Description
Digitization has become both an imperative and a challenge across various fields of social life. This is the case of cultural institutions, such as archives, museums and libraries, which are increasingly digitising and making the records of European colonialism available in digital spaces. Underlying these projects is often a notion of access to information as inherently beneficial and socially desirable. Yet, this imperative of access raises important ethical issues. When colonial records move into digital regimes of visibility and circulation, the violent symbolic and material effects upon represented subjects, as well as on viewing communities, is often replicated. This paper suggests that the digitization and online display of such sensitive material demands a critical rethinking of digital archives premised on an ethics of care.
Questions of care have long been at the centre of feminist debates in science and technology studies which foreground the need to fundamentally change the way humans relate to each other, to technologies and non-human beings. At the same time, these debates have problematized the notion of care as something that is not inherently good, but also violent and fraught with structural inequality and social invisibility. This paper will expand this problematization of care to foreground care as an affective and communal practice, in order to explore its potential to transform our relation to the colonial archive in times of digitization. Finally, the paper asks whether the notion of care, if positioned at the centre of curatorial practice, can contribute to a form of “decolonial healing”. This reinterpretation of the etymological roots of curating (curating=caring=healing) will be explored in order to imagine a reparative relation to the archives that is capable of moving beyond the reiteration of archival violence towards an “archival encounter” that is attentive not only to the objects displayed, but also to represented subjects and viewing communities through a web of affective and mutual responsibility.
| Period | 5 Jul 2018 → 6 Jul 2018 |
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| Held at | Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Germany |