There is a slight irony, seemingly a paradox in the name of this archive: the archive that I imagine to unlearn the archive. Unlearning something while repeating, practicing, constructing it? The idea is not repetition, unless it is always considered repetition in variance and in motion, never settled, never fixed.  It speaks to my attempt to unlearn archiving and archival research while practising, while being implied and meshed within in. Leaning on Irit Rogoff’s notion of criticality, I commit to inhabiting my problem and I have made my problem the archive and the images and imaginaries it produces (Rogoff, 2003, 2006). Criticality is a way that draws from the practice of critique as proposed by post-structural scholars but speaks to the situatedness of each one of us. The impossibility to step out of the world to look at it from a distance and to dissemble it. My hands are always deeply sunk into the matter and my fingers entangled in the net spun, ready to push and pull but nevertheless entangled.

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Unlearning is a concept that I borrow from decolonial and postcolonial thinkers. where it is discussed as a practice that challenges the value-based, hegemonic apparatus of knowledge production from the inside, may it be in education or academic research (Azoulay, 2019; Dhawan & do Mar Castro Varela, 2009; Mignolo & Tlostanova, 2012; Spivak, 2012; Sternfeld, 2016). Let me unpack this a bit.

In Potential History – Unlearning Imperialism, Azoulay proposes unlearning as “a process of disengaging from the unquestioning use of political concepts” (Azoulay, 2019, p. 33) such as the archive. Unlearning is to question and inquire the very grounds upon which the ontology and epistemology of archives are built and to grapple with their imperial condition.  Archives are crucial for the construction of histories and the shaping of narratives – of the construction of a linear temporality even. The question of the archive is a question about knowledge and its transformation.  Nora Sternfeld speaks foremostly about unlearning learning, but I think that her elaborations are relevant for archival modes of knowledge production as well as both are producing orders of the world. Sternfeld states:

“[…] learning does not simply mean acquiring a set of knowledge and skills, but to some effect, that we also perform existing power relations. We study them by making use of this knowledge and passing it on and, in turn, we are also able to use this knowledge to question. […] Learning is therefore both a discursive and performative praxis” (Sternfeld, 2016, pp. 4–5).

Learning the archive then would be performing the existing power relations of the archive. This performing of knowledge and power relations also has an embodied and subjective dimension. We learn to speak and perform who “we” and who “the others” are. Sternfeld stresses the importance of epistemic violence, i.e. the violences that lie within the knowledge, “in the orders and distinctions it creates” (Sternfeld, 2016, p. 6), and the ignorance of those orders or the naturalization of them. It is necessary to question what we have become to learn as self-evident (Azoulay, 2019; Foucault, 1972; Sternfeld, 2016).

The work of unlearning then means working to shift and transform the canon and dominant knowledges (Sternfeld, 2016, p. 10). Sternfeld works here with Antonio Gramsci and his understanding of hegemony as a pedagogical relationship. Gramsci’s theory of hegemony assumes that rule is maintained through coercion as much as through consensus. Consensus (not violence and repression) needs to predominate in the long run. In that sense, rule is constituted and maintained a great deal through the fabrication of consent or agreement (Sternfeld, 2009, p. 61). Education and pedagogy may be techniques to stabilize power as much as they are a crucial strategy for creating societal change as Gramsci is imagining it (Sternfeld, 2009, p. 60). Pedagogy as a transformative practice becomes the space where the thinkable and the sayable are being negotiated; where consent can be achieved, denied, challenged. My relationship with the archive is a pedagogical relationship. Unlearning the archive then means to challenge the value-based, hegemonic archive as an apparatus of knowledge production from the inside.

The last part of this sentence, “from the inside”, is important because it asks me: how can I challenge the hegemony of the archive while performing archiving and archival research? What power relations do I perform? Can I challenge them? Can I find new postures and movements? But the inside also stresses the situatedness of the knowledge that I produce. Any transformation of hegemony goes deep into the flesh, into the certainties of what I (thought I) know and how I think of the subject I am (becoming). Unlearning what I know and more importantly the way I know, unlearning the archive, means necessarily unlearning myself/my self.

There is another word in the title that requires my attention and unlearning: imagining. I understand imagining as a collective and cultural practice rather than an individual faculty (Appadurai, 1996, p. 5,8). Our imaginations produce group identities and feelings of belongings. Both Arjun Appadurai and Benedict Anderson underline how mass (print) media and the experience of a “collective reading, criticism and pleasure” (Appadurai, 1996, p. 8) produce a community of sentiment as a group that begins to imagine and feel things together” (Appadurai 1990 in Appadurai 1996, p. 8) is crucial for collective identities to emerge, even if we might never enter into face-to-face contact or even hearsay with the majority of our fellow members (Appadurai, 1996, p. 6). It is through our imagination that the image of our communality and belonging takes form.

Appadurai distinguishes imagination from fantasy: he finds fantasy carries a notion of the private and the individualistic with it and is rarely associated with action or projects. Imagination instead, he argues, has a “projective sense about it, the sense of being a prelude to some sort of expression, whether aesthetic or otherwise” (Appadurai, 1996, p. 7). Collective imaginations of neighbourhood might lead to solidarity while collective imaginations of nationhood might lead patriotism and the feeling of righteousness when killing the member of another nation, etc.

