RPU63 / CURATOR ENTRY

EVIDENCE FOR A WORLD
THAT NEVER WAS

Nine documents from a synthetic cultural archaeology.

RPU63 treats the archive not as a repository of what happened, but as an apparatus capable of making the unhappened appear historical.

RPU63 / PROJECT STATEMENT

THE PAST AS
A GENERATIVE MEDIUM

RPU63 constructs visual and material evidence for a coherent historical world that never existed. Its posters, objects, bodies, diagrams and fragments are not reconstructions of 1963, but documents issued from an adjacent modernity.

The project is concerned with the unstable interval between memory and its object: the point at which an image ceases merely to represent history and begins to acquire the authority of historical evidence.

HAUNTOLOGY / LOST FUTURES

Mark Fisher's hauntology described a culture haunted by futures that had once seemed possible but failed to arrive. RPU63 approaches that condition from the opposite direction. It manufactures artifacts of futures that appear already to have happened elsewhere.

ARCHIVE NOTATION

RPU63 · CLASS · RECORD · ATTRIBUTED DATE
OBJobject/apparatusHUMhuman materialLOCsite documentMONmonumentBIOspecimenCOMlanguageUNCunclassified
NOETHER
01

NOETHER

RPU63 · OBJ · 0417 · 1963

An institution appears before its history can be verified.

SPECIMEN FOR AN UNRECORDED HUMAN
02

SPECIMEN FOR AN UNRECORDED HUMAN

RPU63 · HUM · 0281 · 1963

The human survives as a model while its definition disappears.

PORTRAIT OF AN UNIDENTIFIED FUNCTIONARY
03

PORTRAIT OF AN UNIDENTIFIED FUNCTIONARY

RPU63 · HUM · 0734 · 1963

A social role is legible; the subject is not.

GRÜSSE AUS KARL-MARX-STADT, 1963
04

GRÜSSE AUS KARL-MARX-STADT, 1963

RPU63 · LOC · 1103 · 1963

A real place contains an impossible object.

MONUMENT TO AN UNRECORDED EVENT
05

MONUMENT TO AN UNRECORDED EVENT

RPU63 · MON · 0529 · 1963

Commemoration persists after its occasion has vanished.

THREE SPECIMENS FROM AN UNKNOWN CLASSIFICATION
06

THREE SPECIMENS FROM AN UNKNOWN CLASSIFICATION

RPU63 · BIO · 0764 · 1963

Taxonomy remains visible after knowledge has become inaccessible.

INSTRUMENT FOR A CEREMONY NO LONGER REMEMBERED
07

INSTRUMENT FOR A CEREMONY NO LONGER REMEMBERED

RPU63 · OBJ · 0892 · 1963

The object survives. The occasion does not.

GO TO THE MIRROR, BOY
08

GO TO THE MIRROR, BOY

RPU63 · COM · 0316 · 1963

An instruction survives the authority that issued it.

UNTITLED, LOCATION UNKNOWN
09

UNTITLED, LOCATION UNKNOWN

RPU63 · UNC · 1248 · 1963?

Organic form and industrial landscape become archaeologically indistinguishable.

RPU63 / ARCHIVAL LOGIC

THE CONVENTIONAL DIRECTION

EVENT → DOCUMENT → ARCHIVE → HISTORY

THE RPU63 REVERSAL

IMAGE → ARCHIVE → IMPLIED EVENT

The document does not authenticate the event. The accumulation of documents makes the event retrospectively imaginable.

RPU63 / 1963–∞

1963 IS NOT A YEAR.
IT IS A PLACE.

RPU63 constructs evidence for a historical world that never existed.

The archive is not documentation of the fiction.

THE ARCHIVE IS THE FICTION.

Perhaps hauntology need not concern only the ghosts of futures that failed to arrive. RPU63 asks whether we can also be haunted by pasts that never happened.

VIEW CURATOR DOSSIER V9CURATORIAL DIALOGUE
VAN BODENSTEEN / RPU63
INSTAGRAMIMPRESSUMPRIVACY