ISCI 711 FINAL PAPER

Collaborative Cultural Memory: Expanding Definitions of Community Archives

In 2009, Terry Cook identified archives as “active sites of agency and power,” and in 2013 as “concept, as practice, as institution….”The latter essay, entitled “Evidence, Memory, Identity, and Community: Four Shifting Archival Paradigms,” follows the pursuit through pre- and post-modern intellectual currents, to contemporary archivist as facilitator of community archives, engaging in “shared stewardship and collaboration” with both existing and virtual communities as they form. Cook ends with a question, asking if the archival community is “ready for such radical reimagining of its purpose?” What follows here may be considered a direct response – not only an emphatic YES, but also an exploration of strategies that community archives can borrow from the overlapping traditions of art archives, reparative archives, and acts of archival activism in order to transform its role in an ever-evolving digital landscape.

Cook’s theory emphasizes archives as a “process of memory-making and identity formation,” rather than final product (e.g. statues, historical sites, archival documents). Aside from establishing evidence, archives preserve and create memory…

Yet memory is notoriously selective….With memory comes forgetting. With memory comes the inevitable privileging of certain records and records creators, certain functions, activities, and groups in society, and the marginalizing or silencing of others. Memory, and forgetting, can serve a whole range of practical, cultural, political, symbolic, emotional and ethical imperatives and is central to power, identity, and privilege. (2013)

This echoes Achille Mbembe’s 2002 essay entitled “The Power of Archives and its Limits,” wherein archives serve as foundation of a political state, including transfer of ownership from author to society. He argues that in the process of selection, archivists bestow status onto evidence of life and death, and exercise authority over the power of the past to threaten order in the present. According to Mbembe, the archival process is transactional, an exchange of “the temptation to repeat an original act,” via commemoration, “the ritual of forgetting.” The archived item is severance, a talisman, evidence of memory (Mbembe, 2002).

Cook continues to explore this tension between memory and evidence, asserting that one cannot exist without the other. His four frameworks, which position the archivist’s role within these polarities, are predicated on the “imagined archival community,” again resonating with Mbembe’s claim that the archivist plays a strategic role in the state’s institution of the imaginary (2002). The pre-modern archivist is passive curator of juridical legacy, culling evidence of shifting nation states following the French Revolution. The modern era historian-archivist is an active appraiser of cultural memory, selecting from the overabundance of records due to flourishing social programs after two World Wars and the Great Depression. Born in the 1970s, postmodern archivists are “continual mediators between past, present, and future, between creators, records, researchers.” So the role becomes self-reflexive, truth is subjective, and the expert works as both social agent and activist, reflecting diversity and pluralism in all its manifestations (Cook, 2013).

The current age reallocates the power of memory to its communal source; to actual archives which have long existed outside of the establishment, and to virtual ones which may be newly forming. According to Cook:

Community archiving, as concept of reality, evidently makes us think differently about ownership of records, replevin, oral and written traditions, the localism-globalism and margins-centre nexus, multiple viewpoints and multiple realities about recordkeeping…and obviously identity, and depending on our responses, around deeper ethical issues of control, status, power, and neo-colonialism. (2013)

It requires us to reconsider who leads the archival work. In his keynote speech at the 2016 Archives and Records Association, “Archives, Race, Class, and Rage,” Colin Prescod examines archives as a “site of struggle” drawing from the rich history of British Black activists in the 20th & 21st centuries, as well as his own experience working with heritage organizations and committees, from the Mayor’s office to museums. “Rebellious rage” leads to the resistance of dominant cultural narratives, which marginalize and deny the Black experience. Prescod rejects representation that does not allow for agency in the creation of records, as well as in curation and contextualization (2016).

In 2014, Michele Caswell declared that any record collection which “affirm[s] the existence of communities that have been silenced, erased, or marginalized is a political act.” Caswell also contributed to a 2016 essay entitled “‘To Be Able to Imagine Otherwise’: community archives and the importance of representation,” which surveyed 17 staff members of 12 community archives located in Southern California, formed around ethnic, racial, religious, gender, sexuality, economic, and/or geographic commonalities. Findings are described as ontological (“I am here”), epistemological (“We are here”), and social (“We belong here”) representation. According to Caswell et al.:

These organizations and projects are framed as ways for communities to make shared, autonomous decisions about what holds enduring value, shape collective memory of their own pasts and control the means through which stories about their past are constructed…. [S]elf-representation in archives empowers community members to…envision a life lived outside of current systems of oppression. (2016)

Just as the personal is political, so is the communal – particularly in the face of “symbolic annihilation” throughout mainstream media.

