Wearable Archives: (co-)creating an archive of unruly documentation

In the context of gross human rights violations, documenting harm is crucial to establish some kind of justice. Archives play a crucial role in organizing that documentation. They can vary in structure, content, and purpose, but often contain forensic evidence and/or testimonies. These testimonies tend to be understood as discursive verbal narrations, which can be mapped onto pre-established categories or data systems. However, injustice can also be narrated through skilled and artistic practices, like embroidery and other textile work. These context-specific expressions often align better with the complex and non-linear nature of how people perceive past and ongoing human rights violations. They offer culturally embedded ways for individual and collective documentation, memorialization and resistance. The ‘unruly documentation’ emerging from textile practices is complex, changing and subjective in nature, yet grounded in factual truth. It requires co-creation, stewardship and activation. While these practices may better capture lived experiences, they do so in ways that challenge the taken for granted notion of what human rights archives are, how they function, and how they can aspire to contribute to justice. Through a methodology of collaborative making, the research 'Wearable Archives', explores how to (co-)create an archive with unruly documentation.