All posts filed under: Issue 12

The Archive of the Future / The Future of the Archive: Introduction

Issue 12: The Archive of the Future / The Future of the Archive (Spring 2008) Aubrey Anable, Aviva Dove-Viebahn, and April Miller [T]he question of the archive is not, I repeat, a question of the past…but rather a question of the future, the very question of the future, question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow. The archive: if we want to know what this will have meant, we will only know tomorrow.1 In his study on the power and politics of the archive, Archive Fever, Jacques Derrida outlines the aporetic desire that defines the archive, describing it as an illness that strives to reconcile the will to safeguard significant documents in human history with the wish to share those documents with others. For many academics, researchers, and students, archives used to be and still are contentious ground, guarded tightly by the archivist/gatekeeper whose relationship with the material is very different than that of the researcher. The archivist aims to preserve and protect; the researcher hopes to explore and experience. Certainly, much …

Archival Genres: Gathering Texts and Reading Spaces

Issue 12: The Archive of the Future / The Future of the Archive (Spring 2008) Kate Eichhorn The archive and desktop are already synonymous. Once denoting a material repository of documents governed by an established institution (e.g., a state archive), definitions of the archive continue to loosen. For a new generation of readers and writers, the archive may be known only as a site of virtual storage. However, even for a generation more intimately acquainted with and attached to the material world of documents, the desktop can easily be understood as a type of archive, or gateway to the archives. Not only is it a site of storage, a repository of documents, but also a space governed by a specific order, or a set of laws. Both the desktop’s visible order (the icons of folders and documents), and its hidden order (the code underpinning this smooth iconography), determines where and how we manage our personal files and subsequently, what relations of knowledge are rendered visible. If the desktop is recognized as a type of archive, it follows …

Buried in the Arkheia: Writing the Female Infant into Being

Issue 12: The Archive of the Future / The Future of the Archive (Spring 2008) Pashmina Murthy One of the first comprehensive official documents on female infanticide in India was an epistolary communication by Col. Walker, the Resident of Baroda, in 1808. While there had been some enquiry into the matter in the late eighteenth century, Walker ‘s document was among the first communiqués to merit serious attention. Structured as an exposé of the crime among a particular group of Rajputs, the Jahrejahs, he set out to uncover evidence of the crime within the group – the existence of the crime itself was not in doubt. In his opening sentences of the letter, where he establishes the aim of the work, Walker declares, “I shall endeavour to ascertain the Origin and History of a Practice, the most barbarous that ever owed its existence either to the Wickedness, or Weakness of human nature.”1 The subtext of this sweeping declaration appears to state that the practice exists and has a discernible origin as well as history, but merely needs …

The Virtual Archive and the Missing Trace: Charlotte Salomon on CD ROM

Issue 12: The Archive of the Future / The Future of the Archive (Spring 2008) Elisabeth R. Friedman In 1941 the German Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon, living in exile in the south of France, created an unprecedented work of art combining image, text and music. Before Salomon died in Auschwitz at age twenty-six she had created more than 1,300 gouaches, 769 of which comprise what the artist entitled Life? or Theater? A Singspiel, or A Play with Music. Painted with only primary colors (red, yellow and blue) and white, and mixing them to create vivid hues, the images are a fictionalized autobiography, incorporating as “characters” important and influential individuals in her life. In Life? or Theater? Salomon narrates the story of her life, her family and the German Jewish cultural world that was destroyed in the Holocaust. While it is often read as an act of defiance in the face of Nazi persecution, Life? or Theater? also illustrates the artist’s struggle to live in the aftermath of the suicides of her grandmother, her mother and her aunt, …

This Bridge Called Imagination: On Reading the Arab Image Foundation and Its Collection

Issue 12: The Archive of the Future / The Future of the Archive (Spring 2008) Dore Bowen Seeing that which had previously been invisible becomes an activity that renews the exoticism of territorial conquests of the past. But seeing that which is not really seen becomes an activity that exists for itself. This activity is not exotic but endotic, because it renews the very conditions of perception. —Paul Virilio1 The Journey Out In the civil archives of Paris one can study strange missives—written notes found in the pockets of eighteenth-century illiterates who drowned in the Seine. Why would farmers, barge operators, and nomadic souls with no knowledge of written language have carried scribbled notes on their person? Historian Arlette Farge ponders this enigma, suggesting that these notes may have been part of a verbal process whereby thoughts were whispered to a member of the literate public who then transcribed them; these texts were then carried by travelers with other symbols such as good luck charms and memorabilia. Consequently, rather than being a form of self-expression, Farge suggests that …

Historias Oficiales / Official Histories

Issue 12: The Archive of the Future / The Future of the Archive (Spring 2008) Carla Herrera-Prats Historias Oficiales—Official Stories Exhibited at la Celda Contemporanea, Mexico City, August–October 2006 Official Stories was originally an installation of archival material intended as an inquiry into the transformation of the Mexican government’s political investment in pre-Hispanic iconography and history. Two timelines charted the contemporary fate of nationalist symbols that have helped support Mexico’s identification with its pre-colonial past. I am interested in this nationalist identification at a time when the requirements of globalization upon developing countries have turned allegiance in historical and geographical territories into both a burden for development and an economical investment. Using materials from almost 20 libraries and museums from Mexico and the US,1 this project focused on the contradictory institutional/governmental administration of imagery through two cultural practices: on the one hand, the historiography of pre-Hispanic civilization in public school textbooks, and, on the other, globe-trotting government- sponsored exhibitions of pre-Hispanic artifacts. These first images correspond to the installation of this project at La Celda …