Block 2.2: Connectivities built by people and groups Özge Çelikaslan (Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design, Germany): Politics of memory in the case of collective counter-archive practices.

1. Politics of Memory in the Case of
Collective Counter-Archive Practices
Özge Çelikaslan
PhD Scholar
Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design

2. “The archive is itself an aspiration rather than a recollection.
This deep function of the archive has been obscured by that
officializing mentality, closely connected to the
governmentalities of the nation-state, which rests on seeing
the archive as the tomb of the accidental trace, rather than as the
material site of the collective will to remember”
Arjun Appadurai

3. The relationship between the archive and the
state is just as complex. It rests on a paradox.
The power of the state rests on its ability to consume time,
that is, to abolish the archive and anaesthetise the past.

4. The archive is, therefore, not a piece of data,
but a status.
Having this secret documentation ritual,
archives function as judiciary of the power.
While this hierarchical mechanism designates
some documents to a privileged status,
it stamps others as irrelevant.

5. Three statuses for the archive; “material status” related to
its tactile universe before digitalisation,
a “status of proof” that proves a life truly existed,
and an “imaginary status” which is characterised by
architectural and religious nature of the archive.

6. “The decentralization of means of archiving is
simultaneously accompanied by massive projects ,
of centralized archives of daily life,
often owned and controlled by large corporations
such as Google and Facebook”
Lawrence Liang

7. It acts without deferring to another’s
authority such as the state, or another
community organisation, and has a public
orientation tied less to inclusion
in public institutions.

8. Emancipatory potentials of media archive
practices emerge through the associations of
the production processes, division of labor,
open source processing, and relations between
with the database users.

9. bak.ma aims to reveal the recent history of
Turkey by means of audio visual recordings,
documents and testimonies
https://bak.ma/

10. https://pad.ma/ from India
https://858.ma/ from Egypt
pan.do/ra open source media archive software
Syrian Archive from Syria,
The Black Archive from the Netherlands
Interference Archive from US
Disobedience Archive from Italy
B’Tselem video archive from Palestine