By Toni Serra-Abu Ali (OVNI)
The Collective OVNI works in an-archiving, and this is the explanation of why: “So this took us to the OVNI gathering of “The Colonial Dream” in 2006 and this led us to consulting archives and these archives were impossible to consult, incredibly difficult. There were hundreds of steps that were needed to access many of them. Those that we could access had to be accessed through back channels, thanks to Iguan (that’s a secret). And the film libraries here in Catalonia and Madrid were impossible, as were the television stations. So we were naïve before realizing that the idea of accessing archives was fundamentally linked to power and constructing narratives. And we saw that each document had a value, especially those that could be accessed, which had the same value as the statue here in the city of Antonio López, which now has been un-archived or an-archived. So the things that we were trying to gather were totally the opposite, they weren’t monuments but the archeology of people’s lives; it wasn’t the marcro but the micro, it wasn’t from one source but gathered from a thousand sources. Also for this reason OVNI is about the unidentified and without borders, OVNI is this whole net, all those authors, because there are many ways to work as a group, and one way of working as a group is when people send you a video and you spend years thinking about it.