Notes on the Archive: Alternative Assemblages and Fringe Imaginaries

This session solicits contributions that foreground alternative archival practices with particular emphasis on artistic interventions into traditional institutional collecting spaces. The notion of the archive has inarguably been expanded in recent decades from physical storage spaces to virtual desktop institutions. The hyper-sanitized objects and ephemera that line the shelves and storage containers of physical archival spaces now have virtual avatars at the ready, including jpegs, pdfs, and dead links, leaving what Douglas Crimp described as an “enclosure of decaying and dead objects” in the museum (On the Museum’s Ruins, 1993). Despite its myriad institutional shortcomings, the virtual archive has similarly provided novel models for using and understanding the archive, its contents, and allusions towards an objective and collective memory. New media artists such as Elisa Giardina Papa, for instance, draw on the personal archive as a novel forum for fringe knowledge production. The personal archive is understood in this context as a temporal assemblage and forum for intimacy; an archeon that houses both personal proclivities and professional obligations. Here, the archive acts as an enclave for ghosts; memories compounded by time that were founded through a “compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive” and what it might offer. How do alternative archival practices, including those that are paradoxically both extant and obsolete, elicit the opportunity to rethink traditional collecting practices, archival assemblages, and memory-making practices? This session will argue for the urgency of personal and alternative archival practices as a critical forum for collective memory, fringe knowledge, and authorship.