Abstract
This article explores the role of archives and archiving in the memory–activism nexus with reference to the various ‘movements of the squares’ that started in 2011. The Egyptian Uprising, 15M, Occupy Wall Street, the Gezi Uprising and Nuit Debout each made concerted efforts to ensure their future remembrance by laying down an archive in which their actions and aspirations were ‘sedimented’. The article explores the crossover between the prospective and retrospective orientations of this activist memory work. It argues that there is an affinity between the affordances of archives as a mnemonic medium and the movements’ ‘politics of prefiguration’, both because the participatory character of the archiving is already an exercise in radical democracy and because an archive provides not a single narrative with a prescribed meaning but a resource for future meaning-making by others.
Keywords
For the record: archiving as activist memory work
Memory scholars have tended to consider archives as falling outside their purview. Reasons for this range from the idea that ‘the archive’ is the locus of official or state-organised knowledge whereas memory is the site of dissenting voices, to the idea that archives, generally associated with written knowledge, exclude other modes of embodied and performative transmission. Suffice here to mention the influential opposition drawn up by Diana Taylor (2003) between the ‘archive’ (associated with inscription, fixity and state power) and the ‘repertoire’ (associated with ever-renewed forms of knowledge transferred through performance rather than fixed forever in script). What holds these critical positions together is an implicit assumption going back to Romantic historicism and its gravitation towards the silences of history (Rigney, 2001); namely, that the most valuable things to remember are those things that have ‘escaped’ the archive and now form an ‘an-archive’. 1 The latter is made up of information and affects that were un-collected and indeed uncollectible in a traditional (read: script-based and state-run) archive. One of the aims of this article is to integrate archives into the broader study of mnemonic practices and related cultural forms.
In doing so, I take my cue from Aleida Assmann (1999: 342–347; 2008) who has argued in several important interventions that the ‘archive’ is not merely the polar opposite of ‘memory’ but should be seen in a dialectical relation to it as part of an ongoing dynamic in which storage and processing alternate. Although Assmann’s terminology and focus have slightly changed over time, her approach remains based on the idea of an ever-shifting boundary between passive and active forms of memory, with (passive) ‘storage memory’ associated with the archive and (active) ‘working memory’ associated with narratives that are in circulation (Assmann, 1999, especially pp. 343–337). As Assmann (2008: 103) writes, ‘The archive, therefore, can be described as a space that is located on the border between forgetting and remembering, its materials are preserved in a state of latency, in a space of intermediary storage ( [T]he question of the archive is not, we repeat, a question of the past . . . It is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow. The archive: if we want to know what that will have meant, we will only know in the times to come. (p. 36)
Needless to say, associating archives with futurity goes against the clichéd view of archives as super-organised arrangements of inert textual records that encapsulate and perpetuate the perspectives of those in power. It aligns them instead with the idea advanced by Arjun Appadurai (2003: 25) that archives can be ‘vehicles for building the capacity to aspire’ by facilitating the intergenerational transfer of promises and hopes.
In what follows, I examine the link between archiving and aspirations with specific reference to the self-archiving of social movements: what role do archives, specifically the archives initiated by activists themselves, play in shaping the memory of protest? I ask this question within the framework of the larger exploration of the ‘memory–activism nexus’ (Rigney, 2018) which is the topic of this special issue (see also the Introduction above). The concept of a memory–activism nexus – which distinguishes between memory activism, the memory of activism and the role of memory in activism and invites study of the interplay between them – has opened up a conceptual space for examining the entanglements between future-oriented activism and past-oriented collective memory.