Reiterating Prescod’s demand for agency, and Caswell et al.’s for self-representation, is a 2019 essay entitled “Knowledge Organization as Knowledge Creation: Surfacing Community Participation in Archival Arrangement and Description” by Greg Bak et al. The authors look at two archives that rely on their respective communities to create systems of metadata and contextualize items including: Project Naming which restores Inuit identities to Library and Archives Canada holdings, and Sex Worker Database hosted by the University of Manitoba. Their position maintains that archives are created by linking documents and describing them via metadata (from archivists as well as “systems of origin”); community involvement in institutional processes becomes knowledge co-creation, with implications for data sovereignty and enduring ownership over records. Strategies explored within this context are self-identification by archivists (acknowledging biases), social tagging systems, participatory methodologies which allow for transparency and accountability, decolonized descriptions, application of community articulated frameworks, and tagging folksonomies. In short, “communities are the experts of all this knowledge,” and institutions act as facilitators (Bak et al., 2019).

Another model for community-institutional collaboration exists at the Punk Rock Archive at the Washington DC Public Library. The archivist there, Ray Barker, explains (2020) that the “Do It Yourself” spirit of the movement informs the entire process: formation, donor relations, acquisitions, processing, digitization, programming, exhibitions and outreach. His metaphor linking the dialogue between a punk rock band and its audience to archivists and collection users illuminates the value of intercommunity exchange between all stakeholders. “Zines as Community Archive” by Sarah Baker & Zelmarie Cantillon (2022) similarly embraces DIY ethos and yet goes one step further in its proposal of “collaborative reminiscence” as a means of building community and resisting suppression of archives. Using as case study the “See You at Paradise” zine about a hotel on Norfolk Island in the South Pacific, Baker & Cantillon explore the “product and process” of zines as community archives, and point to the capacity for institutions as facilitators of collective memory work and activism around historical record (Baker & Cantillon, 2022).

“Zines as Community Archive” relies on the importance of creating and disseminating heritage narratives, with the goal of cultural justice in mind, even (especially) as it may be disruptive or subversive to existing power dynamics. Both zine-making and community archival work are grassroots activities of creating, collecting, processing, and curating. Zines as community archives employ a hybrid model of memory-keeping which allows for the challenge and correction of absences and partial narratives. They are counter-hegemonic tools that “better align with modes of communication and social connection…in the digital era” per Terry Cook (2013). The result is a democratized archival process, where anything can be “as archive” and everyone is an archivist (Ketalaar, 2017) (Baker & Cantillon, 2022). “Creating Community Archives: Giving Voice to the Unheard” by Kelly Ahlfeld (2021) builds on Cook’s exchange of a “neutral custodian” for a community-based process, pointing to the prevalence of self-curation via social media and learning as a social responsibility. “The concept of lieux de memoire, or sites of memory, where a physical space is transformed by archival material to create new understanding, is an effective way to tell stories…” (Ahlfeld, 2021).

In fact, “Documenting Media Art: An Archive and Bridging Thesaurus for MediaArtHistories,” by Oliver Grau et al. (2019), considers the ways social web 2.0 facilitates “collaborative archiving.” Media Art, defined by emergent technology as both medium and subject, requires a unique hierarchical thesaurus and open access database provided by Archive of Digital Art. The result is a form of community archival work, with “expanded concept of documentation,” user-controlled (and reviewed) content curation, and interdisciplinary exchange (Grau et al., 2019). The archival process of documentation and digital storage becomes even more complex in the case of performance art, as Anni Saisto explores in her 2019 essay entitled “D-ark–a Shared Digital Performance Art Archive with a Modular Metadata Schema.” D-ark is a collaboration between the artist community T.E.H.D.A.S. (documentation) and Pori Art Museum (preservation) in Finland which captures ephemeral performances in the full context of setting and audience, so that the document itself becomes ethnographic evidence. This record of “intangible cultural heritage” requires a deft negotiation between the embrace of social media and copyright laws around shared ownership, particularly data privacy (Saisto, 2019).

The notion of the archivist’s role as performative, and archive’s ability to “travel across time and space in search of crossroads…to transform the future,” is further extrapolated in “Entangled Archives: Reparative Critical Practices in Situations ‘Beyond Repair’” by Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld (2022). The author was fired from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, her research defunded and classes canceled, after her involvement with Anonymous Artists’ 2020 transfer of a bust copy of Frederick V from Assembly Hall to the bottom of the harbor. Dirckinck-Holfeld defends the act as “rematerialization,” based on Charlottenborg Castle (which houses the Academy of Fine Arts and Assembly Hall) as “material witness” to colonial history, which may be manipulated to make “different narratives visible” and create new pathways, collaborations and collectives. “By disentangling and reassembling these textures and materials, sedimented practices become permeable.” Furthermore, through rematerialization, time itself may be seen as overlapping or collapsing:

We are repairing the past, which is not yet repaired, but as we do so the present is itself being broken. That means we must constantly engage in processes of repair that do not return a fully recovered body but acknowledge and bear witness to that body’s wounds. (Dirckinck-Holmfeld, 2022)

Perhaps self-mythologizing has a significant role to play in repair as well. Such is the case in Kareem Estefan’s 2022 essay “Narrating Looted and Living Palestinian Archives: Reparative Fabulation in Azza El-Hassan’s Kings and Extras.” In examining El-Hassan’s documentary about her search for a Palestinian film archive which disappeared after Israel invaded Beirut in 1982, Estefan explores methods of recreating a cultural identity and history in the absence of empirical evidence. Estefan defines “reparative fabulation” as an act of creative and collective world building, a counter narrative “at the intersection of the fictive and the historical,” reliant on Foucault’s theory of the archive as discourse.So the result is “a phantom archive–an absence felt like a presence,” based on Mbembe’s observation that “the destruction of an archive does not bring about its loss so much as its transmutation into fantasy….” Mbembe calls this transfiguration into “a spectre…the receptacle of all utopian ideals” (2002) (Estefan, 2022).

