Archive Books
Our impulse to publish stems from the desire to disseminate stories for the subversive potential they can yield, creating cracks in dominant narratives, fleeing accounts of history with a capital H and turning to the power of the fragment. We conceive archives as sites, institutions, repositories of knowledge/power, systems of thought and violence, but also as counter-practices of collecting, preserving, disseminating and organizing experiences of resistance.
Through a publishing practice grounded in collective, transdisciplinary and cross-cultural collaborations, Archive is invested in un-weaving repressive narratives and reclaiming the archive itself as a tool which no longer categorizes but rather continuously un-fixes, de-archives and re-archives through non-hegemonic models.
Like Swarming Maggots: Confronting the Archive of Coloniality across Italy and Libya is Alessandra Ferrini’s first monograph. Featuring the artist’s long-term research on the colonial and neo-colonial relations between Italy and Libya through a critical engagement with the Italian ‘archive of coloniality’ and its structural violence. The book includes documentation of projects developed between 2017 and 2024, reflecting on positionality, censorship, archival research and the erasure of the genocide perpetrated by the Italians in Libya. Building on the artist’s interest in writing, translation, and collaboration as forms of resistance practice, it brings together different voices and visual materials, putting forward a reflection on the ethical and political implications of cultural work.
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This publication seeks to continue previous trans- formative moments, movements, and encounters, as a call for new densities through visible and invisible plottings. Engaging with ongoing questions of possible infrastructures in situations of brokenness—as Lauren Berlant notes in the opening quote—this volume brings together practices, ways of being together, of both fleeing and inhabiting spaces. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten propose “commitment to the impermanence of form because form is to be used, like an everyday thing” and that by using it you “deform it . . . acceding to and enacting its transformation, in and for the everyday.” In this publication, Instituting is discussed as a continuous process that is integral to the everyday, making and tearing apart, using and deforming. In a sense, this book hopes to function as an infrastructure for use. An incomplete composition that has already started in many places.
This publication is the result of the Instituting edition of HKW’s New Alphabet School, Athens, June 2021, realized in cooperation between Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, EIGHT/TO ΟΧΤΩ—Critical institute for arts and politics Athens, and Goethe Institut Athens.
The book is the result of two years of networking, workshops, and conferences that aimed to bring together scholars, archivists, and filmmakers. The focus was on addressing gaps in our shared histories, with a particular emphasis on feminist cultural memory and film heritage in the Global South. This book combines feminist and anti-colonial research, and through the network, women and individuals identifying as female from around the world came together to share passions, frustrations, knowledge, and experiences related to film archives and restoration projects. These projects have often neglected the work of women from the Global South. Recognizing that the intersection of the anti-colonial movement with second wave feminism and the rise of film studies in the seventies provided a rich framework, the authors collectively decided to focus on that era to find a workable methodology for their diverse approaches to film history.
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