Living in archival time, or at the end of narrative(s) @ Transmediale

“Archives are the documentary by-product of human activity retained for their long-term value.”

This internationally accepted definition of archives is proposed by the International Council of Archives – a transnational network of organisations with 1900 member archives across 199 countries and territories and is underpinned by the idea of value. And yet, we are living in a world where the notion of value itself – across a spectrum of things, objects and ideas, histories and cultures, even people – is being constantly questioned and revised.

Although state and institutional (legacy) archives have historically been agencies that preserve knowledge, it is now almost universally accepted that traditional archives, inextricably linked to what Derrida calls ‘Archontic Power’ (Derrida: 1995), have colonial roots and serve as monuments to how power is organised. They are performative sites of segregation, racialisation and immobilization of communities. Coloniality as the ongoing ‘colonisation of power, knowledge, and being’ (Moladanado-Torres: 2007), is not limited to the technical organisation of infrastructure but testify to the narratives of exclusion that cement archives as “not just pieces of data, but a status symbol” (Mbembe: 2002). It continues to affect ‘what is archived, who archives it, for whom’, defining ontological understandings of what archives may or may not do.

A traditional linear concept of time is no longer sufficient to capture the complexities of contemporary digital archives and their narratives. Living in ‘Archival Time’, or at the end of narrative(s) explores new relationships between archives, time, narratology and its various media. It examines the impact of digital archives on our perception of time through three distinct yet interconnected trajectories: (1) The Multiplicities of Archives and Power; (2) Archival Time; and (3) Databases and the End of Narrative.