How might everyday pauses, beginnings, stumbles, and stops embody the edges and energies of our archiving practices?
Shared by NICOLE LAND, MEAGAN MONTPETIT, AND LISA-MARIE GAGLIARDI
How might everyday pauses, beginnings, stumbles, and stops embody the edges and energies of our archiving practices? Since the event unfolded in February 2020, we – Nicole, Meagan, and Lisa-Marie – have been working with other collaborators to create a digital archive for Responding to Ecological Challenges with/in Contemporary Childhoods: An Interdisciplinary Colloquium on Climate Pedagogies. Together, we have crafted A Breathing and Exercising Archive without Chronicity, our experiment in enacting archiving practices drenched in sustaining, speculating, and co-labouring. How, we wondered, might we get to know the work of archiving? Sara Ahmed (2019) offers that “research can be ‘hapfull’; we can be redirected by what happens along the way” (p. 12). What happens to an archive if we borrow from Ahmed to consider archive-making as a sister project to research: archiving as ‘hapfull’, as the project of curating and caring for the shoots that sprout, and live and die, from the Colloquium. As we threaded the archive together, we began to learn that the 12 months (filled with pandemic relations) that we have lived since the Colloquium matter not only as a temporal period of procrastinating on creating the archive, but that we encountered traces of the Colloquium in our everyday movements; our archiving did not pause at the conclusion of the gathering and resume in January 2021 when we began meeting about the archive. Rather, we started to return to small, ordinary moments of staying with the Colloquium that became inextricably entangled with our work of archiving. What if we take these ‘happenings’, these interruptions and recollections, seriously as ongoing archiving practices?
For Lisa-Marie, harvest season merges into canning season and as she sterilizes her collection of mason jars, she comes across a widemouth jar from the colloquium pamba mesa, and the attached and very missed memories of collective eating. Archiving, then, is in conversation with the possible and impossible in our current times. Meagan’s partner started to work from home shortly after the Colloquium. They rearranged their apartment so that it was somewhat livable for two people. Meagan insisted that the Colloquium receipts were the most essential thing and that they needed their own, unshared shelf in their office space. Archiving is asserting a space, purposefully taking up room. Nicole remembers nothing of the Colloquium and is scared to search back in her phone to see images from the event. She has never scrolled back through her photos to February 2020. Here, archiving encounters presence and absence, and the ethical decisions we make to intentionally notice or resist the ways an event lingers. For Ahmed (2019), “an archive in use is an archive that could disappear if care is not taken in using the archive” (p. 15). These everyday moments of giving shape to our archiving practices are intense, intimate, demanding – they coalesce to insist that our ‘complete’ archive must care for our everyday archiving, and that our everyday archiving must be committed to enlivening the work of an archive as one tangled with situated ethics and politics of care
References
Ahmed, S. (2019). What’s the use? On the uses of use. Duke University Press.