Chapter 3: Philipp Goldbach

In earlier works, the Cologne-based artist Philipp Goldbach had already worked with archival holdings or slide libraries, which he placed in their entirety in the exhibition space as a kind of reenactment. In doing so, the structures of the archives and collections were completely dissolved and only their outer shell, which falls off due to the digital migration of the material, was staged.
For the work in the Rheinisches Bildarchiv, Philipp Goldbach will take over the 4,800 archive boxes of the Positive Archive as part of the move of the entire archive with its 5.4 million images. Goldbach has been photographing the 'emptying of the boxes' at the RBA for months. The restorers there are working on a meticulously timed route to conserve the photographic content.
The number of boxes and their transitory state should be taken as an example in the exhibition room: A cube consisting of 192 cardboard boxes stacked on a euroboard was to be set up in the gallery space as a 1.75-meter-high installation in the room. Starting in the summer, the artist will photograph
the entire archive boxes in a site-specific installation over a longer period of time.

The archive as corpus