The Covid pandemic has slowed down activity in the archive; for over a year we had limited access to the building in which the archive is housed, and publications we received from London during this time remained in their Fed Ex boxes, unsorted and uncatalogued. Meanwhile, we were busy organizing our first public museum exhibition of the archive, and it is finally happening after two decades of work: “Ever Archive: The Publications and Publication Projects of Hans Ulrich Obrist” at the Serralves Foundation, Porto, from 11 November until 10 July 2022.

The overarching theme of the exhibition involves exploring how the documents in an archive constitute nodes within a network of human relations. An archive in this respect is not merely a collection of documents or an enumeration of their publication history, but a diverse array of information that underscores the people, ideas, and cultural projects that contributed to their materialization.  Ever Archive evolved as a way of showing how the materials of the archive reflect upon Obrist’s practice of creating links between people, disciplines, venues, and continents — a sustained practice of cultural hyphenation.

Ever Archive was organized with the support of Rachel Wang and Tess Davey in Chicago, Philippe Vergne and Sónia Oliveira in Porto, and Hans Ulrich Obrist and Max Shackleton in London.  Recently, we’ve been packing the material we are sending over–a uniquely complicated undertaking in the age of Covid and “supply chain problems”–meaning, difficult, convoluted, expensive, shipping.