Prefigurative remembrance: Archiving as activist mnemonic practice

This article explores the role of archives and archiving in the memory–activism nexus with reference to the various ‘movements of the squares’ that started in 2011. The Egyptian Uprising, 15M, Occupy Wall Street, the Gezi Uprising and Nuit Debout each made concerted efforts to ensure their future remembrance by laying down an archive in which their actions and aspirations were ‘sedimented’. The article explores the crossover between the prospective and retrospective orientations of this activist memory work. It argues that there is an affinity between the affordances of archives as a mnemonic medium and the movements’ ‘politics of prefiguration’, both because the participatory character of the archiving is already an exercise in radical democracy and because an archive provides not a single narrative with a prescribed meaning but a resource for future meaning-making by others.