In this 3-minute film, the archive comes to life and speaks. The archive of Amman’s historical photographs shares a monologue filled with existential questions about its body, place, kidnapping, fugitivity, and intimate engagements.
Who is the “archive?” What happens when the archive becomes a fugitive? Have people of this land documented their lives or their stories? If so, how did they and why? Have they preserved history in a way that orientalists and colonizers did not recognize, only to be rendered as nonexistent? What “archive” is deemed as valuable and reliable? Can an archive effectively depict what was?
Questions that haunt:
What happens if we no longer have our storytellers? Is it the way we listen when our storytellers speak?
Who are we without the archive? Who are we when the archive is out of reach? & What intimacies exist in our forgetfulness? The archive proposes a different way of looking at memories, remembering, forgetfulness, and freedom.
Yet, more questions haunt:
What happens when we no longer are familiar with what is preserved and how to preserve? Can this preservation restore us?
I use a VHS recorder to give this story a home on a tape. These tapes last between 10-25 years, hence, I use this device to depict temporality of memory, archive, forgetfulness, and freedom.*
*freedom as in the memory will no longer be captive to the machine.
“Aren’t these stories to be had everywhere?” - Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A freudian impression
i look to forage openness where i go. i am not here to master knowledge, nor the archive, nor how to archive. i am here to question its doing, its sensibilities, its body. because, just like mine, “it is a body that has gone up in flame. a body that is in excess, that is another world and also this one” (115). to understand that we deposit traces of our bodies (our archives) in each other and in the threshold of temporality, psychic, and physical. how much do we spill until we break? what is the difference between breaking open and foraging openness?
ghost_archives
This archive is stuck between life and death inside your body. It haunts you with questions, as it grieves. It is a physical reaction to your forgetting, remembering, giving away, or even denying. In a 3 minute monologue, this work explores the concept of archives not as mere repositories of the past but as living entities haunting through the weight of memories, grief, and ruptures. It’s a meditation on the tension between life and death, presence and absence, erasure and preservation.
The footnotes are woven into the experience, accessible through a QR code or a printed guide that accompanies the film, linking the visual narrative to a deeper context of freedom fighters, thinkers, and lived experiences. These notes invite viewers to reflect on their own role in remembering and forgetting, linking personal and collective memory to the broader struggle for liberation. Scan the QR code to remember.
mourning, is porous. is the archive? if the archive, like my body, stores and forgets, burns and hurts, spills and closes up, does the archive fear its own death? does the archive wish to be immortal?
works that have inspired me
“What we search for is whole and swirl; what we find is fractured yet stunning”
— Juliana Singh, no archive will restore you (2018)
“It has required me to trust & know myself intimately and in the same moment to stop knowing who i am”
— alexis pauline gumbs, dub (2020)
archives from the future
coming soon (2025).