Das Archiv
Archives are like black holes. Things, a lot of them, get inside but never get back out again. Either they stay inside, or, they get destroyed. That’s how the director of the Landesarchiv Berlin described the mechanics of his institution during our tour that was part of the annual Germania Seminar of the community organization Berliner Underworlds. Obviously, things do get outside of the archives, but they are bent through the perspective that the researcher takes on the topic they are writing about. Bent through the researcher’s specific space-time-identity continuum, they come to see the public light, significantly warped and worm-holed things arrive in the public consciousness. History is a story we construct, more than reconstruct, out of the source materials, to lend the words of the director again. His words are reproduced, even if significantly distorted, decontextualized, deconstructed, etc., here on this blog. Sometimes gravity literally undermines the archive. For the example of the city archive in Cologne, where the ground underneath wielded, leading to a collapse of the archive’s and the neighboring buildings. As a result, documents from and outside of the archives mingled in the pit, leading to an overarching historical confusion. Archives need to be well tempered, otherwise the papers dissolve, leading the users of the archives to dissolve as well, as the mold attacks their lungs. Given the growing world population, archives are growing drastically as well. Last Saturday I went to an art market, where I saw a black hole-like layered circle made from fabrics that came in different colors. The artist, Muriel, explained that the different fabrics represented the ethnic layers of the world population, with the Asian and African populations being quantitatively dominant. The association of both the archive and the art piece with the black hole made me connect these two sets of data, leading to a very different type of archive, this blog as form of writing that archives my associative flow of thoughts.
