#walkinglab

Conventional archives are not neutral containers of information. They are, more often than not, subject to hegemonic and colonial power structures that limit the ideas of what is considered “acceptable” culture and knowledge that can and ought to be preserved. Anarchiving and counter-archiving are avenues to explore ways of subverting and disrupting traditional or conventional archival practices in order to make tangible space for the “excess” that tends to be left out, and even promotes the question of what makes an archive in the first place. My aim for this project is to use the tumblr platform itself as a tool to dig into the concepts of anarchiving and counter-archives as methods that can further queer and trans cultural production while making meaningful connections to and between queer ephemeral experiences in the process.

Anarchiving is an active practice that emphasizes the affective aspects and material processes of production rather than focusing on static, standardized, and often institutionally propelled documentation, interpretation, preservation, research, and/or retrieval of data and objects that tend to be catalogued within conventional archives.

Counter-archives often go beyond the limitations of the selective practices of conventional archives by focusing more reciprocal and collaborative processes that are grounded in community building. There is an inherent notion of transformation in counter-archival practices because of the intentional inclusion of the uncapturable ephemeral and fleeting aspects that are typically left out of traditional archives, such as “affects, bodies, performances, and embodied events,” as noted by Springgay, A. Truman, and MacLean in their article Socially Engaged Art, Experimental Pedagogies, and Anarchiving as Research-Creation (citation included at the end of post).

We can jump from this article into some related work in audio format. As co-directors of the WalkingLab project and podcast, Stephanie Springgay and Sarah E. Truman look into various approaches to anarchiving and counter-archiving through movement. As discussed in WalkingLab’s fifth episode “Queer Walking Tours,” the generative nature of anarchiving creates space for the defamiliarization of assumptions about place-based research, identity, ableism, embodiment, and queerness, among many other things. In the third episode of the series “Walking as Counter-Archiving,” WalkingLab complicates common conventional archival concepts like chrononormativity (time as linear and chronological), historical concealment or erasure, and the often-ensuing damage-centred research that is used to explore race and racialization in archives constructed under white supremacist power structures.