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Since archives as a cultural form are located at the crossroads between past and future, the study of the self-archiving of protest movements promises to add to our understanding of the memory–activism nexus by exemplifying what Samuel Merrill et al. (2020: 4) have more recently called ‘activist memory work’, understood to mean memory that is culturally produced as an integral part of political activism (see also the Introduction to this special issue). In the cases studied here, activist memory work aims to ensure the memory of the movement itself (what Daphi and Zamponi (2019) call ‘memories of movements’), thus bringing the memory
In what follows, I argue that the self-archiving of social movements represents a distinct form of future-oriented memory work. Although the link between futurity and collective memory has been on the agenda for at least a decade (Gutman et al., 2010), conceptualising the interplay between past, present and future is still a work in progress. A useful starting point is the concept of ‘mediated prospective memory’ which Keren Tenenboim-Weinblatt (2013: 4) has defined as the ‘collective remembrance of what still needs to be done, based on past commitments and promises’ (see also Merrill (2024) and Smit and Van Leeuwen (2024)). As we will also see, the archiving of protest is intimately linked to a desire to transfer promises and commitments. However, the temporalities at play are different from those envisaged in Tenenboim-Weinblatt’s model of ‘mediated prospective memory’. Where the latter supposes a moment in the present in which past promises and commitments are brought to mind, activist self-archiving is concerned with capturing the promises and commitments embedded in unfolding events so that they can be recalled sometime in the future. With this in mind, I argue that the temporalities inherent in recent activist self-archiving are best understood through the lens of ‘prefigurative politics’ as this has been theorised since the 1970s; namely, as ‘the embodiment, within the ongoing political practice of a movement, of those forms of social relations, decision-making, culture, and human experience that are the ultimate goal’ (Boggs, 1977: 4). Hence, my use of the term ‘prefigurative remembrance’ to designate the anticipatory logic of protest archives that by recalling the unfolding present already offer a proof of concept of social transformation.
This article shows how archiving has evolved into a specific form of activist memory work that is congenial to the future orientation of social movements and especially to those movements informed by a politics of prefiguration. As one activist in the Occupy Wall Street movement put it, ‘If we believe “another world is possible,” then another archive must also be possible’. 4 This congeniality between prefiguration and archiving stems from the nature of an archive as a cultural medium that makes sense of events, not in the closed form of a narrative but in an open form that offers many possible meanings.
From archive to archives
Theorisations of archiving among cultural theorists have largely assumed a singular model of ‘the’ archive, seen as institutionalised collections produced by professionals, funded by the state, and hence linked to governance and the exercise of power. However, as a wealth of publications in the field of archival studies has shown (see Caswell, 2016; Gilliland et al., 2017; MacNeil and Eastwood, 2017), there have been major changes in the nature of archiving over the last decades, leading to the emergence of ‘new archival imaginaries’ (Chidgey, 2020: 226) that go well beyond the basic model of state-based repositories. Suffice it here to call on some key discussions within archival studies as a reminder that archiving is a social-cultural-material practice which has evolved over time, both within and outside state-funded institutions.
First, the last decades have seen the emergence of community-led archives, both online and materials-based, dependent on the participation of citizen-stakeholders who play a key role as producers and users of records. This democratisation, facilitated by digitisation, has in turn led to new forms of cooperation between communities and professional archivists (Caswell, 2021). The latter have come to see their role less as gatekeepers and custodians than as facilitators and sometimes indeed as activists supporting minoritised groups (Flinn, 2011; Flinn et al., 2009). Second, as this reference to minoritised groups suggests, archives have acquired new functions beyond their traditional role in documenting the past. They are increasingly becoming resources for groups to establish themselves as collective agents (Moore and Pell, 2010: 257) both to themselves (through shared participation in the archive) and to the outside world (by displaying their capacity to ‘have’ a distinct archive and hence distinct history). Stuart Hall (2008) already wrote in this regard of the ‘constitutive function’ of archiving, something that can be observed in the importance of archiving within the LGBT+ movement since the 1970s (Salerno, 2023; Sheffield, 2019). Third, and consequently, the border between passive memory and active memory, to recall Assmann’s distinction, has become more porous. Curation and public-facing activities have now become one of the archive’s core tasks: exhibitions make selections of materials accessible and bring them together into meaningful, albeit temporary constellations. As a result, archives can no longer be conceptualised as closed spaces encapsulating a past that is completed and filed away, but have come to be seen rather as open or ‘living’ systems (Cohen, 2018; Hall, 2008) that build bridges between the past and present-day concerns and offer new interpretations of the world by bringing materials into new combinations. As Phil Cohen (2018: 11–12) puts it, archives are like art in that they bring unlikely things together, making them ‘sites of struggle not only about the past but about the future’.
