MoRE, an archive of signs and traces of artistic practices: creating a tool for research in contemporary art and curatorial practices

MoRe is a digital museum, founded in 2012 and produced by the Others Association with a team of scholars from the University of Parma: it is presented here as a case study to reflect on similarities and differences between curatorial, art historical and archival practices. This digital resource is devoted to the collection, management and dissemination of unrealized artwork projects from the 1950s onwards. It is at the same time an archive of research data, in the spirit of Open Access, and an archive of documentation of the work of the artists. This paper is organized in two sections, through which the dual dimension of the digital resource, institutional and private, will be analysed. The first section explains the structure of this digital museum, while the second analyses acquisition and digitizing policies, and cataloguing rules. The distinction between different generations of artists has been chosen to demonstrate how the work of the curators can change while working to build a digital museum (through the interaction with other private or institutional archives, and the participatory work of artists and curators). From this analysis, the interaction between the peculiarities of contemporary art research and the digital dimension of MoRE will emerge.