Siegfried Zielinski: An-Archive, Genealogien, Variantologien

History will do that which we will enable it to do and that which we will wrench from it. I do not believe that in the future we will have a smaller amount of long-term cultural memory. We are faced with the great task of choosing astutely and incisively from a myriad of data. We are compelled to have a »memorising« approach to fleeting phenomena. For this we need good, i.e. incisive contructs. These constructs are less a matter of technological hardware, but rather of theories and methods. Time is running. We must at last start to take the cumbersome objectification of the past seriously, so that it can be made useful for the future. The „archos“ does not merely contain the origin, but always also connotes leadership. The idea of the an-archive implies carrying on collecting and finding passionately, without knowing where all this will lead us.