Antoni Muntadas
«The File Room»

A temporary physical installation and a permanent, expandable database in the virtual, interactive and multimedia space of the internet and the world wide web, all of it referring to censorship – and to those of an artistic or cultural order specifically –, on a world scale and ranging from historic cases to those that are more incandescently current. This project, like others before Muntadas has developed throughout his career, brings with it in its execution, evolution and maintenance a collective spirit that is open to a public and a social space of dialogue, discussion and successive contributions, having been initiated by Muntadas in close cooperation with the team from the self-run artistic center Randolph Street Gallery in Chicago, and with the support and collaboration of other organizations, collectives and individuals.
In its materialization as a multimedia and three-dimensional sculptural installation the bureaucratic atmosphere of an archive is recreated, a bit sinister and rather somber, with the walls full of file cabinet drawers that increase the darkness of the enclosure, which is lit nonetheless by the terminals and monitors that allow the consultation in situ of the compiled computer archives. Archives are accessible moreover through the internet.

(source: «Muntadas: Media Architecture Installations», anarachive number 1, Centre Georges Pompidou, 1999.)