aim and the value of a digital and a physical contemporary art archive.

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Marta Bianchi and Martina Angelotti, respectively the President and the Artistic Director of Careof Milano presented the work of Careof, a Contemporary Art Platform based in Italy, and founded in 1987 by Mario Gorni.

Careof comprises in its digital and physical archive images of art works (photography, videos) by artists that have lived and produced in Italy as well as a physical and online library, which contains books and the documentation of art works of a large number of Italian artists.

Similar to Careof, HARABEL’s archive is a work in progress that focuses on the contemporary art works made in Albania. Furthermore, the digital archive that is accessible online aims to present the contemporary visual art in Albania (from 1991 onwards) as well as the art works produced by foreign artists in Albania.

The archive is the starting point of a long process that this platform will undertake to support the documentation of Albanian contemporary art history; therefore becoming an activator for the safeguarding of the collective memory in Albania.

Marta Bianchi and Martina Angelotti explained how and why Careof was born; they showed ways to access the archive online; while the speakers also described the methods that researchers, art students and others, can use to work with the archive.

Some of the issues discussed by the artists attending the talk included the following: the way the archiving organization solicits images from artists who would like to include their works in the archive and the way the organization deals with copyrights issues of artists’ art works. Interestingly, the attendees were also curious to know if Careof had selected any Albanian artist to become part of their archive.

To conclude the talk, the speakers screened one video from the Careof archive which was the following: “I cani lenti”( “Slow dogs”, 1971) from the Italian artist Franco Vaccari.