“A journey implies a destination, so many miles to be consumed, while a walk is its own measure, complete at every point along the way.” – Francis Alÿs

Most of us are used to knowing that our devices track how we interact with them and monitor what we do when they are around. But the Health app, built-in on iPhones, has been causing me a lot of grief lately. What started as an innocent interest in the number of steps I take has grown into an issue. Is tracking steps a helpful tool for becoming more active? Or is it more damaging than helpful in this context, that is, is it easier to associate the level of physical activity with productivity and, by extension, self-worth? I propose to explore the differences between pre-pandemic walks and what I’ve been calling corona walks/COVID walks.

A weekly report on the Health app.

Before the pandemic, I knew that my phone had an app installed that tracked my steps. I would look at it occasionally out of curiosity but did not feel compelled to check it often. Then, the pandemic began, and suddenly almost all options for spending time outside seemed dangerous. My relationship with walking started to shift. Going on walks became a promise for a better mood and a better day. The alternative was dire, sitting in a studio apartment, breathing stagnant air, unmoving and worrying about the future. I would walk to take my mind off things and to have at least some variety in an otherwise homogenous routine.

Soon, I found myself performing for my phone. I would check it during walks to see what mark I was hitting. Am I over 5,000 steps, or still around 3,000? When the weather was bad, I would sometimes pace back and forth at home, phone in hand, watching as it registered each step. As an avid social media user, I had found another way to gain instant gratification. I watched the numbers go up and felt better about myself. Until I felt like I’ve performed enough. Then I would leave the app alone, until the next day. Rinse and repeat. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Artist Stanley Brouwn’s manual step-tracker app. “A Distance of 336 Steps” (1971).

My granddad, a now-retired but still academically active professor, loves to walk. Like many, he believes that walking clears his head and helps him come up with good ideas. I grew up believing that going on walks can solve a lot of things. Above all, it offers a new perspective, getting rid of stagnant energy and providing needed stimuli.

I appreciate the physical and psychological benefits of walking. But being an able-bodied person without a driver’s license or a car means that walking is also my most reliable form of transportation, especially when using public transport is not advised (but, of course, sometimes necessary). So, I find it hard to separate a utility walk from a leisurely walk. I walk fast because I am used to walking to get somewhere, do something. Living in the Netherlands changed this a bit, as now I rely on my bike to run errands. But the habit of walking “with purpose” persists. Even now, over a year into my corona walks, it seems I cannot slow down.

Asking around

I asked on my Instagram story if my friends and acquaintances cared how many steps they were taking and if they used an app to measure their physical activity. Forty people responded, most of them reporting that step counts did not matter that much. But the split was almost even between those who used health apps and those who did not. (See below.) This suggests that some people have health apps, either built-in or downloaded willingly, but they do not check up on them daily, or tracked activities other than walking.

I wanted to know more about other people’s experiences over the last year, so I asked a few close friends about their changing relationship to walking. James said that before the pandemic, he did not go on leisure walks as his job required him to stay on his feet all day. But nowadays, he says, “I always feel better after a walk, even if there were too many people or my feet hurt.” He elaborates: “I had my first proper cry on a walk in about three years. I’ve never felt claustrophobic in my flat but there’s something about how big the outside is that it just felt right, to fill the space.” I love this perspective. It makes me think that going on walks nowadays is a more embodied way to experience something outside of ourselves, something more tangible and fulfilling than observing an endless stream of information online.

According to John Wylie, landscapes represent the “creative tension of self and world.”^[1] So, experiencing a changing landscape can be a way to reconcile something within ourselves, exploring these tensions. Corona walks are also about control. Living through a pandemic is an extreme exercise in letting go, accepting there are some events and consequences we cannot influence or neutralise. So, we go outside to be somewhat in charge of our surroundings. The views change as we walk, serving as a reminder that time continues to pass outside of our homes, outside of ourselves. Still, a level of unpredictability prevails, even on a calm walk.

Walking around Leiden last summer.

Frédéric Gros is a philosopher of walking. In an old Guardian interview, he said: “You can be replaced at your work, but not on your walk. Living, in the deepest sense, is something that no one else can do for us.”^[2] Do we walk to prove to ourselves we are alive, living, and moving through time? It makes sense to me. Walking grounds me, connects me with my body, and helps me relate to other walking, thinking bodies who walked before me.

