This seminar approaches the archive as a spatial, political, and epistemic construct. Beginning with Achille Mbembe’s The Power of the Archive and Its Limits (2002), we examine the conditions of archives: how are archives produced? What are the rituals involved in forming an archive? What are the political conditions of the archive’s foundation? On whose authority does it depend? How is the archive decoded, and under which narrative and conditions is it presented to the public? We will draw special attention to the spatio-temporal strategies, such as the operation of montage, in which “A montage of fragments thus creates an illusion of totality and continuity. Through this introduction, we will critically examine the tensions between preservation and destruction, and the forms of “archival violence” embedded in institutional practices, discussing Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1995).

Building on this, the seminar continues by theorising ways to intervene in (colonial) archives through critical practices, considering colonial sound archives. How does one avoid committing the same violence of the archive in one's own narration from or about the archive? How to listen to the unsaid, translate misconstrued words, and transform disfigured lives at the archive? How can narrative embody life in words and at the same time respect what we cannot know from the archive? Is it possible to exceed or negotiate the constitutive limits of the archive? By discussing these questions, we will reflect on Saidiya Hartman's “Venus in Two Acts” (2008) and her strategies for confronting the “impossible goal” of telling a story and of claiming for the present the lives that are “archived” beyond the violence deposited in archives. We will discuss her writing method of “critical fabulation”, in which she combines archival research and speculative argumentation, writing a narrative “with and against the archive”. These questions extend into the digital through Tonia Sutherland’s Resurrecting the Black Body: Race and the Digital Afterlife (2023), and into community archives through Krista McCracken and Skylee-Storm Hogan-Stacey’s Decolonial Archival Futures (2023), foregrounding relationality, care, and community governance.

We will further reflect on a third section on photography as a critical site for interrogating the materiality and politics of the archive. Drawing on Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s The Civil Contract of Photography (2008) and Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (2019), we will examine how images operate within regimes of visibility and control, and how they might be re-read through her notion of the “civil contract of photography” and “potential history” as relational sites that challenge archival authority. This section is further informed by Tina M. Campt’s Listening to Images (2017), which proposes “listening” as a method for engaging photographs beyond the visual, attending to their quiet, affective, and often unspoken dimensions, and foregrounding the latent histories and forms of refusal embedded within them.

The seminar final section engages with anti-colonial methodologies as a way to interrogate the frameworks that sustain colonial archives and to practice different epistemologies, introducing a material and environmental dimension through Nancy Tuana’s “Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina” (2008), which conceptualises bodies, environments, and infrastructures as porous yet unevenly permeable sites where histories of violence, toxicity, and survival circulate, positioning the environment itself as a dynamic archive. This perspective extends to land-based epistemologies, such as through Leanne Betasamosake Simpso’s As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (2017), who conceptualises land itself as a living archive in which knowledge is generated, transmitted, and sustained through relational, embodied, and land-based practices.

In Berlin, the seminar extends into exhibition spaces, libraries, the urban fabric and its environment, ultimately engaging the city itself as an archive, and multi-species space through visits and meetings with cultural practitioners.

The seminar’s assignments will introduce formats that support students’ own theoretical reflections/confrontations on archiving and memory, allowing them to focus on selected aspects of the seminar’s expanded scope—from documents, photography, and sound to the body, the urban environment, or land—connecting the personal to the political. The assignments will be developed in the formats of journals, letters, and spatial publishing practices. Attendance is fundamental as readings will be discussed in class; the course is in person.

Biobliography

Achille Mbembe, “The Power of the Archive and its Limits”. In: Hamilton C., Harris V., Taylor J., Pickover M., Reid G., Saleh R. (eds) Refiguring the Archive. Springer, Dordrecht, 2002.

Jacques Derrida „Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.“ Diacritics 25, no. 2, 1995.

Saidiya Hartman, „Venus in Two Acts.“ Small Axe 12, no. 2, 2008.

Tonia Sutherland, Resurrecting the Black Body: Race and the Digital Afterlife, 2023.

Krista McCracken and Skylee-Storm Hogan-Stacey, Decolonial Archival Futures, 2023.

Ariella Aisha Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography. Zone Books, 2008.

Ariella Aisha Azoulay, Potential History. Unlearning Imperialism. Verso Books, 2019.

Tina M.Camp, Listening to Images. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.

Nancy Tuana. “Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina.” In Material Feminisms, edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, 2008.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpso’s As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance, 2017.

Exhibitions, archives, and projects of reference (selection)

Tirailleurs: Trials and Tribulations. From Cannon Fodder to Avant-Garde—The Forgotten Soldiers Who Freed Europe. Exhibition and Research Project at HKW

zurückgeschaut | looking back. The First German Colonial Exhibition of 1896 in Berlin-Treptow. A project by the museum Treptow-Köpenick and the project Decolonial Remembrance Culture in the City.

Books of Others, a project by Bani Abidi, Berlin.

Marcela Moraga, ein Fluss, ein Archiv (ongoing), Berlin / Spree River

Museo Comunitario del Agua (Community Water Museum), initiated by Marcela Moraga in collaboration with local activists in Renaico, Chile.