This diversification within the archival landscape provides a new context, not just for theoretical reflection on archiving as a mnemonic practice, but also for the analysis of specific practices relating to the archiving of social movements. 5
Archiving activism
Even after protesters have left the streets, struggles over the power to define their actions continue both in the form of narratives and in the making of archives. In his contribution to this special issue, Samuel Merrill draws attention to the role of the police in archiving protests, presumably with a view to possible prosecutions and future surveillance. In parallel, albeit operating from a less powerful position, protesters and their supporters have looked for ways to build counter-hegemonic archives. If a movement’s aspirations and actions are never recorded, it risks not only disappearing from contemporary journalism (where it may already be misrepresented; see Kaun, 2016) but also becoming bereft of the very possibility of re-entering public memory on its own terms in the future. In order to prevent this from happening and to ensure a movement’s afterlife in future memory, efforts have long been made to safeguard the memory of protest and, more generally, of what Ann Cvetkovich (2003: 172) has called the ‘fragility of activism’s histories’.
Some of these efforts have led to the emergence of alternative archival spaces devoted to protecting the legacy of oppositional movements. These include the state-funded International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam, an institution that has been providing a home for the archives of social movements since the 1920s, the Archiv für alternatives Schrifttum based in Duisburg and the Contemporaine centre in Paris.
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In the recent study
Although a growing number of such institutions offer a home to the memory of activism, as Red Chidgey and Joanne Garde-Hansen show, the relationship between protest movements and institutions remains a delicate one and, for both parties, difficult to navigate. State-funded institutions in particular can be reluctant to compromise their professional autonomy by entering into too close an alliance with oppositional groups, while professional archivists’ priorities may sometimes clash with those of activists (Gledhill, 2012; Ross, 2013). Conversely, activist groups have sometimes been wary of cooperation with heritage institutions since it risks reducing the movement to a commodified and sanitised version of itself and forces them to cede control and even ownership of the movement’s legacy to professional archives (Message, 2019a). In response to all of these ethical and professional dilemmas, new policies and practices are continuously emerging.
It is against this background that we can understand recent calls, aided by the availability of digital technologies, for the development of ‘autonomous’ archives (Artikişler Collective, 2016; see also Pell, 2015). ‘Autonomous’ here means that activists should maintain control of their own records using open-source software beyond the control of governments and Tech Giants. It also implies that they should develop archiving strategies that both reflect and advance the political principles of the movements they document in the spirit of a ‘living’ archive which fosters new activism while documenting the past. Alycia Sellie et al. (2015) have thus pointed to the emergence of specifically ‘activist archives’, exemplified by the Interference Archive in New York. Activist archives are community-based initiatives that deal with the records of earlier campaigns and, in offering a virtual or physical place for debate among activists, also contribute to the ‘ongoing production of social movements with which they identify’ (Sellie et al., 2015: 454; see also Lobo, 2019). In similar terms, Rosemarie Grennan has described The MayDay Rooms in London (Grennan, 2024) as an ‘archive, resource and safe haven for social movements, experimental and marginal cultures and their histories’. 7 Following Francesca Polletta’s (1999) typology, Sellie et al. (2015: 454) refer to such archives as ‘prefigurative free spaces’ that create ‘new networks of solidarity through the archival process itself’. The creation of such spaces has been important in the development of rights-based movements active over a longer period (Lobo, 2019), but as we will see in the later sections, ‘prefigurative free spaces’ have also been important, albeit in different ways, to more ephemeral protest movements.
The emergence of activist archives as an idea and as practice has occurred in tandem with multiple DIY online resources offering advice and best practices to movements wishing to set up their own archive as well as with a metadiscourse outlining the rationale for doing so.
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The Australian-based
Self-archiving in the movement of the squares
While the period since 2010 has been called ‘the mass protest decade’ (Bevins, 2023), this analysis will focus on a particular subset of recent movements, namely those taking the form of an extended occupation of city squares; specifically, the Egyptian Uprising (2011), the 15M movement (2011), Occupy Wall Street (2011), the Gezi Park Uprising (2013) and Nuit Debout (2016).