Walking is also a manifestation of slowness. It is a refusal to optimise, streamline, be efficient and generate profit. Walking requires your attention, and (usually) gets you away from your working self. It asks you to slow down and take stock. This is why I see it as a challenge. My habits speed up my walking pace as my mind starts to wander towards work plans, ideas, anxieties. This inability to take a break is a product of late-stage capitalism. Even when I try to think about something else, it creeps back in, beckoning me to do more, quicker, better, promising I will feel more useful if I increase my productivity. But I do not want to give in. So why am I still compelled to know how far I’ve walked?

Today’s everyday technology allows us to measure everything, monitor performance. Media outlets advise us how to be on our A-game, and how to cut out whatever is unnecessary. But who gets to decide what is and isn’t urgent, needed? Why should I feel compelled to shove my phone under my pillow each night to let it track the quality of my sleep? To go on walks with my phone in hand, feeding it a stream of information about my whereabouts? I do not see how I can benefit from these forms of self-surveillance. Sometimes I wish we could go back to a time when phones allowed for communication and not much else. But we cannot go back. We have to face the privacy threats that come with our wearable personal technologies.

Nostalgic about everyday technology. Artist Maya Man’s Are.na page

There must be a middle ground. Perhaps it is time I disable “Fitness Tracking” on my phone altogether and move however and whenever I want. I do not want to perform for my phone anymore. I want to peel away from it and enjoy time apart.

Looking inwards

Independent, aimless walking allows us to step into ourselves and think about how we relate to the wider world; the actual world, out there, continuing to change even if we are not walking through it and witnessing it. Gros talks about how walking helps to go into autopilot mode, during which we synchronise with our bodies and glide for hours at a time (if your health allows it). This perspective makes walking sound like a primordial, almost ritualistic activity. Why not? Magic has been syphoned out of Western everyday life. Walking can be a vessel for restoring some of that meaning into our routines A refusal to hurry and perform labour makes space for meaningful connections with ourselves and our surroundings.

In the Nintendo Switch game “Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild,” you have the choice of travelling around Hyrule on foot or a horse. Sure, the horse can take me around faster, but I quickly find myself missing the slower pace of walking in-game, and how much easier it is to notice the details I would have otherwise missed.

Exploring the landscapes in “Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild” on Nintendo Switch.

When I talked to my friend Max about corona walking, he said: “I kind of like having my phone tracking steps, but maybe that just comes from growing up playing video games. I like to know the stats from time to time.” I get that, and it is hard to remove ourselves from measuring our performance. Maybe I am making it sound all too serious. If walking can be a ritual, I don’t see why it can’t also be a game. If we treat our data with some distance, we refuse to be controlled by it. Gamifying everyday tasks can be another way to restore some of the joy and spontaneity we’d lost through excessive planning and obsessive control over our performance.

Maybe we are in a contemporary digital panopticon, willingly giving ourselves over to constant surveillance in exchange for surface-level interactions? Foucault says that a participant in a panopticon structure “is seen, but he does not see; he is an object of information, never a subject in communication.”^[3] Our phones were meant to be communication devices, but they act more like data extraction devices. We are given a degree of seeing and engaging, but the price we pay is high – boredom, dissatisfaction, inaction, radicalisation.

I am unsure how to find a way out of this mess. In fact, I might have internalised the panopticon, watching myself from the watchtower as I sit in the cell, pacing and watching the numbers go up. But it can change. I can refuse to participate in the spectacle of constantly measuring myself and my self-worth based on faulty interpretations of productivity. I am growing less interested in my performance, my stats. Doesn’t that take away some of its power?

I have been in locked-down Amsterdam longer than pre-corona Amsterdam. It is sad, but it’s also something I cannot change. So, I go on walks. I see new sights as I glide around town, growing more familiar with these spaces. Sometimes, I catch myself worrying about my stats. Other times, I allow myself to just be, and for that to be enough. Change isn’t linear, but by consistently questioning and readjusting our positioning to digital power structures, we might begin to take back some of the power that self-surveillance holds.

