February 21, 2025
Opening Access
Archive Books
Archive’s Open Access allows books to freely available to read, download, and share.
The free release of these books does not imply that we undermine the energy and labor necessary to produce them but we believe making research freely available to the public supports a greater exchange of knowledge.
Readers are free to share these books if the contribution is properly attributed and used for non-commercial purposes. We hope you will be mindful of the authors while downloading and using the material from this section. We are open for your inquiries if you want to re-use or republish any of these texts, or just to share comments on our programme.
Here’s a glimpse of some of our publications, while the rest can be found here.
Awkward Archives proposes a manual for academic teaching and learning contexts. An ethnographic research approach is confronted with the demands of archival research as both disciplines challenge their inner logics and epistemologies. Through fieldwork and ethnographic tools and methods, both analogue and digital, the editors take various contemporary archival sites in Berlin as case studies to elaborate on controversial concepts in Western thought. Presenting as such a modular curriculum on archives in their awkwardness—with the tensions, discomfort and antagonisms they pose.
Archives on Show unfolds a curatorial approach in dialogue with questions on the archival. Bringing together a variety of approaches and positions, it looks into curatorial practices that take up the archive in its contemporary relevance against its social and political potentialities. The book itself can be read as a curatorial exercise, forming constellations of texts, images and keywords in a printed exhibition format.
To enter a collective archive is to carry an anonymous corpse on your shoulders. You are not investigating how this corpse met its death but rather are trying to fill in the gaps that render it anonymous. The corpse is the researcher’s urgent, mysterious, or even inconsistent question that issues from the here and now but which lacks the language required to speak it.
Navina Sundaram is sitting in the editing room in Hamburg. She has managed to reduce the complexity of the Kemal Altun case to the required 2 minutes and 40 seconds for the political magazine; a journalistic feat considering the legal terminology and the international political situation, which must be presented in simple terms. She places her interview with the judge at the back. The audience therefore first gets an impression of perhaps the best-known deportation prisoner of the republic on trial here.
To enter a collective archive is to carry an anonymous corpse on your shoulders. You are not investigating how this corpse met its death but rather are trying to fill in the gaps that render it anonymous. The corpse is the researcher’s urgent, mysterious, or even inconsistent question that issues from the here and now but which lacks the language required to speak it.
Navina Sundaram is sitting in the editing room in Hamburg. She has managed to reduce the complexity of the Kemal Altun case to the required 2 minutes and 40 seconds for the political magazine; a journalistic feat considering the legal terminology and the international political situation, which must be presented in simple terms. She places her interview with the judge at the back. The audience therefore first gets an impression of perhaps the best-known deportation prisoner of the republic on trial here.
To enter a collective archive is to carry an anonymous corpse on your shoulders. You are not investigating how this corpse met its death but rather are trying to fill in the gaps that render it anonymous. The corpse is the researcher’s urgent, mysterious, or even inconsistent question that issues from the here and now but which lacks the language required to speak it.