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Despite major differences in the political contexts in which these occupations occurred, all shared a commitment to reinventing democracy along radically horizontal lines (Bevins, 2023; Gerbaudo, 2014; Graeber, 2013; Guionnet and Wieviorka, 2021; Sourice, 2016). This translated into new forms of assembly but also, in the context of a prolonged occupation of the city squares where the movements played out, new ways of organising daily life on a communal basis in order to feed those present, defend the group from the incursions by the police, and provide a communications infrastructure serving internal cohesion as well as offering self-representations to outsiders and potential participants. Documenting unfolding events posed many challenges given the vulnerability of the materials (such as banners made from sauce-stained pizza boxes susceptible to mould; see Message, 2019a: 27), the horizontal nature of the organisation and the sheer volume of digital materials and texts being produced on a daily basis. In contrast to activist campaigns taking the form of discrete demonstrations, the temporally extended character of these occupations proved nevertheless conducive to the production of archives
Aided by the availability of smartphones, the participants produced a huge number of records – mainly images – for immediate circulation on social media and through the movement’s own channels. Alongside images documenting clashes with the police and their use of excessive force, many of these activist-produced records, such as the minutes of the daily assemblies, relate to the peaceful pursuit of new forms of co-existence in the occupied space. Aidan McGarry et al. (2019) have shown how the images circulated by protesters on social media highlighted moments of sharing, participating and collaborating in different civic activities, thereby offering glimpses of the alternative society that they were bringing into existence through a reinvention of everyday life. Juan Egea (2022) has argued along similar lines that 15M produced a counter-visuality through photos, including selfies, whose on-the-ground perspective offered an alternative to the images that were circulating in the newspapers, which often took the helicopter perspective of the crowd as a whole surrounded by police. 12 As Nicholas Mirzoeff (2017) has written of the tactics of counter-visuality: ‘Where the police use photography to order and control, people can use photographs to send a message to present and future audiences’.
As images were feeding back into the sense of an emerging community, people also began to collect records and to make new records, with a view to constituting archives that would allow these activities to be remembered in the future. Beginning with the Egyptian Uprising and 15M, it became common for working groups to be charged with, or to take upon themselves, the task of recording events and of collecting the images, texts, and protest-related realia produced by others. In a pioneering article on activist archiving (which also covers two of the five cases discussed here), Red Chidgey (2020) noted the huge labour and immense care invested in collecting materials in a rapid response environment – sometimes at the risk of arrest. She also notes that the concept of a ‘living archive’ figured prominently in these labours as ‘a discourse, a practice, and an idea’ (Chidgey, 2020: 226). Chidgey’s main concern is with the shifting relations between actors, institutions and records and, above all, with the structural precarity to which this leads. My aim here is different, namely to explore a wider range of cases and the discourses underpinning them to get a better understanding of activist self-archiving as a mnemonic practice.
As several studies have shown, a concerted effort was made from the early days of the 2011 uprising in Egypt to collect videos, with a Media Tent set up for this purpose in Tahrir Square (Antoun, 2012; Chidgey, 2020; Della Ratta et al., 2020). As the current website puts it, the aim was to ‘contribute to the digital memory of the event’ as well as to ‘document police abuses and killings of protesters’ with a view to their being held accountable in the future. A key player in this initiative was the Mosireen collective which took upon itself the task of making video records and, after the uprising had been crushed, of collecting the video footage made by others and even arranging for its screening (Grønlykke Mollerup and Gaber, 2015). Their activities were severely curtailed after the military coup of 2013, but they resumed after several years and, in 2018, the 858.ma archive went online including no fewer than 42,000 files.
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The name of the archive corresponds to the number of hours of video footage which, as the home page outlines, is intended to grow as the archive itself becomes more known and other participants in the protest add to it. It is subtitled ‘an archive of resistance’ and described by at least one commentator as a ‘living archive’ (Antoun, 2012):
858 is, of course, just one archive of the revolution. It is not, and can never be,
Within days of the start of the occupation of the Puerta del Sol in Madrid, which also took place in 2011, a stall was set up in the square in charge of ‘documentation and archiving’ (Egea, 2022). It was run by an archiving commission that worked not only throughout the occupation but also in the following years in order to bring multiple collections together into the integrated Archivo 15M and thereby safeguard the ‘collective memory’ of the movement and its material legacy. 14 The lengthy minutes of the committee’s own deliberations, headed by the motto ‘so that this may not be forgotten’ (‘que no se olvide’), can be found online along with a catalogue of the archives’ holdings. In contrast to other movements whose documentation is exclusively digital, the core of the 15M archive is a substantial collection of material artefacts (banners, placards and documents, including many hand-written proposals (‘propuestas’) outlining people’s hopes for the movement). 15 This collection is now housed in the Tres Peces cultural centre in Madrid where it has been brought together with the 15M library (a collection of canonical left-wing political writings as well as literary works, originally available on-site at the Puerta del Sol during the occupation). While the bulk of the open-access collection pertains to 2011, it also invites contributions relating to new movements (for which the Tres Peces site also offers a meeting place). 16
