Presencing Echoes in the Archive: Material Voices Through Space and Time

This article presences the material entanglements of analog and digital archives through a workshop-based inquiry titled “Collaging Echoes and Resonances Across Space/Time”, which applied Annie Goh’s question of whether echoes can claim a voice of their own to objects. In this session, participants collectively collaged with imprints of meaningful objects diffracted through materials like paint, tape, etc., and with the objects themselves. Group discussions yielded key considerations that we examine in the context of archiving. These include understanding materials in relation to the structures that shape the formation of their echoes; tracing how echoes may evolve into unrecognizable forms; and how iterative threads of meaning across ongoing interactions act upon each other in non-linear time. As the digital archive becomes increasingly prominent, these questions help to frame implications across archival formats to better understand the relationships between iterations of an item and the containers in which it is held, furthering the conceptualization of a posthuman archive. This paper applies new materialist perspectives of knowledge to history and archiving through an arts-based approach, offering a novel entry point to understanding archival echoes. It will interest scholars and/or practitioners in history, curation, and museum studies, enriching criticality in how knowledge is enacted in the material.