Archiving is often thought of as a cold, technical process, categorizing, labeling, storing and preserving. But that could not be further from my experience, especially when working with the life’s work of a visual artist like Babs Haenen. As I have spent time organizing and cataloguing her rich ceramic legacy, I have come to understand that archives are emotional landscapes, and that the work of archiving is not just about preservation, it is about feeling, interpreting and caring. Two books in particular have helped me make sense of this experience: The Allure of the Archives by Arlette Farge, and The Archive and the Repertoire by Diana Taylor.
Arlette Farge writes about her experiences as a historian working in the French archives of the 18th century. What struck me most was not her pursuit of facts, but the intimate, almost physical connection she describes with the past. She speaks of archival documents not as static records, but as living relics, breathing with the voices and emotions of those long gone. There is a particular tenderness in her descriptions: the crackle of old paper, the scent of dust and ink, the uneven handwriting of someone trying to make themselves heard.
While Farge worked with court records and confessions, I found surprising parallels in my work with Babs Haenen’s archive. Each photograph, drawings, glaze formula or letter carries the fingerprint of a moment—a feeling, a process. Some of the ceramic works are accompanied by handwritten studio notes that describe many details about the work such as the process of the glazes, a drawing of its final form, or even the people who bought it. As Farge suggests, working in an archive is a deeply affective act, you are constantly brushing against the intimacy of someone else’s thinking and feeling.
While Farge’s archive is rooted in paper, Diana Taylor’s The Archive and the Repertoire expands the field. Taylor draws a line between the “archive” (texts, documents, recordings) and the “repertoire” (embodied memory: performance, gesture, ritual). Her argument is that memory lives not just in what is recorded, but in what is repeated, enacted or felt in the body.
Babs Haenen’s archive holds photos, videos and sketches, but none of those fully contain the bodily knowledge that went into shaping each piece. Her work is deeply performative: it flows with movement, the curve of the wrist, the pressure of fingers in wet clay. These are gestures that cannot be fully captured in the archive, they belong to what Taylor calls the “repertoire”. In this way, I see the act of archiving not just as preservation, but as translation. It is my job to translate the tactile, ephemeral and emotional process of Babs Haenen’s making into forms that can be remembered.
Archiving Babs Haenen’s work is not a simple activity. It is my personal, interpretive and emotional work. Each piece in her oeuvre carries the residue of feeling, and the archive itself becomes a kind of emotional map: the places where the artworks were made, the inspirations behind their creation, how they evolved over time.
In both Farge and Taylor’s work, I have found validation for the emotional labour and responsibility of archival work. The archive is not just a space of memory, it is a space of care. In tending to Babs’ archive, I am not just preserving a career, I am holding onto feeling, onto process, onto presence.
The more I work in archives, the more I understand them as emotional ecosystems. We do not just file and store, we listen, we interpret, we feel. As Farge writes, “the allure of the archive is not in the facts alone, but in the murmuring of lives.” Taylor herself reminds us, “some knowledge lives in the body and refuses to be reduced to text”.
Archiving Babs Haenen’s artistic life has made this clear to me. To archive is not just to document. It is to care, to remember, to translate gesture into legacy. It is, ultimately, to feel.