Occupy Wall Street, which looked to 15M as its model in many regards, had its own ‘Archives Working Group’ led by activists with some professional experience in archiving (Chidgey, 2020; Kaun, 2016; Message, 2019a, 2019b). Against those who did not consider archiving an immediate priority, this subgroup argued that it was vital to maintain a permanent record of the decisions taken at the General Assembly as well as to save ephemera such as banners from overly eager museum collectors in search of potential exhibition material (Message, 2019a, 2019b). Collecting intensified as the occupation began to lose momentum in the face of police incursions and continued, with much debate on the best strategy to follow in converting the collection into an archive, after the disbandment of the Zuccotti Park occupation in November 2011 (Message, 2019a: 48). Given the sheer amount of material available, the online collection encountered major problems with regard to server space and archival descriptors, leading it to be stored on a hard drive in the Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives (Kaun, 2016) as well as on the Internet Archive. The most tangible outcome of what fissured into multiple, sometimes competing initiatives to create an autonomous ‘living’ archive was the collection of documents and realia deposited in the Tamiment Collection of the New York University library. 17
Two years later during the Gezi Uprising, as Özge Celikaslan (2024) has shown in a detailed study, several groups of video activists, most notably a group called Videooccupy, set out to record events as they were unfolding and produced hundreds of hours of footage. After the break-up of the protest, various groups turned their attention to collecting and organising the huge amount of visual materials produced by different actors within the now dispersed movement. Celikaslan (2024) describes the intense labour and affective investment involved in these archiving efforts, which the activists carried over from their involvement in the Gezi Park protests. 18 The Bak.ma archive is the most significant and resilient outcome of these efforts and recently celebrated its 10-year existence with an exhibition in Berlin entitled ‘Don’t Look! – bak.ma: 10 years of archiving social resistance.’ 19 As its subtitle suggests (‘digital media archive for social movements’), Bak.ma has gradually also incorporated material from other movements, both from before and after 2013, thus becoming a nodal point for the memory of activism both inside and outside of Turkey since the 1960s. It answers to the idea of a ‘living’ archive in that it stores information about past events while also engaging, like the Archivo 15M though to a greater extent, with ongoing developments both at home and abroad.
Finally, when the Nuit Debout movement (often called France’s Occupy movement) occupied the Place de la République in Paris in March 2016, a concerted effort was made from an early stage to archive the huge volume of texts, images and realia being produced. A group was tasked with the management of ‘communal memory’ (‘mémoire commune’), whose main output was a participatory Wiki Nuit Debout, which is still online. 20 The Wiki was set up as a dynamic and open-ended encyclopaedia which, on the one hand, would build up a long-term record of events as they were unfolding and, on the other hand, create shared points of reference for the emerging Debout community. Designed for the long haul, it was intended to make the entire movement – its geographical reach, multiple activities and intellectual genealogy – accessible to its supporters in a way that transcended the street-level perspective of individual participants and could help generate more support as the movement unfolded. More than nine hundred images were uploaded to the site (including legacy images relating to 15M) along with text-based announcements and the minutes of the nightly Assemblies. ‘We wanted to restore what was happening, to bear witness to it’, one of the members of the Communal Memory committee said in an interview (Richard, 2016). Although there is evidence that the committee for communal memory not only set up the Wiki-Debout but also collected physical materials, I have found no trace of the latter collections having survived. Unlike 15M whose archive found a physical home in a centre run by volunteers in Madrid, the Bak.ma online archive that continues to grow, the 858.ma archive that made a fresh start several years after the repression of the movement, or the Occupy Wall Street collections some of which found a home in a friendly institution, the archival project of the Wiki Debout was abandoned as the movement itself lost momentum and met with increasing pushback from the police. The result is more a zombie than a living archive. Yet, for those who seek it out, the Wiki continues to bear witness to the commitment and hard work of those who brought it into being and to the hopes vested in the movement in the first half of 2016. Although collecting was foreclosed, and the collection itself remains very vulnerable, the Wiki testifies to the Nuit Debout’s capacity to constitute itself as a multi-sited, interconnected and self-regulating movement over the course of just a few weeks.
