[Ausstellung] Archive Mirrors/ Mirror Archives
Lorenzo Sandoval
Opening event: Thursday, 16 October 2025, 5pm onwards
Time: 17 October - 16 December 2025 | 8am-8pm and upon request
Location: Institute for European Ethnology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Anton-Wilhelm-Amo-Str. 40/41, 10117 Berlin, Amo Salon Exhibition Space + Office for Everyday Culture
In its tarnished, dirty mirrors, things exchange a Kaspar-Hauser-Iook with the nothing.
It is like an equivocal wink coming from nirvana.
(Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 1999: 542)
Archives do not reproduce the worlds from which they emerge. They are not windows into a world, preserved in the documents of an authorised institution. Rather, archives capture fragile snapshots of moments, experiences, tainted by the lens of time, ideology, and subjectivity. In archives, what we see is mediated by our entry points, our standpoints, our gaze, and our “aperture”; or, to put it in other words, how narrow or wide we cast our search. Each archival encounter is an encounter with the archive of our own being. As bodies, we store traces and traumas of the past. Our bodies are a “somatheque” (Preciado 2012), which influences how we encounter other archives.
This exhibition reflects on the partiality, situatedness, and deceptive nature of archives through the concept of the mirror. Archives mediate images (understood here as inscriptions of many kinds) from other times, dispersed in its boxes, folders, assembled through its inventory systems, which are always incomplete. Archives, like mirrors, do not reflect a objective reality, but curated histories that change depending on our position. Archive mirrors offer images of (supposedly) gone realities, which are “recursive, redundant, marked by returns and reanimations […] haunted by the repetition of unresolved pasts and the ghosts of lost futures” (Gala Hernández López, “Psychicones: Hauntologies of Neural Decoding AI Systems”, 2025). Some of the stories they contain are amputated, their connection tangential and connected only by imagination, like the phantom pain felt and treated only through the illusion of Ramachandran’s mirror box.
The notion of the mirror invites us to consider the archive not merely as incomplete, but indeed as fractured. This exhibition suggests that the value of this mirror problem lies precisely in that very fragmentation, because it renders visible and tangible our distorted perspective onourselves and the world: a mirror, indeed, is always potentially broken, its image always spiegelverkehrt, mirror-inverted. The idea of the mirror and its broken reflection urges us to attend to the fragments and illusions implicit in archives: the gaps, the dangers, the splintered perspectives on ourselves and the world around us. The only possible way for an archive to exist is precisely through the piecing together of fragments–each fragment calling forth parts of a bigger entanglement.
Working with archives is a continuous process of assembling the fragments of such mirrors to create a narrative. Each surface of mirror fragments, when tilted in a different direction, reveals a new angle and offers a different modality of seeing. Yet each angle is deceptive, might be twice or thrice refracted by another fragment. A possibly endless game of paths, none seemingly truer or more correct than the other. And even if we were to piece all fragments together, the mirror image itself remains forever reversed.
Mirrors, to paraphrase Roland Barthes’ reflections on photography, are not a perfect analogon to reality. They mirror instead; they distort and shift. They turn around. Mirrors furthermore can get hazy, blind. They echo and repeat, rather than single out and simplify, offering glimpses and fractures, a pendulum of illusions that are both fake and real. They always add some form of distortion, a different texture, an angle, even “noise”.
Just as a mirror catches only the angle from which it is held, archives disclose only what has been collected, catalogued, and preserved—while leaving other worlds outside their frame. Michel Foucault argued that archives are less storehouses of truth than systems that “define the sayable”. They structure memory as much through absence as they do through presence. The mirror, then, is cracked, partial, and unstable.
For this exhibition, we draw on this ambiguity. For Walter Benjamin, the mirror was a phantasmagorical surface: in the Arcades Project, mirrors multiplied and unsettled urban life, showing modernity to itself in fragments embodied in the “mirror city Paris”. Jacques Derrida, in his lecture-essay Archive Fever, described the archive as haunted by a mirror-like double movement of preservation and erasure: the more one seeks to capture memory, the more one encounters its loss. Its functioning recalls artist MuSa Mattiuzzi’s Abolition Garden project, which cultivates medicinal plants that enhance, variously, memory and forgetting, evoking not only the recalling and erasure of enslaved women, but also its relation to knowledge and the inevitable partiality of how we can understand.
This exhibition is an experiment in seeing archives as mirrors and in thinking with—not against or despite—their distortions. The pieces presented in this proposal are mainly from previous projects: through the work about other archives, the exhibition brings into relation sculptural displays and archive-related projects into the one hosted by this institution. It is a decomposition of the fractured pieces of the archival mirrors, and in some corners an intensification. We zoom in, project onto, illuminate the broken pieces of the archival mirrors found in the vault of the Institute for European Ethnology. We want to see the trickery of the mirror (even, or especially, when broken) as a possibility to read the archive: to become aware of its fractures and failings, its fault lines and traps.
The collaboration between artist Lorenzo Sandoval and anthropologist Jonas Tinius is the first archival-artistic experiment by the Berlin- Brandenburg Office for Everyday Culture. It opens the colleex workshop “Styles of Experimentation. Unsettling the Anthropological Curriculum” (16-19 October 2025) convened by Adolfo Estallela, Elisabeth Luggauer, Maka Suarez, and Jonas Tinius with support from the European Association of Social Anthropologists. The experimental collaboration is also a mirror of its own: not a copy of reality, nor a complete illusion, but a fractured, collaborative surface where art and anthropology test the ways we might look again at what archives reveal—and conceal.
You can download the exhibition booklet "Archive Mirrors / Mirror Archives" here.
Printed copies are available on site.
Lorenzo Sandoval (Madrid, 1980) works as an artist, filmmaker and curator. In 2025, Zineb Achoubie and Lorenzo Sandoval founded La Casa de los Engarces, an artist-run space working on the intersection between textile, audiovisual media and agroecology. Find out more here: https://lorenzosandoval.net/
Jonas Tinius is a socio-cultural anthropologist and directs the Berlin-Brandenburg Office for Everyday Culture at the Institute for European Ethnology of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.