Archive and aspiration by Arjun Appadurai
“On the one hand, the newer forms of electronic archiving restore the deep link of the archive to popular memory and its practices, returning to the non-official actor the capability to choose the way in which traces and documents shall be formed into archives, whether at the level of the family, the neighbourhood, the community or other sorts of groupings outside the demography of the state. On the other hand, the electronic archive, by allowing the formation of new prosthetic socialities, denaturalises the relationship of memory and the archive, making the (interactive) archive the basis of collective memory, rather than leaving memory as the substrate which guarantees the ethical value of the archive. We are thus entering an era in which collective memory and the archive have mutually formative possibilities, thus allowing new traffic across the gap between the internalities and externalities of collective memory. The archive, as an institution, is surely a site of memory. But as a tool, it is an instrument for the refinement of desire. Seen from the collective point of view, and keeping the sociality of memory and the imagination in mind, such desire has everything to do with the capacity to aspire…”
Is an entire city an archive? by Vyjayanthi Rao
“The notion of archive in this sense of city-as-archive presumes a unitary space that can be made whole, objectified and supported by the evidence provided by an ever inclusive archive. However, if as I suggested above, ‘archive’ is understood to be a principle of order rather than a location for information and substrate of pre-constituted or even to-be-constituted memory, we need to ask, what sorts of principle of order does destruction constitute? If even preservation/conservation itself is linked to this destructive urge, we need to ask ourselves how we can read the urban fabrics and tapestries constructed through destruction. How should we read the principles of order that constitute these fabrics – deliberately or inadvertently created by mass destruction, by planned destruction and by natural disaster, by environmental catastrophe and the sci-fi landscapes created by continual industrialisation and infrastructure infusion. These are, in other words, landscapes of emergence, in which a certain state of emergency and the provisional, experimental nature of space under production are always at the fore, as spectacle. The city itself emerges, in other words, as a process of planned and unplanned destructions, disasters and catastrophes, process and state of experiment and emergency, shot through with displacements and other provisional experiences. More particularly, it involves a different approach to memory itself wherein the archive is not merely an accessory, tool or instrument but also a practice of intervention into these kinds of fabrics, constituted by voids…”