References

^[1] John Wylie, “Landscape and Phenomenology” in Routledge Guide to Landscapes; p. 62

^[2] The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/20/frederic-gros-walk-nietzsche-kant [Accessed 28 April]

^[3]  Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 200

by Felicity Gush and Rosie Rigby

We embarked on the project to translate Palissot’s Les Philosophes as a class in our second year at Oxford. Many of us were in the process of working on our 17^th- and 18^th-century French period papers for finals guided by Jess. Theatre in a variety of forms made up a large part of our studies for this paper. We not only read the texts, but also learnt about the theatres themselves as social, physical and political spaces. This context and understanding of the period helped to inform our decisions and thinking around how best to translate Palissot’s play.

After having read the play ourselves in French, we sat down in a translation class in Jess’ office in Catz and looked over an existing English translation of the text by Frank J. Morlock. This was a springboard for us; it allowed us to discuss what we’d do differently, what we liked and disliked about its style, word choice or sense of the meaning and ultimately what a good translation looks like in our eyes. The key goals we took out of this were to capture the sense of the French, capture the period and use as idiomatic English as possible. Obviously this project was different to our experience of translation thus far, as we were translating as a group, rather than as individuals. For every other task at university we are encouraged to develop our own, unique writing style, however this project was not about us as individuals, but as a team. It was important for us to make sure that the reader could not identify where one translator started and another stopped, and so we worked hard together in order to create a style in which we could all feel comfortable writing, and which reflected the collaborative nature of the project.

Early on in the process, we realised that to ensure a smooth reading experience, we would have to ensure the style and approach was consistent across the whole piece. An example of this would be our decision to treat certain key terms, such as philosophe, in the same way throughout. As philosophecarries with it a certain weight that philosopher does not in the English, we decided to leave the term untranslated for the majority of the play.

Typical of a play of its time, Les Philosophesis written in the alexandrine form. This 12 syllable form does not exist in the English language, and so we chose something that was equally classic: iambic pentameter. It quickly became clear that when translating we could either have rhythm or we could have rhyme, but it would be very difficult to ensure we had both. This choice, although integral to maintaining a sense of authenticity, posed a real challenge to idiomatic translation.

There were also further details to consider, such as what might be necessarily untranslatable. There are frequent uses of cultural references that are deeply rooted in the philosophesociety of the late 17th century. Many of the scenes, specifically Act 2:3, rely heavily on references to works and authors as Cydalise, Valère and Théophraste attempt to prove their wits. We discussed whether or not to translate these titles into English or leave them in French, concluding to leave them; whilst leaving them in the French might hinder the reader’s understanding, it certainly helped maintain the air of intellectualism for intellectualism’s sake. Take for example, in Act 2 scene 3, the reference to Diderot’s,Le Fils naturel. Translated into English, this title has the same rhythm and number of syllables, but loses some of its aloofness and almost unapproachable nature. Keeping the French titles makes them contrast the rest of the text, and holds the English speaking reader at a distance from the characters who think their intellect makes them superior.

We translated the very first scene together in class, throwing ideas around and bouncing off each other. Working on an online document meant that we could all edit in real time, leave notes and comments and build up the translation collaboratively. From then on, we translated scenes and sections individually adding them to the online document and coming together fortnightly to discuss our progress, the potential stumbling blocks and how to overcome them. Every session we worked in pairs with different people on our versions and edited the translations, cutting out the forced rhymes or misunderstandings and putting our brains together for the right word, idiom or sense.

Avoiding anachronisms was a challenge; when translating, we decided early on that it was important to ensure the text was clearly from the 18th century, because the play embodied the cultural and intellectual issues of its time. However, we also wanted to make sure that the text was approachable to a modern day audience. This was where translating as a group really became an asset: we could bring our suggestions to the group and workshop them, to make sure that they did not sound too antiquated, or have an air of forced theatrics. Being able to work as a team like this was a privilege, and was definitely an approach to work that is rarely experienced at Oxford. It was great to understand the different ways to tackle a translation and to see how our collaborative, real-time editing process ultimately produced a more successful final product than if we had each worked alone. This project taught us so many skills about how to shape a project effectively as a team, how to communicate and criticise sensitively and constructively and even gave us a taste of remote working as we worked on the drafts on our year abroad dotted across the world! These skills have all proved invaluable, some in more unexpected ways than others. The pivot to open book translation exams for our finals meant we could draw on our experience of this different style of translation more readily and, as we entered the newly-remote working world, we’ve found ourselves more at ease and confident to tackle collaborative projects.

