In the context of gross human rights violations, documenting harm is crucial to fostering some kind of justice. Archives play a crucial role in terms of organizing that documentation, and many of them contain testimonies of violence. Although the structure and content of archives are divergent, many testimonial records often have in common their factual, individual, and discursive nature, as they tend to neatly fit into established categories or data systems.
However, there are numerous ways to organize this documentation into an archive, and many artifacts testify to the violence people experienced. Some of these artifacts and methods of documentation challenge this notion of archives, as they capture lived experiences that in themselves defy clear classification. This limitation is notably true for testimonies of people who experienced disruptive life events, such as human rights violations or displacement, which may spark a need to document, narrate, and share. But because of their painful and overwhelming nature, they may be difficult to express in verbal language. Instead, they often foreground a more embodied way of telling.
In this context, artistic expressions often align more closely with the complex and non-linear nature of how people perceive past and ongoing human rights violations. Textile practices are a prime example of how people use(d) skilled and embodied practices across the globe as culturally embedded ways for individual and collective memorialization, documentation, and resistance in contexts of human rights violations.
The ‘documentation’ emerging from these artistic forms of expression, which possess their own aesthetic vocabulary, complicates our understanding of what an archive is. It does not only raise questions about how archives can contain artifacts and stories that defy traditional organizational logic. They also encourage us to start from these unruly documentation efforts to (co-)create archives in ways that better reflect these various ways of capturing lived experiences – while safeguarding ethical requirements regarding potential vulnerabilities and risks.
Through a methodology of collaborative making, this research explores how to co-create an archive stemming from the aesthetic, embodied, and material nature through which these testimonies are told.
Photo: (c) Aaron Lapeirre
