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Activating the museum: digital scanning and creation of memory counter-archives

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This laboratory proposes a critical and creative exploration of the museum as a living and dynamic space, using digital scanning as a tool for creating para-archives or counter-archives of memory. Taking advantage of the museum’s architecture and the works in the exhibition Invocando los fantasmas de la modernidad, participants are invited to reimagine and activate the museum space, questioning traditional forms of conservation, representation, and transmission of memory, including institutional methods of preserving art pieces and the tensions between material conservation and symbolic activation.

The exhibition Invocando los fantasmas de la modernidad examines how digital technologies can open new possibilities for the presentation of cultural heritage and art in a museographic context, critically reflecting on modernity and its narratives. Through archives, historical exhibitions, and contemporary artistic proposals, it offers a different way of thinking about the art object: not only from its materiality but also from its symbolic, political, and technological resonances.

In this sense, the laboratory incorporates a reflection on the concepts of original and copy, material and immaterial, and the function of conservation in art. It puts into tension the traditional notion of the unique work and the idea of permanence, proposing instead new forms of circulation, reinterpretation, and activation of cultural heritage from the digital realm, understanding scanning not only as a technical record but as a gesture of memory and symbolic intervention.

About the artist

Juan Covelli (1985) is a visual artist and independent curator who lives and works in Bogotá. He holds a Master’s in Philosophy and Practices of Contemporary Photography from Central Saint Martins, London. Covelli is a researcher, university professor, and founding member of the digital platform Nmenos1. His practice focuses on the new materialities generated by the digital era, with an emphasis on the dynamics of the physical within this ethereal space. Covelli explores the technological potential of the archive, scanning, modeling, and 3D printing, as well as machine learning and artificial intelligence, as a radical tool for creation, seeking to transgress and redefine rooted arguments and concepts about repatriation and colonial histories, investigating the relationship between technology, heritage, archaeology, and de-colonial practices in the digital age. He uses video, modeling, databases, and code to create installations that collapse historical practices with current models of visualization and digital aesthetics. He was recently nominated for the Luis Caballero Prize and received the Lumen Prize for moving image.

Covelli has been part of numerous exhibitions, festivals, and workshops around the world, including: Museo Miguel Ángel Urrutia, Museo de Pereira, Arebyte Gallery, KW Institute of Contemporary Arts, MAMM (Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín), Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest, Art at Americas Society, NY, Galleri Image, Aarhus, Denmark, Getxophoto festival, Spain, Warrington Museum & Art Gallery, United Kingdom, MACO Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca, Yeltsin Centre, Russia, Guttormsgaard Arkiv, Oslo, V Moscow International Biennale for Young Art.

Activity of the Audience Development strategy of the Secretaría de Cultura Ciudadana of the Mayor’s Office of Medellín.