Fabiola Nabil Naguib, Archives Re/Imagined (No. 1 of 5 in Series I - Montreal/Cairo installation), 2005/07, Large-scale photographic collage with accompanying text panels

Fabiola Nabil Naguib, Archives Re/Imagined (No. 1 of 5 in Series I - Montreal/Cairo installation), 2005/07, photographic collage, large-scale panel with accompanying text panels

My series Archives Re/Imagined is a way of re/orienting archives as one of many possibilities in the inhabitation of justice. As an artist and more importantly as a human being, I imagine the deep correlations between justice and connection as constituting a profound ecology of living and being in the world. Dominant forms of archiving are so elementally tied to capital that expansive processes of history making or archiving that disrupt commodification are all too often expunged into “non-existence.” As an artist, I continuously resist “documentation” as a means of capital containment: locating and inhabiting archiving as a living, breathing system of connection, whereby the earth and cosmos and all human and non-human inhabitants are inextricably linked to each other and by each other—for survival, to witness and record, for all generations to come. For me, the activations of listening, witnessing, acknowledging, and sharing, as well as refusing to be subalternized or contained, are all active sites of archiving, fundamentally and inextricably linked to activating justice. I believe that re/imaginings of archives and archiving in multiple ways are essential to ethical re/memberings of histories as dynamic records of existence, never to be suppressed and emerging as all of our histories were meant to. 

 

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