Temporal rollovers: between the prospective and the retrospective
The five cases presented above show the importance of activist-led archiving to the movements of the squares, starting in 2011. There are clearly major differences in the ‘archives’ that emerged from these processes. The quotation marks are placed explicitly here (and should be read as implicitly present elsewhere) to indicate considerable variation in the degree to which the archival aspirations of a movement was limited to an online database or extended to a materials-based collection supported by an organisation and infrastructure committed to its preservation and accessibility. The five archives described above also vary in the degree to which they have remained autonomous or subsequently sought collaboration with cultural institutions or even incorporation into them. Since maintaining an archive demands considerable human, financial and technological resources as well as storage or server space, and since continuity in the involvement of stakeholders can be at odds with the mutability of activist alliances, the sustainability of these archives in the long term is continuously threatened. Further problems are posed by police crackdowns (Deutch, 2020; Merrill and Lindgren, 2020: 9), interventions by tech platforms (Kaun, 2016), and by the financial and ecological costs of preserving so much audio-visual material on independent platforms. 21 There are signs of some new alliances between ‘archiving activists’ and activist heritage professionals (Flinn, 2011) willing to take over guardianship of these activist-led collections of images, texts and ephemera (Chidgey and Garde-Hansen, 2024; see also Chidgey, 2020). These initiatives may help in the future to mitigate the structural vulnerability of activist archives, perhaps best illustrated by the Egyptian case where the political climate continues to be hostile to the movement and the chance of shut-down remains ever-present (see Della Ratta et al., 2020). Imperfect and precarious as they are, the complex temporalities these activist archives bring into play add to our understanding of the interplay between memory and activism.
Commentators have drawn attention to ‘immediation’ (see Kaun, 2016) as a feature of digital media and noted that the investment in recording protest events as they unfold is a way of serving ‘the needs of
Despite the differences between the archiving projects discussed here, they all shared a common purpose: to extend protest in time and offer resistance to its disappearance through the work of memory. Digital and material records consolidate a movement’s existence by sedimenting its actions and aspirations in the form of material traces. I use ‘sedimentation’ here following Donatella della Porta (2020) who sees it as key to a movement’s capacity to reproduce itself and gain footing in society. Although archiving is not mentioned by Della Porta, it represents sedimentation par excellence, one which works both in the short term, as the mobilisation is ongoing, and in the long term, in the ‘abeyance’ time after protesters have left the streets. Collecting records creates a feedback loop of recollection which helps a movement to gain traction as it unfolds and subsequently allows it to return as the memory of (the crushing of) past hopes. The resilience of the archive, for as long as it lasts given the structural precarity mentioned earlier, is itself a reason for some measure of fresh hope, however minimal. The 858.ma archive has been described as a ‘means of communication with those who have become despondent’ and a way of ‘raising morale’ by making personal memories of the movement accessible to others and by refusing to let the memory of Tahrir Square be erased (Antoun, 2012). In similar terms, Özge Celikaslan has described the Bak.ma archive as a reminder, in a hostile political climate, of the hopeful moments during Gezi when it seemed things might turn out differently.
To be sure, an afterlife in memory is not the same thing as continued embodied existence, but a form of life it is. Phil Cohen (2018) has likened activist archives to a Noah’s ark that safeguards the records of hopeful resistance to the status quo so that they can inspire and educate future generations. Whether or not the Ark will ever be opened, however, depends on the ability of political subjects in new contexts to engage with them. As one commentator on the 858.ma archive put it,
The archive is now available, accessible to whomever would like to utilize it. And yet, it may still be too soon. The undertow of crushed hope has yet to dissipate. In the present moment, nobody may possess the ability to activate these images with revolutionary potential. (Della Ratta, 2019: 30)
The key term here is ‘potential’ since archives, to recall Assmann, are sites of latency, operating in the intermediary zone between remembering and forgetting. While ‘storage memory’ fits these archives in the first instance, they may also become active sites of memory production. This happens when selected materials are brought back into circulation and a new generation engages with them, be that as historians or as political subjects. Think here of exhibitions (to date, there have been more than 10 exhibitions based on banners from the Archivo 15M; mention has already been made of the Bak.ma anniversary exhibition) as well as of published compilations of documents such as those based on the Nuit Debout wiki (Farbiaz, 2016; Molkhou, 2017; Ngo and Truong, 2016). Time and future research will tell how the activation of the archives’ potential proceeds and what it tells us about the readiness of future political subjects to unlock their potential. Pending such research, however, I will use the rest of this article to address the more fundamental question: why has archiving become such an important medium for memory work in recent movements?
