Archival renewal
Dublin Core
Title
Archival renewal
Description
Archival reckoning with death
Arguably, every interaction with the archive is destructive: whether that is literal pieces of a notebook falling apart or the oily friction from your fingers meticulously wearing down the fibers of a piece of paper. However, this is just predicting the inevitable of our physical world: everything passes. Each interaction with the archives also breaks something of the less tangible: the barrier between you and it, those knotted connections whose pieces are rearranged and made anew. Like the human body, on its way to rotting into illegible mush, there is a brevity of beauty and renewal in the archive’s death and decay.
Despite the fact that all things perish, for the time being, the archives elude a false promise of eternal preservation for those who are inducted. This invincibility to oblivion is significant as its timelessness and factfulness maintains hegemonic power. Through this project, I want to explore the ironic relationship between preservation and decay specifically through the lives and subsequent archival remains of those who have met premature social violence.
Even as a living body, you can face premature death in society due to perceived criminality, incarceration, and race. The castigation to social death can be interpreted as “a loss of social identity, a loss of social connectedness and losses associated with disintegration of the body” as imposed by society and its structures (Králová). When you are purposefully neglected by governmental institutions and deemed non-existent, it is common to meet the same fate in the archives.
Archival renewal
However, neither physical death nor societal death is final. The debris and decay that is left behind and scattered physically reside in a unique space of institutional memory. By highlighting what already exists in the archive and examining those pieces alongside queer, black feminist theory, and decolonial perspectives, I question if there can be a rebirth: a wholeness, love and life redeemed in the archive.
Jana Králová (2015) What is social death?, Contemporary Social Science, 10:3, 235-248, DOI: 10.1080/21582041.2015.1114407
Arguably, every interaction with the archive is destructive: whether that is literal pieces of a notebook falling apart or the oily friction from your fingers meticulously wearing down the fibers of a piece of paper. However, this is just predicting the inevitable of our physical world: everything passes. Each interaction with the archives also breaks something of the less tangible: the barrier between you and it, those knotted connections whose pieces are rearranged and made anew. Like the human body, on its way to rotting into illegible mush, there is a brevity of beauty and renewal in the archive’s death and decay.
Despite the fact that all things perish, for the time being, the archives elude a false promise of eternal preservation for those who are inducted. This invincibility to oblivion is significant as its timelessness and factfulness maintains hegemonic power. Through this project, I want to explore the ironic relationship between preservation and decay specifically through the lives and subsequent archival remains of those who have met premature social violence.
Even as a living body, you can face premature death in society due to perceived criminality, incarceration, and race. The castigation to social death can be interpreted as “a loss of social identity, a loss of social connectedness and losses associated with disintegration of the body” as imposed by society and its structures (Králová). When you are purposefully neglected by governmental institutions and deemed non-existent, it is common to meet the same fate in the archives.
Archival renewal
However, neither physical death nor societal death is final. The debris and decay that is left behind and scattered physically reside in a unique space of institutional memory. By highlighting what already exists in the archive and examining those pieces alongside queer, black feminist theory, and decolonial perspectives, I question if there can be a rebirth: a wholeness, love and life redeemed in the archive.
Jana Králová (2015) What is social death?, Contemporary Social Science, 10:3, 235-248, DOI: 10.1080/21582041.2015.1114407
Collection Items
ELEGYA unique grievance that lies between a feeling of revival in beauty and a body that eludes our control.
The suffocation and manmade stench of social death, one that overlooks the inherent love in man.
Bury the rotten, the spoiled. "It is time for birth..."
The beauty and life created out of rot.
What does it mean to overcome death? To be beyond matter?