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.
This collection proposes instituting as a potentially critical methodology in curating, art making and organizing as an unsettling process that produces forms and structures. Engaging with ongoing questions of possible infrastructures in situations of brokenness this volume brings together practices, ways of being together, of both fleeing and inhabiting spaces. In this edition, instituting is proposed as a process of situating and making otherwise in a continuous critical dialogue with the surrounding landscape. As the painful necessity of making vulnerable spaces and forms that are always in relation to other practices, structures, and encounters.
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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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