We must end on a huge thank you to Jess, not only for giving us the opportunity to take part in this project, but also for her enthusiasm and expertise and the enormous amount of time she invested in the project and in us.

'The Philosophes' by Charles Palissot is an open access title available to read and download for free here.

Learning from other scholars’ work on Haitian radio was, and still is, one of the greatest pleasures in the process of writing Isles of Noise: Sonic Media in the Caribbean (UNC 2016). People living in or from Haiti widely acknowledged and almost took for granted radio’s outsized role in public and political life. Edwidge Danticat and Jonathan Demme also understood this and paid tribute in Claire of the Sea Light and The Agronomist respectively, but historians remained largely fixated, understandably, on pivotal moments in Haiti’s rich history. Radio is different. Not pivotal, but witnessing the pivotal. Less dramatic and more long lasting and adhering to the same format for days, years, decades. It speaks to people who wouldn’t read newspapers or books. It floods private and public space with the sounds of music, talking, ruling, dissenting, explaining, satirizing, creating, crying, testifying, lying. But it leaves few archival traces. This is why the work of the five scholars in this series is so important. They allow us to hear a little and honor the listeners who make the medium what it is.

To start the series, Ian Coss gave a finely tuned account of a “day in the life” of a radio station in Cap Haïtien that follows the programming rhythm of days and nights.  Last week, Jennifer Garcon shows how the long marriage between Haitian politics and Haitian radio has endured, despite multiple and conflicting alliances, high drama, and attacks from all sides. The powerful and the powerless have even in their enmity presumed that if they could harness radio’s power they would ascend to political power. Her story recounts one of the pivotal points in the relationship—its near breakdown and ultimate survival—also a turning point for a 19-year-old Jean Claude Duvalier, newly proclaimed President for life.

The sweeping stories of Radio Haïti-Inter and its archive (now at Duke University), its more than 5300 recordings fully digitized and described in English, French and Haitian Creole) come together in this all too brief account. Laura Wagner, who listened to each recording and wrote the descriptors, writes of the work itself, the emotional, financial and intellectual challenges involved, and the reason this archive is essential to anyone interested in Haiti, or radio, or racial justice.

Guest Editor– Alejandra Bronfman

Click here for the full series!

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For four years, I spent forty hours a week in a cubicle in a converted tobacco warehouse with noise-cancelling headphones over my ears, listening to and describing the entire audio archive of Haiti’s first independent radio station, Radio Haïti-Inter. Though my title was “project archivist,” I am not an archivist by training. But I am compelled to compile, assemble, and preserve stories from lost people and lost worlds. Sound is more intimate than printed words or video. With sound, voices are inside your head, as close as another person can be. As I processed the Radio Haiti collection, I would forget that many of the voices I heard every day belonged to people I never knew in life. Sometimes in my dreams I would see the station’s director, Jean Dominique, alive and laughing.

Radio Haïti-Inter was inaugurated in the early 1970s. Dominique, an agronomist by training, quickly became the most recognized journalist in Haiti. His professional partner and wife, Michèle Montas, Radio Haiti’s news editor, was a Columbia Journalism School graduate who trained several generations of Haitian journalists. Dominique was part Ida B. Wells, part Edward R. Murrow, part Sy Hersh, part Studs Terkel, part Hunter S. Thompson. He was an investigative journalist who uncovered human rights abuses, government corruption, and corporate malfeasance. He was an activist who possessed the charisma of a theater star, the crackling wit of a satirist, and the public intellectual’s gift for insight and analysis. After Dominique was assassinated on April 3, 2000, more than fifteen thousand mourners attended his funeral.

