In an era defined by digital networks and human movement – of data, people and ideas – the act of archiving has taken on new urgency. As I have mentioned in my previous blog posts, archives were associated with dusty repositories and bureaucratic order, but today they are being reimagined by artists, curators and displaced communities as a digital space of dialogue, care and translation.
Digital technologies have transformed not only what we archive, but how we relate to what is archived. The online archive is no longer a static catalogue – it is a living interface through which dispersed communities can connect, reinterpret and reclaim their narratives. For refugees and migrants, whose histories are often scattered or erased, these digital archives offer a new form of homecoming: a way to reassemble fragments of belonging across virtual geographies.
Jacques Derrida, in Archive Fever (1995), reminds us that the archive is driven by a paradoxical desire: the impulse to both preserve and control memory. The word “archive,” derived from the Greek ‘ἀρχεῖον (arkheion)’, referred to the house of the ruler, where official documents were kept under authority. Yet, as Derrida notes, every archive is haunted by what it excludes. To archive is to choose what survives and what remains silent.
Artists and displaced communities, living often at the edge of visibility, challenge this structure of control. Their archives are rarely official; they are fragments, stories carried across borders or memories saved on phones.[1] When these ephemeral traces are uploaded, mapped or shared digitally, the archive becomes not a sealed house of power, but a distributed shelter – an open and unstable home for plural voices.
Michel Foucault’s[2] notion of heterotopia [3] (also a Greek word) – spaces that are “other,” simultaneously real and imagined – offers a powerful lens to understand these artistic archives. A digital platform that collects testimonies of displaced artists, a participatory installation in a refugee camp or a community-curated database of lost artifacts can all function as heterotopias. They juxtapose multiple temporalities and geographies: the homeland left behind, the present site of exile and the imagined place of belonging.
These archives do not aspire to a single truth only. Instead, they hold contradictions: loss and hope, silence and voice, displacement and renewal. They invite visitors into a kind of “translated space,” where each artifact – a photograph, a recording, a piece of fabric – speaks across languages and histories. In these heterotopic archives, translation is not merely linguistic – it is relational. It bridges differences without dissolving them[4].
Contemporary artistic archives, particularly those engaging with undocumented and exiled artists, displaced communities and diasporic communities , often use translation as both medium and metaphor. Consider projects such as Forensic Architecture’s investigations into border violence, which use digital mapping and 3D modelling to reconstruct erased events, or Bouchra Khalili’s “The Mapping Journey Project,” where refugees draw the routes of their displacement on maps while narrating their stories.
Installation view of the 2016, exhibition at the The Museum of Modern Art, New York
In such projects, the archive becomes a site of co-creation between artist and subject, translator and viewer. Each act of translation – be it subtitling, transcription or curatorial framing – becomes an ethical gesture: the refusal to let experience be lost in transmission. The process acknowledges that meaning is never fixed – it migrates, like the people whose stories it carries. The digital layer enhances this migration, allowing the archive to circulate beyond borders and generate new solidarities among viewers who may never meet physically.
In the face of rising nationalism and cultural amnesia, digital artistic archives of migration remind us that memory itself is borderless. They teach us that, to remember is to host – to make room for other narratives within our own. By creating heterotopic spaces of encounter, they turn the archive from a static institution into a living ecosystem, where empathy and understanding are continuously negotiated.
Photo Gareth Gardner
Ultimately, the archive’s positive impact on multicultural understanding lies not only in what it preserves, but in how it transforms us. Each archived story, image or sound expands the horizon of who we consider part of “us.” In this way, archiving becomes both a political and poetic act – one that affirms, as Derrida wrote, that “the question of the archive is not the question of the past… but the question of the future[5].”
[1] To read more about the stories behind these items: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-ukrainians-fleeing-war-with-russia-share-the-items-they-couldnt-leave/ & https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2022/10/22/1107495948/keepsakes-that-refugees-brought-to-remind-them-of-home
[2] Michel Foucault (1926-1984): French historian of ideas, philosopher, and author
[3] Heterotopia: hetero- is from Ancient Greek ἕτερος (héteros, “other, another, different”) and is combined with the Greek morpheme τόπος (topos) and means “place”.
[4] To read more about the stories behind these items: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24954580
[5] Derrida, J. (1998). Archive fever: A Freudian impression (E. Prenowitz, Trans.). University of Chicago Press, p 36.