This online archive portal includes part of the archives of the Ecole du Magasin. It is organised in three main sections:

• The archive project presents our initiative.
• The École du Magasin features documents, interviews and texts that look back at the beginnings of the École, its functioning and ambitions over the decades and allow for critical and historical reflection.
• The archives of the 25 sessions of the École bring together a selection of documents and photographs relating to the activities and projects carried out by each session. They include projects as well as the daily life, travel, meetings and pedagogical milestones of each session.

The archives included on this online portal come from both the digital archives kept by the Magasin-CNAC and the personal archives of former students of the École du Magasin.

Nb: Other archives related to the working process of the sessions can be made available to researchers on request, by writing to ecoledumagasin.alumni@gmail.com. Many documents, especially administrative and budgetary ones, are not accessible. Negotiations with artists and most of the internal and external correspondence of the School remain private or confidential.

This initiative was started by the Association École du Magasin Alumni, which brings together former participants of the École du Magasin’s curatorial training programme. In 2018, a grant from the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (INHA) allowed a group of them (Damien Airault, Michela Alessandrini, Lore Gablier, Estelle Nabeyrat, Asli Seven and Ekaterina Shcherbakova) to work on the history and archives of the École du Magasin. The project was entitled Calling Back. During the first six months of work, a census was made of former students, teaching staff, and projects and editions produced. Some thirty interviews were also produced which, once transcribed, serve as the basis for the constitution of a new, entirely dematerialised archive. This first phase of work, which was presented at the INHA in June 2018, also highlighted the origin of the art centre, the École being a stakeholder in its initial project.

The design and production of the online archive portal ecoledumagasinarchives.org was implemented in a second phase by Lore Gablier, with the collaboration of Damien Airault, and received support from the Centre national des arts plastiques and the Cercle du Magasin. In addition to the design of a specific site and its architecture, this portal required the production of new interviews and translations, the digitisation of hundreds of documents, and a work of verification, captioning and indexing. This archive portal provides a cross-sectional view of the School’s activities through an index, but also through recurring categories, such as trips or people met by students, or websites produced by the sessions from 2000 onwards. Finally, it provides a better understanding of the teaching methods experimented with over almost 30 years, with numerous working documents from tutors and students (seminar plans, bibliographic bases, theoretical reference texts or texts produced on site, reports of trips, visits and meetings, etc.).

Today, there is only limited access to the physical archives bearing witness to the history of the Ecole du Magasin, which have been deposited with the Archives Départementales de l’Isère. The latter have ensured their classification, but access to them remains subject to a request for exemption.
To counterbalance the difficulty of consulting these archives and to allow historians access to an institution that was for almost thirty years an exceptional space for alternative pedagogy and curatorial research, we decided to undertake an independent collection and archiving. The primary intention of our research was to trace the history and development of curatorial practices in a changing political and cultural context, as well as to highlight the specificity of the École du Magasin as a pedagogical model, in order to assess its role in defining and inscribing curatorial activity from 1987 to the present day - a period that has witnessed both the institutionalisation and the extension of the field of curating within and sometimes beyond the field of contemporary art.