About
Archive Stories is a website about how to work with creative and non-traditional archives. We wanted to create a space for conversations about archiving beyond institutional archives, to think through the possibilities that open up when we imagine the archive as expansive and as encompassing everything around us. We designed this website with Frederick Kannemeyer, to reflect the idea of archiving as a creative practice. It is open access so that it is accessible beyond academic spaces, and designed in a way that allows you to make your way through without a set path. This website includes a collection of 23 archive stories, and we will add more each year. The website as a whole rejects the notion of a complete archive, instead seeing archiving as an incomplete and always-expanding practice. The aim is not to give an alternative definition of what an archive is or alternative archival practices that can be directly emulated, but rather to propose other ways of thinking with and working with archives that still leave space for many other approaches.
We imagine this website as a starting point for anyone interested in exploring more creative and non-traditional archives. The focus of these archive stories is not on the archives themselves but rather on archiving as a creative practice. What does it mean to work with creative archives like music, food, or film? How does someone begin working with archives like these? How might we come across unexpected archives when we expand what ‘archive’ means? We invited people who already do this work to take us on their journey with archiving. Alongside the website, we organise workshops where we invite archivists who do this type of work to speak to us about how they archive and what this means for the way we define archives and archiving.
We believe these archive stories are increasingly important in light of the difficulties around institutional archives. National state archives, though important, raise a whole host of concerns. In some places, such as Palestine, they have been and continue to be destroyed as part of violent political processes. In other places, people are denied access to them because of authoritarianism and repression, or because they have not been taken care of. Colonial archives, another source of history for much of the world, equally raise concerns. They represent colonial power, and are thus organised in ways that replicate that power; we see this in the way they are organsised and curated, as well as in the history of how the archival objects were collected to begin with. Though we can read institutional archives against the grain, we believe that there are a whole array of other archives that have much to tell us about history.
We have an expansive notion of the meaning of an archive, hoping to disrupt traditional disciplinary boundaries in the academy and start conversations with activists, film makers, and musicians. Archive Stories also involved students submitting their own reflections on encountering archives, and one included on this website explores the history of LSE student activism. In this sense, students relate to the history of LSE differently, recalling the traces of activism as they walk through today’s campus. These encounters with the archive were also apparent in the pilot workshop organized this year with May Day Rooms and Conflict Textiles. Students were able to make sense of different archiving practices, and to approach the archive as a process rather than a depository of documents.. Students had the tactile and visual memory of encountering archives that traveled to campus from different parts of the world.
Archive Stories features not only different kinds of archives, but also different types of archivists. Oral history, for example, makes it possible for narrators to act as archivists in their own right. Through memory and story-telling, the narrators document political, social, and cultural subtleties that together tell a different side of history. The act of remembering is therefore not about ‘preserving’ an existing archive but by crafting a new one altogether that becomes constantly shaped and reshaped by the present. Musicians recovering old sound recordings from the early 20th century tell a different story on the history of music that takes seriously those who were left on the margins of this history, and with every performance something new is both formed and recovered. Filmmakers read a new politics of solidarity through encountering, and recrafting film archives from the past. These kinds of archives open up new possibilities of engaging with the past without getting ‘stuck’ there. What would it mean, for example, to archive absence today? Approaching archiving as a practice, rather than a finished product, makes it possible to keep telling all the different stories of absence and disappearance from the past and the present. It makes it possible to think about all the bodies that acted, resisted, traveled, disappeared, and incarcerated.
We hope you enjoy exploring the archive stories gathered here, and we hope you encounter archives and archiving differently through this website. Please get in touch if you want to submit an archive story or participate in the project.
Sara Salem and Mai Taha
Archive Stories is funded by the London School of Economics and Political Science.
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