Archives have long since ceased to be understood as neutral repositories of the past. A rich body of critical scholarship has shown them to be contested infrastructures through which memories, histories, publics, and relations of power are shaped, negotiated, and erased (Foucault 1972; Mbembe 2002; Stoler 2009). Yet, much of this work has remained primarily concerned with the archive as a site of preservation, governance, contestation, or, in its counter-archival inversion, resistance.
Rather than revisiting these debates, this workshop asks what they look like when viewed through the lens of cooperation. We follow the fluid movements and diverse incentives through which different publics mobilize, rebuild, uncover, conceal, and seek to erase recollections of past events. This workshop shifts attention to archiving as an ongoing practice of cooperation, understood as the mutual production of the means and procedures of interaction (Schüttpelz and Gießmann 2015). It examines how and why the past is remembered and made public in the present through media, infrastructures, institutions, technologies, and environments; how particular versions of it circulate and acquire authority; and how its traces are maintained, transformed, contested, or erased. From this perspective, the archive is approached as an infrastructure of cooperation, grounded in distributed, material, and mediated practices of memory work through which past events are made sensible, publics are formed, and futures are imagined.
Approaching archives in this way shifts attention from what archives contain to the heterogeneous practices and relations through which they are assembled. It foregrounds the cooperative work that connects memories, their custodians, and the material and mediated traces through which they endure, while revealing how memories are produced, stabilized, contested, and transformed as different publics mobilize competing versions of the past. Like all forms of cooperation, these processes may falter, exclude, fragment, or break down.
The workshop asks what forms of cooperative work bring archives into being, hold them together, transform them, or allow them to fall apart. It follows archival traces as they circulate through landscapes, religious networks, migrant mobilities, museum collections, artistic practices, administrative records, and digital platforms. How do a colonial water system, a military ruin, a statue of Mary, a museum object, an administrative file, an old train timetable, or a sensor record become enrolled in new forms of cooperation that assemble publics and generate meanings beyond their original purpose?
The workshop brings Susan Slyomovics’ work on memory, heritage, vernacular archives, and postcolonial justice in North Africa and the Middle East (Slyomovics 1998, 2005) into conversation with current research within the SFB Media of Cooperation to explore archives as infrastructures of cooperation through which memories, publics, and possible futures are continuously made and remade.
Expected program:
Keynote lecture
Susan Slyomovics (UCLA) , keynote lecture; discussant: Sevi Bayraktar(HfmtKöln)
Panel I: Sustaining: the labor that holds recollections of the past together
How is the past kept alive through repetition, transmission, maintenance, and care, and who is enrolled in that work?
Carla Tiefenbacher (B04) Catholic networks, voluntourism, travelling Marian statues, cemeteries, and transnational Catholic memory
P01 (Meyer/Mondada) sensory mediation, embodied memory, and cooperative practices of transmission
Nina ter Laan (B04) transnational memory activism and contemporary engagements with the material remains of colonialism in the Rif
Panel II: Breaking and sensing: absences, gaps, and cooperation that fails
What happens when archival cooperation fails, and how is this sensed and made meaningful?
A04 (Potthast) institutional infrastructures, maintenance and breakdown, public administration
P06 (Baraikyte) war sensing, documentation, and conflict archives
Martin Zillinger (B04) haunted water infrastructures, agricultural modernism, and environmental afterlives of colonial and postcolonial development in Morocco
Panel III: Future-making: imagining collectivities, claims, and repair
How do archival practices construct identity/collectivities, and project futures, including through restitution and historical justice?
Birgit Meyer (Utrecht University) religious heritage, mediation, museums, and restitution
Anna Brus (Cologne University)museum collections, and provenance research
A01 (Gießmann) historical media infrastructures, networked archives, and archival practices
Roundtable discussion
Closing roundtable with all participants, reflection on cross-cutting themes.