The Diary – Collective Notes on Archives of Commons
[1] From the workshop discussion emerges an open-source, collaborative diary for creating archival alliances. We identify “commoning the archive” as a disobedient, decolonized, autonomous, subversive and rogue practice. Hereby, we can approach it as a collective mnemonic practice involving communities themselves in memory-making processes as opposed to the state-led construction of history. Alongside the diary, we present a map that includes and involves do-it-yourself archives, activist archives, participatory community archives, anarchives, autonomous archives, disobedient archives, feminist and LGBTQI archives, and so on, they all function as different forms of non-institutional archives dedicated to archive all kinds of data, objects, memories, oral histories, human experiences, feelings, emotions and affect for human rights activism, social justice, commons’ struggle, subculture, empowerment, visibility, collectivity and so on.
- This contribution is published as the workshop findings of “Archival Burnout in the Age of Vulnerability: [Disobedient] Commons and their Dilemmas, Speculations, Emotions”. The workshop was convened by Özge Çelikaslan and Naz Cuguoğlu and took place online from October 2021 – March 2022 as part of the Whole Life Academy Berlin. ↑
This contribution is published in the framework of the Whole Life Academy as part of the workshop “Archival Burnout in the Age of Vulnerability: [Disobedient] Commons and their Dilemmas, Speculations, Emotions“.
Connected Material
A conversation on compulsive archiving in relation to a private archive of press photography on Liberia.
Schaber’s contribution revisits her 2004 work culture is our business and considers the complex issues around these three agencies. At stake in these differences are how the image’s story should be told, and how this telling is embedded in the viewing and understanding of history.
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Epistolary narrative, dialogism, intertextuality, speculative narrative — we imagine this text to be letters between the two of us across different temporalities, making use of a speculative and fragmented narrative in line with the themes we explore in our work: archiving the unarchivable, emotions, memories, and other human conditions within the horizon of extinction.
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This video interweaves the mobility of defiance against national-colonial borders and the collection of gossips by Southeast Asian migrants in Berlin.
The audio map “biography of kecak” is an attempt to decrease this discrepancy between the singularity of archival knowledge and the multiplicity of individual realiities – using the sonic as its material.
These images were taken in the frame of The Whole Life Academy. Laura Fiorio accompanied the project as a photographer from the beginning in 2019 and developed her own approach of documenting archival sites and methods.
Interrogating the archive of “green” extractivism is not just about uncovering access to knowledge, legal knowledge, for example, that can help expose (ecological and economic) crime and that can thus be a starting point for empowering true alternatives and thus alternative ways of living and organizing economic processes. It is also about creating a resonant space for shared thinking and reflection.
Accumulation and multiplication of images is an accumulation of the hidden histories behind them. How do we recover these invisible histories?