Languages that were not archived
An exhibition on what the archives did not keep
This event is part of a demonstration of what Lera offers for running knowledge events. Its content is written with care and draws on real sources, but the conference has not taken place, and apart from the convener its participants are fictional.
Every archive begins with a decision: what is worth keeping. In Archive Fever Derrida showed that this decision is never neutral; an archive organises forgetting as much as it preserves. Ann Laura Stoler, who worked for years in the colonial archives of the Netherlands, proposed that we read the archive "along the grain": not for the information it holds, but for the logic that decided what would be recorded and what would remain outside.
This exhibition is about that outside. It is about the languages that found no place in library catalogues, in administrative forms, in civil registry files and in data corpora. UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger names thousands of languages whose next generation is uncertain, but what is seen less often are the languages that are still alive and have died only in the archives: a language heard every day in a home in The Hague, in which no official document has ever been written.
The six works in this exhibition come from six places in the world, and each proposes a way of seeing this absence: voices that were recorded but never catalogued, pages whose script the scanner does not recognise, names broken in a passport. None of these works mourns the absence. They ask what an archive would look like if it were built by those who have so far been left outside it.
The exhibition is held at The Grey Space in the Middle in The Hague. It opens on the evening of the first day of the conference and remains open to the public until the conference ends. All wall texts are in Persian, English and Dutch, and each work has an audio version in the artist's own language.
Works
- "Unfinished Catalogue", installation of library cards, by Akua Mensah (Accra): catalogue cards whose subjects she has rewritten in Ghanaian languages.
- "Unlabelled Voice", sound work, by Yeni Condori (Lima): twenty hours of Quechua recordings from a radio archive that was never indexed.
- "Name in the Passport", photographic series, by Raha Amini (The Hague): migrants' faces beside their names, once in their own script and once as the office wrote them.
- "The Script That Will Not Scan", hand-printed pages, by Aigul Nurlanova (Almaty): pages in the Arabic-script Kazakh alphabet that optical character recognition software sees as blank.
- "Kitchen Dictionary", video, by Sara Ait Hammou (Rotterdam): three generations of a Riffian family naming spices in Tarifit, Arabic and Dutch.
- "The Reverse Archive", participatory work, by the exhibition team: a wall on which visitors write a word from an unrecorded language, given to the library at the end of the conference.
References
Derrida, Jacques. 1996. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Stoler, Ann Laura. 2009. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Moseley, Christopher, ed. 2010. Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger. 3rd ed. Paris: UNESCO Publishing.