Archival Care

This article focuses on the theme of archival care, with a discussion on the planning, curation and thematics within the Archive of Forgetfulness project alongside key themes that emerge in a set of works. The Archive of Forgetfulness is a pan-African online platform, hosting a podcast series, essays, and artworks drawn from over 16 countries on the African continent, in addition to the wider diaspora. Projects focus on questions of mobility, migration and infrastructure. In centering a project around ‘forgetfulness’, the inclusion of a wide range of archival practices and a myriad of voices and methods was important to consider from the outset. The project carefully navigated questions of inclusion an critically in order to establish the an infrastructure that supported a wide range of work and authors from varied backgrounds and geographies. Yet in addition to the importance of gathering undertold stories, many of the works speak to “practices of peripheral care” in the words of AbdouMaliq Simone, as a form of being in the world that emerges in response to systemic structural violence and yet actively attempts to move beyond this. Drawing on particular examples, this article speaks to how working across praxis and theory enabled the construction of a framework that speaks across registered, from archival work as a practice of care, to curation, and the attendance to the ethics of knowledge as a form of care-work. This will be discussed bearing in mind Miriam Ticktin’s insightful critique of the limitations of care-frameworks as also entangled with hierarchies of power.