The Invisible Archive

As a creative research journal, The Invisible Archive (TIA) is committed to creating a dialogue that investigates how ideas on performativity and embodiment complicate and inform the conventions under which art is made, shared, and understood. By manifesting new relationships between rigorous writing and the radical nature of time itself, the journal critically documents the unique experiences and knowledge produced by cultural workers and artists who primarily work through performance and time-based strategies, and who use their bodies for social, ecological, and political change. The journal is especially interested in discussing the invisible labor, politics, and challenges attached to practices that are vulnerable due to their ephemeral nature, institutional neglect, cultural bias, or politically unpopular content.

For each issue, TIA invites a different writer who explores the work of a person/collective of their choice. The journal offers two volumes - Vol. Los Angeles and Vol. Berlin - and the issues are published in limited edition prints at irregular intervals through close collaborations between the artists, writers, editors, peer reviewers, and advisors.

The journal presents a community-led archive, which relies on the collaboration of its contributors. We operate as an independent platform that is self-funded, self-published, and self-organized. The editorial, economic, and artistic agency is crucial as we continuously strive to develop a structure that responds to and draws directly from a place that makes up our community. We seek to counterbalance the limitations of commercial, institutional, or academic publishing by offering our contributors a playground for creativity, conversation, thinking, and performative writing.