In 2013, Montas donated the archive of Radio Haïti-Inter — more than 1600 open-reel tapes, more than 2000 audio cassettes, and approximately 100 linear feet of paper records — to Duke University’s Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, under the condition that it be digitized and made available to the widest possible public in Haiti. Thanks to support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Council on Library and Information Resources, today the Radio Haiti Archive is a free, publicly accessible, trilingual digital collection. Its over 5300 audio recordings represent the most comprehensive archive of late 20th-century Haitian history. Radio Haiti still speaks, despite government repression, multiple exiles, the assassination of Dominique, the attempted assassination of Montas in December 2002, the closure of the station in 2003, and the 2010 earthquake. That the archive exists is a miracle. 

According to its mission statement, the Rubenstein Library “builds distinctive collections of original materials and preserves them for use on campus and around the world. In support of Duke University’s mission of ‘knowledge in service to society,’ we collect a diversity of voices in a wide range of formats… We invite students, scholars, and the general public to explore the world through our unique collections.” the library seeks to preserve the voices of marginalized people, and make various kinds of materials (including sonic media) available to audiences beyond Duke, beyond the United States, and beyond academia.

In Radio Haiti’s broadcasts, rural farmers, activists from poor urban neighborhoods, sex workers, marketwomen, Vodou patriarchs, and refugees narrate vivid stories of their lives and worlds. The aurality of radio allowed speakers and listeners who were not traditionally literate to participate in the political life of Haiti. Likewise, the aurality of the Radio Haiti collection makes it a trove of information that appears nowhere else. It is invaluable for academic researchers and ordinary audiences alike. It is a people’s history of Haiti, told through voices that are silenced in the written record.

Most libraries in poor countries like Haiti lack the resources to restore, digitize, and process audiovisual materials, but wealthy institutions in wealthy countries tend to neglect sonic archives. Unlike written records, audio is difficult to skim, and therefore harder for researchers to use. The rights considerations are often fraught. Audiovisual archives are expensive and difficult to preserve, digitize, and process; as a result, many projects, including Radio Haiti, depend on highly competitive external grants. While these days many universities prize Black archival collections (sometimes to the point of commodification, as Steven G. Fullwood argues), it’s another matter when those collections are audio, especially non-English language audio. In Radio Haiti’s case, the audio is in Haitian Creole and French. All of these factors made Radio Haiti a complex project. But I believe the complexity of a project like Radio Haiti could be mitigated if institutions were to truly make custodianship of marginalized collections a priority. In other words, some of the complexity isn’t inherent to the collection, but rather to the system that was not built to accommodate it.

As I processed Radio Haiti, I ached for the cane-cutters that the Duvalier dictatorship effectively sold to the Dominican Republic, former political prisoners describing horrific torture,  and migrants risking their life at sea. But it was not my trauma. In some ways, this project was challenging because I am not Haitian, but it was also easier because the anguish was not my own. I understood the archive’s importance, but I did not feel the pain in my bones. 

So, yes, the material in the archive could be heavy, but the project was difficult mainly because the current practices of US academic libraries are incompatible with a project like Radio Haiti. For the last year and a half of the project, there was no remaining grant money or internal funding for an intern fluent in Haitian Creole or French to earn a living wage. When I proposed seeking additional funding to support an intern to help describe the audio, I was told it would be unfair to other staff who are likewise underpaid. In order to finish before my own grant-funded salary ran out, I listened to and created multilingual narrative description for an average of ten recordings a day. Every day was a race against time. I was reprimanded for “overdescribing” the audio, and told, “Don’t do the researcher’s job for them.” Library leadership and I did not share the same objectives. Despite their stated commitment to digitize Radio Haiti and make it available to the Haitian public, they still considered traditional academic researchers the target audience, while I was thinking of ordinary people in Haiti, trying to access the audio on a secondhand smartphone with a limited data plan.

Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor ask, “what happens when we scratch beneath the surface of the veneer of detached professionalism and start to think of recordkeepers and archivists less as sentinels of accountability… and more as caregivers, bound to records creators, subjects, users, and communities through a web of mutual responsibility?” They call for empathy between the archivist and the creators, subjects, users, and audience of the archive. I believed that “slow processing” — providing detailed, trilingual description of each Radio Haiti recording — was a necessary act of empathy, and the only way to honor the voices in the archive and make the collection truly available to Haitian audiences. If I provided only “minimal description,” Radio Haiti’s audio would remain lost. 

