OF ARCHIVES AND REPERTOIRES, ARCHIVE-REPERTOIRES AND/OR REPERTOIRE-ARCHIVES
The archive, as a concept, has increasingly become a site of dissent which—despite or perhaps precisely because of this—retains its potency. The distinction between archive and repertoire (Diana Taylor) is taken here not as a dichotomy, but as a starting point for mapping or weaving a complex web of tensions, overlaps, and combinations. The expanded topology of the digital and the multiplied (dis)location of sentient archives (Linda Caruso Haviland) have begun to disrupt the relationship between archive and domiciliation, inviting an expansion of the questions surrounding structures and dynamics of power—namely, conditions of access, selection, and transmission.
Stability and instability, durability and ephemerality, legitimacy and illegitimacy, impermeability and permeability, completeness and incompleteness: these and other oppositions are repeatedly complicated by the performativity of archives (body-archives and archive-bodies). What transformations and displacements emerge from this expansion and (re)distribution of the archive, no longer understood merely as a static or controlled repository, but also as a volatile and ungovernable vehicle? What openings and what aporias are carried by movements that are counter- or anti-archive, by sentient archives and/or archives that are ostensibly or effectively obsolete? What are the ecologies and economies of the archive?
How can so-called minor archives—those that operate emphatically in the cracks, the gaps, the invisible, the sensitive, the uncapturable—inform our relationship with institutional or instituted archives that reiterate hegemonic narratives, systemic discrimination, and oppressive systems of control? What are the consequences of these possible other modes of use and relation for the always-problematic notion of collective memory? What forms of care are possible in the construction of memory/memories, history/histories, and (u)topias? Is the decolonization, democratization, or de-hierarchization of the archive achievable? How can we sustain an archival ethic that is implicated in and committed to processes of (always insufficient) repair?
Participants:
Ana Bigotte Vieira, Carlos Manuel Oliveira, João dos Santos Martins, Daniela Agostinho, and Paula Caspão