Inquiry

Everything collected and preserved represents particular values at respective places and times. What do particular collections then tell us about those (individuals, institutions, museums, or states) that accumulate and maintain them? How are artists and researchers working to reveal the often violent and extractive histories that many collections are founded on? Strategies of institutional critique, counter-archiving, and reading existing collections against the grain can illuminate the failures and exclusions of official archives, while alternative modes of collecting, display, and distribution can give birth to new archives, participate in preservation towards new modes of futurity, and re-value those materials, practices, and experiences that may be difficult to preserve.