The politics of prefiguration and the storing of dreams
Up to a point, the gravitation towards archiving is opportunistic. As mentioned earlier, occupation as a mode of protest facilitates archiving as a prospective mnemonic practice since it makes long-term planning easier than in the case of day-long protests or campaigns spread out over multiple sites and occasions. As I argue in this last section, however, it also reflects prefiguration as a principle of political action and discourse. First formulated by Charles Boggs (1977), prefiguration has been developed as an alternative to thinking in terms of revolutionary transformations and teleological grand narratives leading towards such transformations. In a recent work significantly subtitled ‘Building Tomorrow Today’, Paul Raekstad and Sofa Saio Gradin (2020: 10) have summarised prefigurative politics as the ‘experimental implementation of desired future social relations and practices in the here-and-now’.
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In this line of thinking, systemic change should not be thought of as a one-off radical transformation that will occur sometime in the future but as something that begins here and now. Here too we are dealing with a complex temporality in which the future is enfolded into the present, hence the 15M slogan is a way for activists to anticipate the changes they seek. And while everyday micropolitical action may not trigger a revolution or herald political salvation, it may progressively transform our ways of thinking, behaving, and imagining what society should be like. (Fians, 2023, n.p.)
Prefiguration offers a useful framework, I argue, for understanding the importance of archiving as practice and as an idea in the movements of the squares. Its role in those not only recalls but also goes beyond the idea of a ‘prefigurative free space’ (Sellie et al., 2015: 454) which emphasises above all the networks of solidarity created through the archival process. My argument runs along three lines.
First, the materials archived, especially images, prefigure the ‘desired future social relations and practices in the here-and-now’, to recall Raekstad and Gradin (2020: 10). On the 10th anniversary of the occupation of the Puerta del Sol in Madrid,
Second, the archiving projects discussed here are prefigurative in enacting core political ideals in their very mode of production. Besides being repositories of evidence, they are thus also a materialised proof of concept that outlasts the movement itself. The phrase ‘communal memory’ used in the Nuit Debout movement echoed a more widespread commitment to the use of the idea of the Commons (Varvarousis et al., 2021) based on the participation of activists themselves and, where possible, on the use of open-source software and creative commons licenses. 24 Those behind their making believed that the archive should be democratically constituted so that it could become a vibrant site for world-making both in the immediate future and in the long term. Their very mode of production – participatory, multi-perspectival, open-ended – should already instantiate the political ideals of the movement that is being remembered. As one member of the Occupy Wall Street Archive Working group put it: ‘What better way to make the archive accountable to the people than to make the people accountable for the archive’ (in Message, 2019b: 175). Or as the Occupy Wall Street activist already quoted at the beginning of this article put it, ‘The challenge to remake the world begins with a radically inclusive, directly democratic, open-ended, and open-sourced archive’ (see note 4). This metadiscourse and its concomitant practices indicate that ‘activist archives [do] more than collect; they also enact the politics of their communities’ (Sellie et al., 2015: 457). Crucially, moreover, this prefigurative action is not just a one-off action in the present. When sedimented in the form of retrievable records, the work of prefiguration acquires an afterlife or, at least, the potential to be continued by new political subjects in the future.
Third, there is an elective affinity between ‘archives’ as a site of latent meaning, to recall Assmann, and the prefigurative memory work of these recent movements. Archives are ‘open’ semiotic resources rather than ‘closed’ ones (Eco, 1984) and hence have different affordances when it comes to memory work. Rather than take the form of a narrative in which events have already been interpreted by connecting their beginning, middle and outcome into a meaningful whole (White, 1987 [1981]), archives give users the freedom to produce different constellations depending on the pathways they have taken through the records.
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They do not assume that the outcome of events determines their meaning, but that meaning can also be found in individual moments or constellations of such moments. That ‘the archive’ should be the mnemonic genre of preference in the movements discussed here reflects their loss of trust in the power of progressive narratives to provide continuity between past, present and future as in traditional Marxism (see Traverso, 2016). Put in more positive terms: it expresses their commitment to leaving the future relatively open to the interpretations and actions of those who come later in an ongoing and emergent participatory process. I say ‘relatively open’ because no matter how voluminous the archive is, it is always based on selection criteria, including, in this case, the desire to document the movements from the perspective of the participants. In doing so, it aims to prefigure a desired future in which democracy has been reinvented. Although the choices made in archiving do limit the number of possible stories that can be told, archival memory work never takes the form of a single story with a single message to be dictated to the next generation. According to the 858.ma’s mission statement, the archive offers ‘one set of tools’ for fighting ‘narratives of the counter-revolution’ and thus serves ‘purposes as yet unknown within struggles both local and international’. Commenting on 858.ma’s position, Naira Antoun (2012) writes:
The question then is not what story to tell, but how to enable the telling of multiple stories and narratives. What to collect, how to organize the material are, of course deeply political questions, for they will shape, limit, enable what stories it will be possible to tell.
