Archive Fever

Social Media. Libraries. Museums. Artistic repositories. They all collect, construct meaning, erase meaning, and generate archives! But how?! And to what end?! Archive Fever uses an interdisciplinary lens to explore individuals’, groups’, and institutions’ practices for making and mobilizing archives.

Through its focus, this course will investigate processes, ethics, and limitations of representing and receiving the past. In the traditional sense, an archive refers to a systematized collection or place for preserving records of the past. But the archive is more than a dusty storage site. It is also a site for constructing narratives—authorizing understandings of what has been and what could be. Accordingly, this course will underscore marginalized perspectives and strategies for engaging those who have been excluded, suppressed, or imperiled by the archive. We will ask: how should we work with and against the archive when it is both a repository of erased stories and subjects as well as an instrument of erasure?

Tackling this question together, class members will analyze a range of disciplinary, interpretative, and interactive modes for approaching archives. In the process, students will visit various collections, investigate fervent accumulation (i.e., archive fever), creatively respond to multiple archive forms, and ultimately produce their own.