Archive in Flux: A Diffused Narrative of Material and Geo-History

Abstract

Emerging from a socio-political urgency resultant from the current volatile situation of world politics, this article brings to the fore the age-old question of what an archive is. Spanning through the intellectual history of arkheion and the hegemonic structure of a daunting, cohesive building that reflects the ideologies of a singular authoritarian power that created it, this article explores the parallel structures of power that exist within the archival structure, at the same time rendering its structure and being rendered by it. The shift from the unidimensional power positions to this multiplicity of exchanges that make the archival structure fluid will be studied through certain eminent contemporary archival art practices.

This article proposes a topology of the archive, as a departure from studying the archive as a location, a container. The archival art practices, in this schema, are neither an external element to the archive nor a separate practice gaining meaning in discourses, but an essential element in the horizons of what the archives enact in their multiplicity. In doing so, this article will strive towards an indeterminacy of the structure of the archive, where it functions neither as a mere integration of a determinate matter in the archive discourse nor as a domiciliation of the hitherto unknown or unacknowledged documents in a new container like a museum. Leaving the discourse-oriented and material-oriented path, the action of doing will be discussed as the determinate factor behind the existence of the archive. Hence, the search for the answer to the question initially introduced, what an archive is, may only be contemplated by focusing on how archives function, as the function will be explored further as the key to its creation and sustenance.