The work was exhausting. I began to have panic attacks. One administrator encouraged me to develop “strategies for self-care.” “Self-care,” which places the responsibility onto the individual worker, is not a solution to burnout. What I needed were more resources.

Like everyone else in the neoliberal US university, archivists are bound by concrete considerations of political economy. They are being asked to do more with less: they must eliminate backlogs and process more collections more quickly, without improvements in salary, staffing, or workspace. Library work remains a feminized profession, one that downplays and erases the intellectual labor of those workers who “merely” process collections. The archivist is the invisible technician, while researchers discover. And so my intent is not to impugn any individual. Rather, I point to the structural factors and cultural attitudes — including institutional white supremacy — that make traditional archives inhospitable to collections like Radio Haiti. 

Former archivist Jarrett Drake contends that “the purpose of the archival profession is to curate the past, not confront it; to entrench inequality, not eradicate it; to erase black lives, not ennoble them.” As a white American woman, my personal experiences were obviously not comparable to those of archivists and scholars of color who endure racism regularly, but my time as the Radio Haiti project archivist revealed to me how Black archival collections are subjected to structural racism. The Radio Haiti collection was created by and for Black people. It centers the voices, perspectives, and experiences of Black people. It is a sonic archive, in a field that prioritizes traditional paper collections. It is largely in Haitian Creole, a disparaged language spoken mostly by Black people. It is from a country that has been colonized, exploited, invaded, occupied, vilified, pitied, embargoed, evangelized, and intervened upon for centuries. And finally, its primary audience is not anglophone academics, but Haitian people. 

Many library workers at predominantly white institutions make extraordinary efforts to combat systemic white supremacy, but low-level staff cannot create change when the larger institution remains hidebound. Bringing Radio Haiti back to Haiti required intellectual work, passion, and love. To represent diverse voices and make a collection like Radio Haiti truly accessible to a worldwide public, traditional archival institutions must undergo a radical transformation. They must confront assumptions about what makes a collection “difficult to process,” commit resources to collections that foreground the voices of marginalized people, and support the work of staff who give those collections the care they deserve.

Editor’s Note: Minor changes have been made since publication for clarity and to add links to sources. Nothing substantive has been changed. 12:48 PM EST, 5/3/2021

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Featured Image: Picture of a painting of Radio Haiti tied to a cross with the inscription (in translation): “The proverb goes: each firefly lights the way for itself [every man for himself]. We say: unity makes strength. Let’s help Radio Haiti-Inter lay its cross down so that it is not crucified.” Radio Haiti Collection, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

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From 2015 to 2019, Laura Wagner was the project archivist for the Radio Haiti Archive at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University. She holds a PhD in cultural anthropology from UNC Chapel Hill, where her research focused on displacement, humanitarian aid, and everyday life in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Her writings on the earthquake and the Radio Haiti project have appeared in Slate, Salon, sx archipelagos, PRI’s The World, and other venues. She is also the author of Hold Tight, Don’t Let Go, a young adult novel about the earthquake and its aftermath, which was published by Abrams/Amulet in 2015. She is currently working on a book about Radio Haïti-Inter and its archive.

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SO! Amplifies: Marginalized Sound—Radio for All–J Diaz

Collectivity, copying, care. Sharing knowledge is key; no one should be irreplaceable. Copy before you transfer. Care about your content and be transparent about your biases, as archiving is never truly objective.

Last Friday, the Networks of Care event series initiated by nGbK Berlin took place. Artist Cornelia Sollfrank introduced Old Boys Network (OBN), a cyberfeminist alliance from the late 1990s in need of archiving and preserving today. Guests revealed their archiving experiences, strategies and pitfalls they encountered while building archives of different types, ranging from initiatives started by national institutions to self-organised independent projects. 

Going into this, I wanted to develop a better understanding the challenges of digital archiving. Now I appreciate the importance of the commons and care in the context of these cultural practices. I will share the most insightful points from the event, and reflect on the significance of informed and honest archive-making.

Sollfrank explained that OBN was hard to define and pin down. It aimed to facilitate discussions about cyberfeminism through research, experimentation and direct action. She noted the challenges of documenting a shapeshifting organisation; sometimes a network, sometimes a group, or a collective with an aesthetic dimension.