So, imagination might lead to action and produce sense of community belonging. By imagining an archive to unlearn is a collective task, one that does not spring from my individual ideational abilities but rather something that is crafted and worked by the community that I invoke in my doing and writing; the people I think and write with. An unimperial grammar – of the archive – cannot be invented, it needs to be practiced and rehearsed (Azoulay).

Imaginaries. Images. Imag(inari)es. There is tie that links images and imaginaries in as much as visualizing and imagining are proximate practices to each other. Mirzoeff describes in The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (2011) how visuality does not describe the totality of all images or visual signs but instead the visualizing of history. By taking away someone’s right of self-representation, of telling history, of creating narrations, one takes away the possibility to imagine. The possibility to imagine a collective belonging and feeling as much as a collective imagination of a future (and past) otherwise (Mirzoeff, 2011). More often than not it is seemingly impossible, to imagine an otherwise or an archive that allows for an otherwise (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018, p. 3).  Maybe in that world there would not be even the possibility for an archive. A repeating echo in my ear: Can there ever be a truly decolonial urge for an archive? (Ngumi et al., 2023)).

What is it that I attempt to unlearn in relation to the archive? In my doctorate research I study picture books that were employed to teach children “about the world”, to teach them “how to see”, i.e. training their senses, in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries across Europe, across Empires (Germany, Switzerland and Portugal). Engaged in producing a historical narrative and in contact with these archival materials, I began questioning how I produce historical narratives through the archival methodologies I make use of and what kind of knowledges these are. My practices of archiving and archival research are crucial - epistemologically and methodologically – and have consequences for the ontology of the archive that I am constituting through these approaches. 

What concept of the archive am I invoking? I work from an approach that considers the archive a system of practices, institutions, and discourses that govern the production, circulation, and use of knowledge within a society. An archive is then not just a “repository” that contains documents, but it is a generative system. Falling back onto Foucault’s definition, the archive is the laws and systems that govern the possibilities and impossibilities of discursive statements and particular subject formations (Foucault, 1972). By actively shaping what can be said, seen, thought, felt and imagined the archive is productive in shaping the world. In this sense, the archive is an apparatus that acts; not an empty container that stores. There is power in play.

Ariella Azoulay works on the particular imperial condition of the emergence and existence of the archive. Azoulay argues that imperial archival procedures such as collecting, classifying, cataloguing, indexing, preserving etc. have been effectuated before the institution of the archive came into being and that they have never solely manifested in paper documents. The archive as a walled institution took shape a few centuries after millions of people in various places  “were already forced to embody imperial archival categories” as being part of a growing operation of classification, tagging and naming groups of people in order to “form a  human index” (Azoulay, 2019, p. 164,171-2). The names, tags and categories may have varied; the difference they instituted between them is what matters she argues (Azoulay, 2019, pp. 164, 171-2).

Both Azoulay and Foucault understand archives as powerful mechanisms that produce particular orders; actively being employed in the construction of hegemonic, official history by the means of seemingly presenting a priori knowledge and the make-believe of neutrality, continuity and universality, as well as the imposition of a Western concept of temporality. The archive is manifestation and yet productive force in the shaping of the world; its logics precede the institution of the archive and are perpetuated through its functioning. Dealing with the archive means to deal with how we construct history as a society and speaks to the very conditions of how we know the world and ourselves as subjects.

“Omittance and silencing happens at all stages of the production of historical narratives: the making of sources, the making of archives, the making of narratives and the making of history in the final instance (adding retrospective significance)” (Trouillot 1995, p. 26 in Zaayman, 2023, p. 9).

I find this quote useful to speak about the different levels on which archival violences are being produced and on which resistance or opposition to those can occur. In her comprehensive analysis, Azoulay carves out the epistemological violence brought about by the acclaimed neutrality of archival procedures such as the making of sources. The constitutive distinction between archival objects and documents and its assumingly neutral procedures (preservation, classification, indexing, etc.) endows the archive itself with (false) neutrality (Azoulay, 2019, p. 60). Achille Mbembe calls the production of documents in or through the archive a “quasimagical” ritual that turns secular texts into religious, archivable documents (Mbembe, 2002, p. 19). The archivability of a text thereby depends on what is imbued with historical value. Declaring pieces of peoples living worlds as of “historical value” and archival appraisal are employed as a major excuse for accumulating, appropriating, owning, processing and sealing meaning of those pieces as “history” which materializes in the archive (Azoulay, 2019, p. 169).  Archival appraisal is not the process of “identifying records with archival value” but rather the process of “creating archival value” (Harris 2002, p.84 in Cifor, 2016, p. 13). Historical value and archival appraisal are articulated in policies and the acclaimed agendas of archives and through what is being collected and safeguarded. Those decisions always speak to the attribution of cultural importance and discursive power that is being practiced in the present society (on the role of affects in archival appraisal see Cifor, 2016). Who made the archive I am engaging with and for what purpose? Which documents do I ascribe value? How does my positionality inform those ascriptions? How can I account for my affective ties in the archive?

