This paper defines Archive Fatigue as the exhaustion produced when evidence accumulates faster than listening. It argues that archives can silence through absence, but also through excess: voices may be buried inside administrative forms, colonial categories, mistranslations, institutional metadata and documentary abundance. The paper reframes the archive as a surface of translation, restitution and care rather than a warehouse of kept material. It treats classification, ordinary life, ritual, house, threshold and metadata as political forms. Archive Fatigue asks the living archive to return position to what it holds: context, relation, name, uncertainty, dignity and possible routes of interpretation.
Anto Lloveras (2026) studied this question.