Archival-poetics

Archival-poetics emerged as a slow, situated unfolding, an embodied reckoning with Australia's state colonial archive and those traumatic, contested and buried episodes of history that inevitably return to haunt. It developed as a means to rupture and re-imagine contemporary legacies of colonialism, including the inconceivable volume of Indigenous records, objects, artefacts and human remains held in state collections all over the world; material, cultural and intellectual property that was stolen, recorded, categorized and contained in the name of empire and conquest. These archives hold histories of preservation painstakingly maintained, a fixed consignment process of hierarchy and order where provenance, objectivity and security are assured. As institutions of future memory, they also signify sites and histories of immense loss for all that was discarded and deemed irrelevant for the record.