Fictive Archive Investigations (FAI)  is a fluid collective of artists and researchers from a variety of locations and artistic disciplines, whose questions converge around fiction in the archive.

Founded in 2020 by Claire Ducène, the group collaborated through a residency in La Mètive, France in 2022 and an exhibition at ISELP, Brussels in 2023. In 2024 and 2025, the collective - coordinated by Claire Ducène and Margerita Pulè - includes a number of Maltese, Belgian and French artists; Elise Billiard Pisani (FR), Balthazar Blumberg (FR, BE), Josephine Burden (MT), Anna Calleja (MT), Céline Cuvelier (BE), Katel Delia (MT, FR), Claire Ducène (BE), Bettina Hutschek (MT, DE), Margerita Pulè (MT),  Stephanie Roland (BE), Matthew Schembri (MT), Raffaella Zammit (MT).

The Archive Understood as an Act of Fiction

"The dream is a hypothesis, since we only ever know it through memory, but this memory is necessarily a fabrication." - Paul Valéry

In general, the archive (understood here as a repository of information relating to one or more individuals, an organisation or location) contributes to the construction of what we perceive as history and truth; archives are used as the basis of historical, sociological and anthropological research, with the presumption that the material and the collection as a whole, refer to a historical ‘fact’. Thus, the archive attests to a palpable past: its position is understood as concrete, unassailable, authoritative. However, the archive’s selectivity alone betrays its inherent subjectivity - the archivist or curator makes a choice when selecting and arranging archival material. This process of retaining, accumulating, sorting, acquiring, and cataloguing also includes absences, ommissions, losses and destructions, as well as biases and assumptions, rendering the archive inherently incomplete, and always open-ended.

The archive has been utilised and manipulated in contemporary arts practice since the early 20th century (Spieker, 2008), when the Dadaist movement employed collage, photomontage and assemblage to disorder and reinterpret bureaucratic archives.

In more recent years, however, the archival has increased in importance within contemporary art practice, allowing for the re-narrating of political events for example through film and installation (artists such as Rabih Mroué), or the reordering of information and story-telling through digital technologies (artists Alexis Choplain & Noëlie Plé). More and more, the ‘archival’, or what is understood as archival material is being used by artists, to include a collection of documents - institutional and personal, a series of events in history, or a more arbitrary collection of material, objects or artefacts.

Artistic archival practice also services to find links that exist outside of the historical norms of sequentiality. What the museum curator may desire within an archive may be meticulously ordering and researching – vertical, organised and predetermined. However, what the artist or storyteller may seek to find is links that are rhizomatic, arbitrary or seemingly unconnected, which can juxtapose perceived truth and fiction to form new narratives and modes of understanding. 

The knowledge and imagination of the historian or museum curator is used as they select, attempt to make sense of, and reorder archival material. However, his selecting and reordering can also be done by artists and curators using a different methodology and a different system of understanding.