OBN home page (click on image to visit).

The talks

Curator Mela Dávial-Freire reflected on the difficulties Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid had archiving materials that belonged to local LGBTQ+ activist groups from the 1990s. Posters, banners, and photographs of demonstrations exposed different archiving issues. Some materials were kept in multiple spaces, their authors/makers were often unknown, and emotional involvement complicated acquiring and circulating the content. Dávial-Freire noted that the project unbalanced the musem’s collection, which gathered millions of documents to date. This was a good thing, as it made the institution reconsider its archiving strategies.

Art scholar Michael Hiltbrunner explained his practical approach to archive-making while gathering information about the early days of the F+F School of Experimental Design (now the F+F School of Art and Design, in Zürich). He worked with time witnesses from the 1970s, when the school was founded, and maintained positive relationships with individuals who provide insights, leads and materials. The goal for his project was to create a platform that has an openness to it, one that allows interaction.

Monoskop founder Dušan Barok noted the importance of working with independent servers. Monoskop’s server allows other websites to use it as a host, free of charge, and offers basic maintenance tools. He clarified that while running a server is not a precondition for creating a digital archive, it is a good solution. He stressed that we should be wary of the current trend of storing information in “the cloud,” as they routinely run statistics and analytics of users.

Monoskop’s main page right now (click to visit)

Curator and cultural worker Laurence Rassel urged everyone to consider sustainability from the beginning of the project, going as far as asking: “What happens when the archivist dies? Who knows how the archive works, how to add to it and maintain it?” Based on her experience as director of the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, where she opened the archive some ten years ago, she highlighted the importance of using free and open-source software. She also mentioned that being transparent with the public and cultural workers about each step of archive-building should not be overlooked.

The aftermath

Based on the talks, I identified overarching themes and most valuable advice: collectivity, copying, care. Sharing knowledge is key. No one should be irreplaceable, and their knowledge should not disappear when they do. Copy content before you transfer. Care about your work and the networks that are involved in its creation and maintenance. Be transparent about your biases, as archiving is never neutral.

In the discussion, a point was raised about the untouchability of archives. Some participants believed that archives are ever-changing, and that with each interaction, they shift just a little into something different. Others said that the value of an archive lies in its autonomy; people may interact with the content or add information, but the very nature of the archive should remain unchanged. I tend to side with the first camp, seeing interaction as added value, but I understand the core of an archiving project should be respected.

I wish there had been enough time during the event to discuss what strategies may be used to build the OBN archive. However, it seems like the project has just begun. I am sure the discussions gave ideas to the OBN team. The meeting left me wondering about the fragility of archives, how we rely on them always being there, but may be disappointed to find traces instead. Digital archivisation does not lift the anxiety of losing content, and comes with its own set of challenges; technical, logistical, even emotional.

Nothing lasts forever. One day, archivists, their archives, and anyone interested in them will be gone. There is no way of telling when this happens. But maybe it doesn’t matter. It is up to us at this moment to decide what feels urgent, and how to record it and share it for as long as it retains a degree of importance. 

Kaucylia Brooke’s “Boy Mechanic” project, documenting the disappearance of lesbian bars in the US and Germany. [Cologne Edition, 2004]

I wrote my master thesis on the ways artistic research activates engagements with queer temporalities. I focused on projects that utilised archives, used archiving strategies, and/or acted as archives themselves. While archival artworks operate on a different set of priorities than the projects discussed during this event, there are similarities between them. In my research, among themes of nostalgia, longing and speculative thinking, I identified an overwhelming sense of community; a desire to relate to others across time (and space), coming together in the present to establish these connections. The question of how to build sustainable digital archives is multifaceted, especially now that cultural events happen almost exclusively online. What traces do they leave? Do archivists recognise their power as individuals who decide what to record, and what to discard? It is clear that only collaborative, transparent efforts can preserve content that would otherwise fade and dissipate, way before its time.

“To stand out of time together, to resist the stultifying temporality and time that is not ours… It is in these ecstatic moments that we arrive (or move inexorably towards) collective potentiality.” – José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia (2009).