The dominance of paper documents in archives and the argumentation that they are “archivable” while movement and oral stories etc. are not, is not incidental. By rendering embodied knowledge of rituals through which knowledge of the past was passed on as non-archival, European colonialists justified the ahistoricity of indigenous populations that were considered as non-scripture societies, disregarding any other mnemonic devices (Taylor, 2003; Tuhiwai Smith, 2012). In Europe, too, oral and embodied knowledges for example of agricultural workers were increasingly supressed in favour of scientific natural history that promoted paper-based procedures such as drawing and written description of flora and fauna (Pratt, 1992). What sources enter into the archive I am constructing? What sensory modes do they make recourse to? What are the relations between a paper-document and an embodied experience?

And where are the labourers of the archive? This is a question that Azoulay raises when she criticises that the labourers and users who  make the archive (as an institution) possible are absent from the definitions and accounts of the archive (Azoulay, 2019, p. 176). Simply put, the archive is run by humans, inevitably situated, and as scholars engaged in historical fabrication, we need to acknowledge that. The indifference to this disappearance of human labourers is another trait of the imperialist logic and includes scholars who often take an “active and deliberate role in performing their own disappearance, removing their presence from the archive, while positing the archive as an external object for their consultation and reflection” (Azoulay, 2019, p. 176). Making the humanness of archives tangible means carving out their situatedness and the ways they came into being and continue to exist. This is an undertaking of epistemological importance because it speaks to the very conditions on how one knows the archive, the knowledge it produces and the knowledge that exceeds and precedes it.  Making my inscription or my entrance into the archive tangible is crucial to produce situated histories.

What historical narrations become possible? Given the silencing and erasure of great parts of the population from archives particularly in post-colonial and post-imperial societies, the challenge remains how to write not only along but at and with the borders of the archive. Saidiya Hartman’s work is remarkable in the way she engages with fiction writing that goes beyond the limits of the archive in order to tell the histories of black lives (Hartman, 2007, 2019). In my research, I have found it particularly important to engage in a re-reading of the archival documents that have entered into the archive and craft critical narratives around those.  I was surprised by the overtness of nationalism, misogyny and racism in those documents that have nevertheless not been sufficiently discussed in the history of (arts) education. The making of narratives through a decolonial, postcolonial and feminist lens appears urgent. How to tell those stories?

One example of challenging historical narration that I have found inspiring, is Carine Zaayman’s work on anarchival practices or methodologies.  For Zaayman the archive always points outside of itself, the archive is “a sign denoting everything that is absent from archives - understood in a profoundly expanded sense. […] including the full sensorial experience of lived life - its non-linear temporality, unrealized potentials, and immaterial networks of intersubjectivity” (Zaayman, 2023, pp. 13–14). In that sense, the anarchive is constituted by that which in the first place escapes the documentary matrices that makes archives possible (Zaayman, 2023, p. 14). Rather than explaining extensively the term anarchive, Zaayman focuses on ‘anarchival practice’ as a mode of artistic production that is cognizant of the limits of archives and colonial archives in particular and that focuses on “giving voice to knowledges of the past that are embedded in a community” (Zaayman, 2023, p. 4) that are not fixed in archival documents. Her elaborations derive from the Clanwilliam Arts Project, a community engaged art project which works with and beyond the Bleek and Lloyd Collection (archive) in the town Clanwilliam in South Africa. The anarchival practice here is deeply collaborative and “born from dissensus” (Zaayman, 2023, p. 17).

I am drawn to the idea of the anarchive because it invites critical and creative engagement with colonial archives that disrupt scholarly historical procedures that “accord colonial archives the power to delimit methodological possibilities” (Zaayman, 2023, p. 16). Anarchival practices offer an opening up and reimagining of what archiving, authorship and ownership might mean.

Zaayman writes, “an anarchival methodology to making history (whether in formal or informal ways, in written, spoken or performative modes) eschews exclusive reliance on slivers of archival material as evidence” (Zaayman, 2023, p. 14). As such, the anarchive draws awareness to the many other sources that we might draw on when narrating the past and therefore “the anarchive offers a constellation of ‘archive’ in which the written, colonial document can no longer act as the despot of historical narration […] instead the anarchive privileges other practices whereby we perform our custodianship of the past, practices that keep alive memories and ways of knowing in defiance of coloniality” (Zaayman, 2023, pp. 15–16).

One crucial aspect of anarchival modes of historical narrations is that these historical narrations are not constituted as “far away” and “cut off” from our present day but that they are kept alive by other means than the archival document (Zaayman, 2023, p. 16). This focus on the present day makes two moves possible in my understanding: drawing attention to other modes of remembering that are not written and might be oral, visual, imaginative, performative, gestural, etc. Secondly, and here I am leaning more on the post-structural idea of the history of the present (REF), it might make us recognize how certain conditions, certain institutions, certain oppressions, certain discourses are still with us today. When the archival document becomes a trigger to speak about our societies, our conflicts, our imaginations today; when the engagement with it, “using a variety of artistic modalities in order to find the importance or significance of the story for [our] lives” (Zaayman, 2023, p. 26, emphasis in original).