Archiving the City

I had a great question from my colleague today:

Hi Adeola. I’m curious how you think about your archiving practices in relation to your archiving (analysis? retrieval?)… I know in your work you are more focused on studying rather than creating archives. But you do create them, so I’m wondering how the 2 activities relate for you. Is one more personal and the other more academic? Or can there be such a distinction for you? What do you think Benjamin was doing with the Arcades project?

This was a great question, because it forced me to think carefully and articulate my approach to archiving. Here is my answer:

I don’t work on “the archive”, per se, because I think that it is too fetishized as an object. I am interested in “archiving” as an everyday practice that has been part of modern life, for many people (anyone associated with a state, in one way or another) and today, it is THE modus operandus for most people who live in the world of electronic devices–from TV watchers, to phone callers, and email senders.

Right now, as I write I am engaging in an archival practice. To me this is more than simply creating an archive that someone can retrieve. I take a lot of inspiration from Benjamin’s arcades project, and many of his writings are part of my “top shelf.” I don’t want to make the comment TOO long, so here is a link to my blog, where I discuss Benjamin a little:
http://archivingthecity.com/2009/01/14/one-day-sculpture/

You will see that Benjamin is very interested in trash, debris, what as been discarded. Why? Not only because it needs to be retrieved and saved (the Arcades project was as much about his life in Paris, as anything else. It is far from a library, or national archive, or institutional archive), or worked with in any conventional way, but because looking at the trash–dumpster diving–was a way to re-train our historical senses, to begin to see how the past is never really gone, and does not necessarily need to be “retrieved” because it never actually left. The Arcades project is not conventional history, or even conventional archiving, in any sense. It is not about creating narratives. I think it is about training oneself as a researcher to do what, in one’s time seems odd, challenging, difficult or even embarassing. What is today’s equivalence of (academic) dumpster diving?

(more…)

A recent New York times article highlights Ushahidi a “Kenyan-born” open-source adaptation of wiki technolgy, which has been used in crisis situations across the globe. From the election-related violence in Kenya, to the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile and even to the snowstorms in Washington, DC, Ushahidi technology has come to the rescue. How does it work?

Anonymous mobile phone users witnessing an emergency situation, or incident of violence, can text messages to the local Ushahidi number. These messages are instantly relayed to a mapping station and triangulated on interactive maps, and then help may be be dispatched to the crisis area, or researchers may get a sense of where incidences of violence are occuring most frequently, or find out how far inland hurricane damage struck, etc.

As an archive instantaneously created by people in situations of distress, this is unmatched. The use of technologies like Ushahidi, challenges the paradigms of reporting and writing the history of places like Kenya, Haiti and Chile. Reports can now come from local people, on the ground, living these situations, rather than from the first wave of foreign reporters, and then years later the histories created from these reports by trained, published historians. This is the Long Here and the Big Now in action. This is the creation of an alternative sort of archive.

It is also interesting that this creative use of open-source technology, which challenges the paradigms of history-writing, and which is so in tune with the everyday ways in which people use technology today, comes from an African city, generally marginalized in discourse on technology, the city and crisis management.

Vendredi Soir (Friday Night), dir. Claire Denis (2002)

Cinema is a materialization of our psychic life. It makes visibly tangible all psychic phenomena, including the work of memory and the imagination, the capacity for attention, the design of depth and movement, and the mapping of affects.

…Film repeatedly shows that pictures–moving pictures–are the current documents of our histories. Indeed, filmic memories–fragile yet enduring–are fragments of an archival process porously embedded in our path, part of our own shifting geography.

–Giuliana Bruno, Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts (2007)