Archive Fever.
No real sources, but real artistic form

The archive is no longer reliably perceived as the backbone of a “historical truth” which it often claims to be. Especially over the past decades, the archive has become visible as a site of struggle: a place where power is exercised and contested, as well as occasionally seized. Far from functioning as a neutral container of the past, the archive, which has to be activated by its recipient, becomes the catalyst to determine whose memories are preserved or how they are framed.

Contemporary artistic practices have been central to exposing the role archives play in our understanding of the past. But rather than treating archives as sources, artists increasingly activate them as structures to be disrupted or reinvented. In doing so, they mark a broader transformation in memory culture: a retreat of the documentary promise of factual completeness and a growing turn toward poetic and performative forms of remembrance. This development reflects a critical awareness that (selective and framed) documentary evidence alone cannot account for lived experience, structural violence, or historical absence and the unarchived. In fact, the archive is only ever a starting point to be explored.

From Evidence to Encounter

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s video game Resurrection Lands offers a look into these blank spaces. The game functions as an archive of unarchived Black trans lives and rejects any notion of neutrality. Here, memory is not presented as information to be consumed, but as an ethical encounter that demands participation and decision-making.

Through first-person gameplay and confrontational choices, players are forced to act, and they will fail and have to bear the consequences, which shows how remembrance is inseparable from responsibility. The archive becomes affective and protective and privileges those it is made for. With this, it becomes obvious that the practice of archiving has always been bound up with questions of survival and exclusion as well as with self-determined storytelling. Resurrection Lands exposes the fragility of documented existence and survival itself becomes a form of historical continuity, which refuses to disappear into archival silence.

Archives as Seized Terrain

This approach contrasts with other instances when archives were imagined as instruments of justice. When authoritarian regimes collapsed at the end of the twentieth century, archives were stormed, occupied, and then sometimes secured. The seizure of the Stasi files in 1990, as well as similar struggles in Paraguay, Argentina, Guatemala, South Africa, and Tunisia, reflect a widespread belief that documentary records would finally reveal the truth of state violence. Yet these hopes were often disappointed, as documents did not speak for themselves. Some of the crimes had never been recorded at all and others were buried in bureaucratic language or erased entirely. The terminology ‚source‘ or in German ‚Quelle‘ is actually misleading as the historical record and document never produce knowledge by themselves, but must be activated through the person who is studying and framing them.

It was this realisation that Jacques Derrida captured in his concept of archive fever: the anxious desire to secure the past against loss, paired with the knowledge that archiving itself is an act of selection and control. We archive because we fear forgetting and in doing so, we forget differently. Aided by an ever-increasing excessive electronic data collection in a globalised world, fuelled by authoritarian and capitalist interests, there is plenty of material, while at the same time there is often nothing. While they battle material and research, artists arrive from material at form: there might not be a real source, but there is real poetic form.

Hijacking the Documentary Excess

Contemporary artists respond to this dilemma not by restoring faith in documentary completeness, but by exposing its limits. One strategy lies in hijacking archives that were never intended as historical repositories. The collective Total View repurposes material from Chinese Baidu’s street-view infrastructure to reveal transformations in Chinese urban space. What was advertised as being recorded to optimise navigation (while actually training technology and recording infrastructure data for the streetview company) becomes visual evidence of cultural erasure. For example, mosques turn into Chinese market halls and Arabic and Christian symbols disappear.

Public space that is constantly recorded normalises that being visible is the default, that privacy must be activated instead of assumed. While Baidu (and google streetview) make the world legible to machines and markets (and move cartographical sovereignty away from previously accepted institutions), they also create an archive which can be used to detect in visuals what is not said or written about.

Total View have found a way to hijack an archive by activating its unintended use. Here, the archive precedes meaning. Data is collected indiscriminately, stored excessively, and interpreted later. The algorithm trained by Total View in order to detect visual change becomes an unintended archivist. This readymade archive by an all-seeing eye in the sky (if we disregard the gaps in streetview in regard to poor neighbourhoods e.g.) forms the starting point for artistic practice that destabilises authorship.

Performing the Archive

Other artistic practices abandon documentary logic altogether. Performative archives do not pre-exist the artwork; they emerge through the act of creation itself. Mey Seifan’s VR project How Am I Here?! begins not with documents, but with dreams told by Syrians who experienced war, displacement, and exile. These dreams are treated as archival material in their own right. They do not document events as they happened, but as they continue to resonate in bodies and minds. Trauma appears not as evidence, but as atmosphere and fragmentation. Through immersive media, i.e. virtual reality, sound, AI-generated imagery, the archive becomes something that must be entered rather than consulted. Visitors move through affective spaces instead of reading files. Meaning unfolds through presence rather than verification.

This approach foregrounds a key insight into contemporary memory culture: not all experiences can be stabilised without violence. Some memories resist documentation and demand poetic form instead. In this sense, the project speaks directly to what Jacques Derrida described as archive fever. We archive because we fear forgetting. And – in the eyes of Seifan – forgetting still takes place when official archives archive but we don’t take a look at the dreams of people which document the ways of processing past experiences. Yet archiving — as an act of fixing and externalising memory — is always also a form of forgetting. How Am I Here?! responds to this dilemma by refusing closure via artistic form.

Speculation and Technoheritage

The retreat of documentary certainty becomes even more apparent in artistic engagements with digital heritage. It is not only our everyday that is governed, produced and owned by technology companies and digital tools, also our history and heritage are never not simply, neutrally preserved by digital means, but move within parameters of control and authorship. Cultural artefacts, once materially bounded, now circulate as data, which can be captured and stored by technological infrastructures shaped by colonial and capitalist power relations.

Nora Al-Badri describes this condition as technoheritage: a regime in which heritage is managed through Western technologies, servers, and legal frameworks. In response, her work uses generative adversarial networks to create speculative sculptures trained on datasets of Mesopotamian and Sumerian artefacts. These objects are not reconstructions, they are imagined. Artificial forms that question ownership as well as authorship. Here, Nora Al-Badri does not restore the past but allows the GAN to re-imagine it. Therefore, heritage becomes unstable and uncanny, and unresolved, it question the totalitarian narrative that the past is based on the sovereignty of archives alone.

Who Is Allowed to Remember?

Archives only become meaningful when they are activated. They are not powerful because they exist, but because someone decides that they must not be destroyed but taken and/or repurposed. Memory is never automatically safe and justice depends on who controls its traces.

Today, archives in Germany are rarely stormed physically. They are scraped or trained, copied or monetised. But the question remains the same as in 1990: who is allowed to remember and under which conditions and in what format? Archive fever persists, but its symptoms have changed. It is no longer only the fear of forgetting the past. It is the anxiety of living in a present where everything is collected, while so much remains unheard or actively suppressed. The artistic practices we have shown do not treat the archive as a stable foundation of truth. Instead, they insist on finding their own form, e.g. speculative or performative ways of collecting, keeping or imagining a memory while at the same time questioning its relations to the world.

This article is a summary of Felix Fuhg and Anna Norpoth’s keynote speech at Kampnagel’s “Coding the Archive” event, Hamburg, 23 January 2026.