The Archival Phantasist

A multimedia series on archiving curated by Sara Velas, Ruby Carlson, Margo Bistis and Norman M. Klein

Black and white portrait. (n.d.). [Glass lantern slide]. Magic Lantern Slide Collection, Velaslavasay Panorama, Los Angeles, CA.

 

 Velaslavasay Panorama is pleased to present The Archival Phantasist, a five-part multimedia series staged in the theater of the Panorama, curated by Sara Velas, Ruby Carlson, Margo Bistis and Norman Klein. This series features performances, installations, lectures, and films that all use archival material as a primary source for locating fictions truer than facts. Playful ironies abound but so does the serious business of research, archiving and cultural criticism.

 

Events in the Series

Florence in Ruin: An Excavation by Sara Velas and Ruby Carlson. A Slideshow Essay, Installation and Moving Panorama, November 12th – December 19, 2026.

The Imaginary 20th Century by Norman M. Klein & Margo Bistis. First Live Performance of the Online Archival Tale, February 6, 2027.

An Anti-Tour of How LA Rewired Itself: An Illustrated Immersive Lecture by Norman M. Klein, March 6th, 2027.

Immersive Research Session: Panoramic Thinking, date TBA. 

 

 For decades, the women of the Velaslavasay Panorama have created wholly immersive environments out of miniscule budgets and discarded materials. With Florence in Ruin: An Exhavation, their utilization of castoff projections of the past results in a timely portrait of climate existentialism and modern paranoia. (Megan Koester, SAG-AFTRA)

The Imaginary 20th Century not only negotiates the question of where the lines should be drawn between fact and memory, but the book doubles as a puzzle.  Its central sentence reads: ‘The future can only be told in reverse’.  This aphorism is as paradoxical as it is true.  Because after all, it is — among other things — about four visions of the future, but a future that lies in the past; getting reconstructed from the fragments of the archive. (Hans Ulrich Obrist, Das Magazin)