notion : Counter-archive
Counter-archive
"In recent years, more and more artists have been messing with/in the archives, opening up dynamic possibilities for counter-archival practice. In this formulation, the “counter-archive” represents an incomplete and unstable repository, an entity to be contested and expanded through clandestine acts, a space of impermanence and play. Taken as an action, the term entails mischief and imagination, challenging the record of official history. Employed as an artistic strategy it pushes our archival impulse into new territories, encouraging critique and material alteration/fabrication, and emboldening anarchivism. To counter-archive is to counter-act, to rewrite, to animate over. Consider it a take-and-give thing… a negotiation. Against the un-Commons." (Kashmere, 2010)
"For the purposes of this project, we have defined counter-archives as political, ingenious, resistant, and community-based. They are embodied differently and have explicit intention to historicize differently, to disrupt conventional national narratives, and to write difference into public accounts. They seek to counter the hegemony of traditional archival institutions that have normally neglected or marginalized women, Indigenous, Inuit and Métis Peoples, the LGBT2Q+ community, and immigrant communities." (Archive/Contre-Archive, n-d.)
"Counter-archiving highlights the problems of a presentist agenda that selectively highlights and erases subjects, spaces, and events to expand its own power in the present into the future, without letting go of the past or the future. It further questions what acts, subjects, and inscriptions legitimately constitute an archive." (Ware, 2017)