When reflecting on institutional archives, I found myself simultaneously hopeful and anticipatorily disappointed.
Growing up between Kerala and Kuwait during the Gulf Wars as a displaced third-culture child, I must have internalised a stock image of an animated cast of ‘working professionals’, individuals unrestrained by gender, ethnicities, mobility, ability and means, who balanced personal needs with those of the whole. On examination, could this optimism be due in part to the pervasive reach of imperial imaginations intersecting with the ‘model migrant’, the abstraction of the individual as invisible labour within the institution?[1] This is prevalent within archives, the archivist ostensibly without agenda, in service only to preserve the archive for a future scholar.
For all my idealism and proximity to institutions, I have struggled to belong in them. Far from exemplifying inclusion, many institutions have been known to be exclusionary. Through the preservation of material that is racist, many are still grappling with the balance of providing access without risking harm.[2] Others inherently maintain a legacy system of othering based on outdated forms of cataloguing and describing, defaulting to eurocentrism.
This, in part, forms my disappointment. What am I doing here? It appears that to be doing archival work in institutions is also to be doing ‘diversity work’; that is, challenging conditional inclusion, institutional inertias and calling out ‘institutional speech acts’. Sara Ahmed describes this as an activity whereby institutions claim they are committed to diversity but do little to challenge the power structures that maintain inequality.[3] It is also calling people in, to unlearn harmful positions, often relics of a colonial endeavour.[4]
This is hefty work, which is embodied, emotional, and frequently leaves those ‘doing the work’ feeling isolated. Again, what am I doing here? When I think about all the invisible hands authoring the archive, who is to say that there wasn’t already protest (even if unsuccessful) against the ways archives were maintained? What new thread can be added to a line of efforts to create alternative archives?
Archives are often contained in buildings with entrances that serve as a threshold to separate the archival practices occurring within from those outside. Ariella Aïsha Azoulay critiques this:
Archive’s modality seems to set it apart from people. But people were always there, doomed to be included in the archival regime, struggling against their transformation into archival records, interacting with others who deprived them of access to the archive and confiscated their documents for preservation in the centralised archive.[5]
Access is maintained through a set of rules and the professional enactment of an internationally agreed set of archival practices. In many ways, the archive is people. How do we create new or alternative archives if the mechanisms, individuals and the archival transactions remain the same?
Artists have long confronted archives and the notion of archiving. Within the institution in which I work, Palawa artist Caleb Nichols-Mansell responded to an art commission request from a new university library by ‘archiving’ the ecological impact on the nearby kanamaluka (Tamar), laykila (North Esk) and plipatumila (South Esk) rivers into designs across the building’s carpets. His works serve as a reminder of the broader ecological impact of the edifice of repositories.[6] Artist and curator Léuli Eshrāghi has published poetry, written, in part, during their residency with the University of Tasmania’s Rare Book collection. Researching Samoan representations in settler-colonial texts, they note the absence of contemporary Samoan authors represented in the general print collection.
In 2023, Wiradjuri artist Jazz Money created the film WINHANGANHA (Wiradjuri language loosely translating to ‘Remember, know, think’) as a ‘visual poem’ in five chapters, ‘born from a desire to make sense of the archival inheritances that shape our present realities’.[7] Commissioned by the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, the work is a culmination of their two-year examination and reflection of works made by, and about, First Nations Australian people held in the archive.
However, to rely on artists alone isn’t enough. This disproportionately shifts the labour of risk, trauma and transforming archives. Instead, could the emphasis be placed on the invisible actors of the archive, on the ways in which they (we?) do, don’t, can, can’t interrogate the tensions between competing perspectives in these archival institutions.
I am hopeful, as paradigm shifts are occurring: the use of Traditional Knowledge (TK) Labels is a relatively new approach for libraries and museums, led by, and prioritises, First Peoples’ decisions on how cultural material and knowledge can be accessed. Several institutions, including the one at which I am based, recently adopted this (led by the Indigenous Collections Coordinator Cindy Thomas). Similarly, the adoption of Reparative Description or Critical Cataloguing — an approach used in archival practices to address the harm done by past descriptive approaches — is empowering staff in institutions to go beyond simply acknowledging the non-neutrality of the archive.
Both are imperfect and it is slow, conversational and reparative work and moves at the pace of trust. Was this always occurring or perhaps it’s my phantom nostalgia? Perhaps to create alternative archives is to find alternative ways of relating, untethered by the archive itself.