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In similar terms, the Archivo 15M has made clear that the meaning of the movement is not fixed in stone or the property of any single party, and that any selection made from the archive is no more than a temporary constellation that will enter into dialogue with others. Thus, the guide ironically notes that the exhibition of selected 15M posters at the prestigious Reina Sofia museum (December 2021–July 2022) was available to be enjoyed and improved upon, while recommending in the spirit of the Commons that people should only visit the museum when the entrance was free. 27
Conclusion
Archiving, to recall the discussion at the beginning of this essay, is a future-oriented mode of remembrance whose affordances make for meaning that is latent rather than actualised. My subsequent analysis of five cases shows how activists build the memory of their own movement and provide the conditions for its becoming an object of future recollection. This activist memory work feeds back into social movements and their long-term impact since it involves investing in a movement’s future remembrance in the terms set by the protesters themselves. Although it is true that some recordings were designed to counter media misrepresentations, the overall aim in the five cases was never just to contest a pre-existing memory but to create a new one; to ensure that the movement itself would not be forgotten and, more positively, that its promises have a chance of being re-activated. As an activist mnemonic practice, archiving thus feeds back into political activism itself.
This adds new complexity to our understanding of the memory–activism nexus and, more generally, of the temporalities of memory work. The cases examined here open up new perspectives on the link between futurity and memory, adding a prospective dimension to the usual understanding of memory in terms of a two-way traffic between past and present (‘the interplay of present and past in socio-cultural contexts’, as Erll (2008: 2) influentially called it). Where individuals are equipped not just to recollect the past but also to recollect intentions and promises, so too are societies equipped (among other things by archives) to remember their own commitments. My analysis of activist archiving resonates with discussions of prospective mediated memory (Tenenboim-Weinblatt, 2013) but also takes them in a new direction by highlighting the transfer of promises across generations. Remembering the efforts of protesters 10 years ago means in the first instance recalling other people’s past intentions; only in the second instance does it become a reminder of our own intentions and commitments as derived from those of our predecessors. In linking archiving practices to the politics of prefiguration, moreover, I have shown how the future, in multiple ways, already begins in the now. This is less a matter of a two-way traffic between a ‘past’ and a ‘present’ but a feedback loop between an unfolding present, an imagined future and a past that later enters the present again as a ‘sensorium’ of images, texts and sounds. This temporal rollover suggests that new understandings of time are needed if we are to fully understand future-oriented memory work.
Finally, the prevalence of activist archiving casts new light on the issue of ‘consequences’ in relation to social movements (Bosi et al., 2016; Earl, 2007; Giugni, 2008). Rather than look for impact in terms of systemic change, the cases suggest that we should also consider significant the qualitative changes effected in the micropolitics of producing the memory of activism. The cases outlined here suggest, moreover, that the power of a movement to ‘make its mark’ on society by becoming a political factor of significance may be correlated to their ‘mnemonic capacity’ (Armstrong and Crage, 2006) in reproducing themselves as culturally sedimented memory (see also Daphi and Zamponi, 2019: 408; Zamponi, 2013). As we have seen, Nuit Debout had a relatively limited mnemonic capacity since, after the mobilisation had ended, its archiving activities did not become a curated archive supported by stakeholders. In contrast, the 15M movement has consolidated its status over time and, through spin-off exhibitions, contributed to bringing its memory into the Spanish mainstream while also resisting its appropriation and sanitisation. How exactly mnemonic capacity correlates to broader political impact is a matter for future research.
Suffice it here to have demonstrated that archiving has become an activist mnemonic medium, that memory and prefiguration can work together, and, more generally, that safeguarding the archives of oppositional movements is vital for ensuring that dissent can be remembered and its history written in the future.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author is very grateful to Red Chidgey, Samuel Merrill, Nina Grønlykke Mollerup, Daniele Salerno and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful feedback and suggestions.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: Research for this article was financially supported by the European Research Council under grant agreement 788572 for the project
