Archives & Butterflies

In the text project, Helen Brecht develops performative writing strategies through which she inscribes herself in the blank spaces of the collection of the Historical Archive of the City of Cologne. It is an endeavour to reconstruct the documents from the estate of a portrait artist (Bonn Republic) and a sender of gifts of charity (WWI) that have been damaged by the collapse of the venue in 2009. In the process, other and own biographies, the private and the public, fact and fiction come into paradoxical alignment. The project follows the excessive (futile) search for the original (the reliable source) in the archive (in herself). It runs intermittently from 2019 to 2025. Based on Brecht’s email correspondence with the archive, a semi-fiction unfolds: B writes to A, persistently demands to see lost documents, sends letters to the archive (to smuggle traces of herself into the archive), (stalks the archive), constructs an alternative archive of gifts of charity (L’ARCHIVIO DI DONI D’AMORE) and finally devotes her text-desire to the archive pests who might know how to digest history. In April 2025, the ‘Post-Provisional User Centre’ opened at Heumarkt 14 (Glasmoog), in the very room that housed the ‘Provisional User Centre’ of the Cologne City Archives from 2009 to 2019. Visitors were invited to scroll through the email correspondence between A and B, view the resulting documents and study the archive pest miniatures.