Archives as plural[8]
Archives as conversation
Archives as we meet over tea and coffee
Archives as being with
Archives as absence of agenda
Archives as relationship (even exiting is a form of relationship)
Archives as family histories and unfamiliar stories
Archives as inconvenient stories
Archives as acknowledging missing voices
Archives as no more missing people
Archives as nonviolent
Archives as multilingual beyond archival or elitist language
Archives as ‘non-imperial grammar’
Archives as reparative description
Archives as no jargon
Archives as evolving language with time
Archives as disrupting the timeline
Archives as interested in potential histories
Archives as phantom nostalgias
Archives as not ‘we are preserving this for future scholars and future communities’
Archives as not obsessed with the future
Archives as transparent
Archives as having opening hours on the website
Archives as having a website
Archives as not having a website
Archives as open more than 10am – 12pm first Mondays and Thursdays of the month
Archives as not ‘I am fully booked until April next year’
Archives as that of present not looted, stolen, or forcibly removed
Archives as undoing destructive practices
Archives as undoing the colonial gaze
Archives as not needing an alternative archive
Archives as not obsessed with the archive
Archives as unarchived
Archives as new protocols (no protocols?)
Archives as relational and antifragile
Archives as taking new forms
Archives as no more filling another institutional form to protect the institutional archive
Archives as communities decide what happens to their archives
Archives as Traditional Knowledge Labels
Archives as remunerating community for their shared time and knowledges to understand the archive
Archives as recognising that remunerating alone is far from enough
Archives as knowing consultation is not collaboration is not co-creating is not care is not agency
Archives as unlearning the archive with many companions previously deprived of access
Archives as accessible to those without visas
Archives as FAIR and CARE[9]
Archives as the right to opacity
Archives as right of reply
Archives as not traded between private hands
Archives as restitution and repatriation
Archives as held and led by communities
Archives as aware of its threshold
Archives as no threshold
Archives as no archival regime
Archives as not compromised by funding
Archives as calling out and calling in
Archives as imperfect solidarities[10]
Archives as going beyond careful to caring
Archives as not a glass half full or a glass half empty but looking for the jug of water
Archives as looking after our bodies of water
Archives as landscape
Archives as the body
Archives as every emotional reaction as armour
Archives as a turn toward not a turn away
Archives as undoing shame
Archives as repair
[1] Drawing on and synthesising critiques by Gayatri Spivak and Edward Said of the paradoxes and limitations of postcolonial studies as a genre.
[2]Nathan mudyi Sentence, ‘Racist Material in Archival Collections’, National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, https://www.nfsa.gov.au/latest/nathan-sentance-racism-archival-collections (accessed 2 August 2024).
[3]Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2012, JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1131d2g (accessed 2 August 2024).
[4]Loretta Ross, ‘Calling In: How to Start Making Change with Those You'd Rather Cancel’, TEDMonterey, 1 August 2021, https://www.ted.com/talks/loretta_j_ross_don_t_call_people_out_call_them_in (accessed 7 September 2024)
[5]Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, Verso Books, London, 2019, p. 190; Dr Ariella Aïsha Azoulay is an author, curator, and theorist of visual culture and has developed concepts and approaches around the reversal of imperial violence. Born in Tel Aviv, she is of Algerian descent and identifies as an Arab and Palestinian Jew. In Unlearning Imperialism, she argues that decolonisation of the archive is not possible without the decolonisation of the world itself. https://www.guernicamag.com/miscellaneous-files-ariella-aisha-azoulay/
[6]Shantelle Rodman, ‘Drawing Inspiration from Country and Culture,’ University of Tasmania, 2022, https://www.utas.edu.au/about/news-and-stories/articles/2022/drawing-inspiration-from-country-and-culture (accessed on 11 July 2024).
[7]National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, Jazz Money in Conversation with Gillian Moody, 2023, https://www.nfsa.gov.au/latest/winhanganha-film-award-winning-poet-and-artist-jazz-money (accessed on 2 August 2024).
[8] This line play was inspired by the poem ‘Some Things I Like’, written by Lemn Sissay.
[9]Referring to FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Useable) and CARE (Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, Ethics) principles in libraries, archives, and museums.
[10] Aruna D’Souza, Imperfect Solidarities, Floating Opera Press, Berlin, 2024, p. 81.