Valaco Archive Project

WEB-BASED SPECULATIVE ARCHIVE AND ARCHIVAL INSTALLATION, appropriated objects/ephemera, varied media, variable dimensions

As the flagship endeavor of the group for Research on Experimental Accumulation and Speculative Archives, the Valaco Archive Project aims to produce, assess, catalog, and interpret the evidential record of one Roberto Constantín Valaco (born Robert Konstanz Wälke), notional author of an enigmatic manuscript found in an obscure municipal archive in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 2004. REASArch has assumed as its point of departure certain indications of Valaco’s role as a movie extra in the last and costliest film production of the Third Reich (he but one of some twenty thousand German soldiers furloughed from the front lines for that purpose). Through critical and aesthetic engagement with a complex assortment of visual, textual, material, and conceptual elements, we strive to lend substance to Valaco’s ostensible wanderings from war-sundered Europe to the South American continent. Principal among our ambitions, subsequently, is the constitution of a memory for the future, one equipped to bear witness to that densely sedimented imaginary, in the present, of a singular, if indeterminate, historical persona

* See this spread on The Valaco Archive project in Limn magazine #6 (March 2016), in an issue that explores “The Total Archive.”

* G. D. Cohen explored the Valaco Archive project with Carol A. Stakenas, Curator at-Large for the Social Practices Art Network (SPAN), in this interview recorded in New York, NY on 12 April, 2014:

* G. D. Cohen delivered a multi-media presentation on the Valaco Archive at the Radical Archives conference, New York University, April 11-12, 2014 (click link and open “Radical Resampling” panel tab to learn more)

* Click here to visit The Valaco Archive...