A spirit of activism is central to Cook’s claim that “community is also about displacing old myths as much as constructing new ones, about embracing a future as much as defending a past” (2013). This requires from archivists an eagerness for adaptation and embrace of the unknown. A fundamental creativity is necessary for cultural memory, and all of its counter narratives, to thrive. Along those lines, a few nominations to the archival canon, from this author’s time and place: Jonathan Greene’s 2016 reimagining of Porgy & Bess, which imbued the Gershwin opera set on Catfish Row in Charleston with the Gullah artist’s vibrant set and costume designs, reclaiming the characters’ identities; second, Fletcher Williams III’s reconstruction of his own North Charleston neighborhoods in neon lights, synthetic hair, and ambient soundscapes for the exhibition “When It Rains it Shines”  which opened the International African American Museum; and finally, the recent repatriation of Big Shell Top from an area museum to the ninth generation sweetgrass basket weavers who created the work of art, facilitated by a mutual aid initiative called Acres of Ancestry. These are all (very personal) examples of institutional support for arts-based methodologies which indeed radically reimagine our shared heritage, and should be preserved as such, digitally or otherwise.

WORKS CITED

  1. Ahlfeld, K. (2021). Creating Community Archives: Giving Voice to the Unheard. Journal of Library Administration, 61(4), 493–499. https://doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2021.1906570

  2. Bak, G., Allard, D., & Ferris, S. (2019). Knowledge Organization as Knowledge Creation: Surfacing Community Participation in Archival Arrangement and Description. Knowledge Organization, 46(7), 502–521. https://doi.org/10.5771/0943-7444-2019-7-502

  3. Baker, S., and Cantillon, Z. (2022). Zines as Community Archive. Archival Science, 22(4), 539–61. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-022-09388-1.

  4. Barker, R. (2020). A Community Shapes a Collection: The Punk Archive at the Washington, DC Public Library. ARSC Journal, 51(2), 203-209. Accessed November 28, 2023. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=sso&db=lih&AN=147656558&authtype=sso&custid=s3604775&site=ehost-live&scope=site

  5. Caswell, M. (2014). Toward a Survivor-centred Approach to Records Documenting Human Rights Abuse: Lessons from Community Archives. Archival Science 14, 307–322.

  6. Caswell, M., Migoni, A., Geraci, N., Cifor, M. (2016). ‘To Be Able to Imagine Otherwise’: Community Archives and the Importance of Representation. Archives and Records, 38(1), 5–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/23257962.2016.1260445.

  7. Cook, T. (2009). The Archive(s) Is a Foreign Country: Historians, Archivists, and the Changing Archival Landscape. Canadian Historical Review, 90, 497-534.

  8. Cook, T. (2013). Evidence, Memory, Identity, and Community: Four Shifting Archival Paradigms. Archival Science, 13(2-3), 95–120. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-012-9180-7.

  9. Estefan, K. (2022). Narrating Looted and Living Palestinian Archives: Reparative Fabulation in Azza El-Hassan’s Kings and Extras. Feminist Media Histories, 8(2), 43–69. https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2022.8.2.43

  10. Grau, O., Haller, S., Hoth, J., Rühse, V., Schiller, D., & Seiser, M. (2019). Documenting Media Art: An Archive and Bridging Thesaurus for MediaArtHistories. Leonardo (Oxford), 52(5), 435–441. https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_01482

  11. Ketelaar, E. (2017). Archival Turns and Returns: Studies of the Archive. In Gilliland, A., MacKemmish, S., & Lau, A. Research in the Archival Multiverse (pp. 228-268). Monash University Publishing (Australia).

  12. Mbembe, A. (2002). The Power of the Archive and its Limits. In Hamilton, C., Harris, V., Taylor, J., Pickover, M., Reid, G. & Saleh, R. Refiguring the Archive (pp. 19-26). Kluwer Academic Publishers. https://sites.duke.edu/vms565s_01_f2014/files/2014/08/mbembe2002.pdf

  13. Prescod, Colin. (2017). Archives, Race, Class and Rage. Race & Class, 58(4), 76–84. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306396816686278.

  14. Saisto, A., & T.E.H.D.A.S. (2019). D-ark—a Shared Digital Performance Art Archive with a Modular Metadata Schema. Heritage, 2(1), 976–987. https://doi.org/10.3390/heritage2010064

    [Submitted 14 December 2023]