Essay: The Living ArchiveEssay: The Living Archive

Although archives are often seen as entities that somehow just ‘are’, they actually aren’t: they are constructed. We sometimes forget that archives are collected, and the inventory within them is deemed to fulfil the criteria of ‘archivability’, a criteria defined by personal, cultural and institutional systems that deem them something worth keeping through time. Once deemed worthy of archiving, they become part, through well-established procedures and regulations, of a spatial system, an archive.1 This means, that even before we think about the archive and what is inside: we must take a moment to remember what never made it into the archive. It is important to note, that although things are not archived, they matter and survive through other forms of memory and trans-generational acts of remembrance.

The archive is no more than a social tool for the work of collective memory - in the case of Het Nieuwe Instituut, a collective memory focused on the Dutch National architectural and urban memory - but does this archive then deal and confront its colonial legacies and the histories it has chosen to exclude from the collections? What national collective memory is it constructing? The archive is of the present - and thus, has to be in a continuous process of making and remaking, allowing for new stories to be included, not only by the acquisition of new material but also by acknowledging the existing structures that define the narratives that are constructed within the archive. It is here that I see the urgency to allow for the archive to continue to be mobile and flexible. Although archives have been assigned the responsibility of remembering, archival apparatuses are not stable bodies, although they do store information in place, they are also under a constant process of movement. It is in this mobility that there is space and potential for new workings with and in the archive. It is not an erasure of what has been done, but allowing the archival apparatus to do what it does best, move and make space for new material, new insights, new approaches, questions and re-dimensioning its shape, re-addressing and remixing its content. These processes make archives itinerant bodies. The archive is in fact caught in a double blind, it is both an inert, rational repertoire of artifacts, but at the same time an itinerant, moving, active body.2

With this in mind, we can think about how we can bring new tools of working with the archive, specifically working with the notion of care: care as an embodied practice that we use to allow for new understandings of archival practices. Care not as a defined practice, but as an on-going format-in-progress. Care as the practice of asking ourselves, Why care? What does care mean? How do we care for ourselves? For those we work with? What are these acts of care? These practices of queer world-making in relation to archival practices push open spaces for re-imagining the force and function of the archive as a living body. We chose ‘to queer’ the archive in a present tense verb, as we think and collaborate with archives and find ways to do so that subvert the normative.

Before there was an archive to be acquired and to be placed into institutions, there was someone drawing, someone taking a picture. Each photograph, each drawing is in itself an archive, that allows us to think about the relations and contexts that helped produce it. These contexts can include histories of inequalities, of taking without asking, of covering and hiding. As we see each artifact as an archive, we focus on the production, consumptions, exchange and possessions of these items. These objects' meanings will change over time as they are used, owned and moved they gain their own biographies. Objects can go from being gifts, ritual objects, commodities, archival material or trash. These objects provide maps of travels, of people that produce them, of those that are in contact with them, as their value continuously changes as they move.

There are parties involved in acquisitions - the donors, the institute - but who else is there? Everyone comes with their expectations and their desires for what this exchange will entail - how can ‘we’ take care of everyone? There are certain phases and steps in the process of acquisition, but why are they in this order? How can we provide care within these structures? Can we move these phases around? What contracts are there? Does the donor have a contract they can draft as well? How can we work around contracts to make sure they also enable space for practices of care to occur?

The archive is now at Het Nieuwe Instituut. It has entered the building, it has finished its quarantine and sterilisation stage - now it finds a new home - within the walls of the HNI building and the online matrix. The archive claims status and power within the architectural dimension, the arrangement of the rooms, the organisation of the files all with a degree of discipline. A space filled with sets of rituals that take place there, rituals of quasi magical nature where fragments of lives and pieces of time are preserved like relics. The archive has material status, it is inscribed in the universe of the senses, tactile as we can touch them, with gloves, visual because we can see it, and cognitive because it can be read and coded. The archive is ‘there’ and material, it presents itself as something that takes away doubt and a status of proof. Thinking of archival content in terms of material objects begs to question what work is expected of them? under what material condition are they seen? And where and by whom should they be seen- these questions, bring up the imaginary status of the archive. In fact, the archive also has an imaginary status. Imaginary because no archive can be the depository of an entire history of a society, or a timeframe. There is nothing complete about archives. It is through the documents that are present that we are given pieces of a time to be assembled, placed in particular order, in an attempt to build and formulate stories, that acquire coherence through crafting links between pieces.

The archive is inside the institute but it interacts with the world around it, within and outside the institute. Meaning is given to the archive, regardless of its original intention, everytime someone interacts with it - every time it is looked at, touched or used, new meanings are made. As archives can move and can be interpreted, when using archives we can enact the function of historians, translators, curators, architects, artists and much more. But, who does the archive really belong to? And how can it become something public? Something that can continue to evolve in its meanings and uses? Why do these archives actually matter? Who do they matter to? Who are they speaking of and to?

We already mentioned that some things never make it to the archive. The archive is fragile, no matter how hard institutions work to keep material. The archive collapses. Although archives have been delegated the responsibility of remembering, being mobile bodies they are also prone to disappearing. This ability to disappear gives me hope. Hope that memory, whether national, communal or personal, will continue to belong and have space outside archives. Memories are multi-sensory, and sometimes the knowledge from these sense memories are not translatable into verbal information, yet memories remain in a bodily repository. Pure memory does not exist in the body, it is in the body that memory is activated, as one calls up sensations associated with the remembered event. Rituals connect individual experience with collective experience, activating collective memory in the body3. Although we expect the archive to have the responsibility to remember and thus carry us, it is clear that archives are more fragile than we prefer to accept. I hope our sense of belonging can exist in spaces beyond the archive, while we continue to find ways to belong to an imperfect archive that oftentimes doesn’t hold us.

1. Mbembe, The Power of the Archive and its Limits, 2002, 20. 2. Edwards, Elizabeth. 2012. "Objects Of Affect: Photography Beyond The Image". Annual Review Of Anthropology 41 (1): 221-234. doi:10.1146/annurev-anthro-092611-145708. 3. 3. Marks, Laura U. 2000. The Skin Of The Film. Durham and London: Duke University Press.