Violent Entanglements - Tracing Life and Loss in Colonial Archives

Workshop of the MIDA project
 

Guests: Marika Cifor (University of Washington), Mallika Leuzinger (ZMO), Catarina Madruga (TU Berlin), Christian Stenz (University of Heidelberg) 

Organisers: Yonatan Duran Maturana (University of Basel), Fiona Möhrle (Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg/University of Potsdam), Jannes Thode (ZMO/MIDA) & Hanna Wüste (University of Basel)

From the fifteenth century onward, European colonial expansion was inseparable from practices of documentation, classification, and record-keeping that rendered territories, peoples, and nonhuman life legible to imperial regimes, giving rise to colonial archives. Far from neutral repositories, these archives functioned as epistemic instruments that enabled extraction, dispossession, and domination, while simultaneously obscuring the physical violence through which they were continuously produced and reproduced. The records preserved today—textual, audio-visual, oral, botanical, zoological, and digital—bear the traces of these processes, registering not only administrative control and scientific ambition, but also loss, displacement, extinction, and erasure. At the same time, colonial archives remain deeply ambivalent sites: while they have historically stabilized unequal power relations and marginalized non-dominant forms of knowledge, they also contain the documentary conditions through which past injustices can be traced, contested, and made visible.

In this workshop, we use violence as an analytical lens to explore the ethical, epistemological, and historiographical challenges of working with archival remains that are inseparable from colonial domination yet continue to structure contemporary research practices. By attending to materiality, sensory experience, spatial design, and archival mediation, this workshop also opens possibilities for critically reimagining the archive beyond its colonial legacies. During the workshop, we will have group discussions on published articles that are provided via a reader beforehand to further our understanding of the inextricable entanglements of archives, colonialism and violence we encounter in archival research.

We will explore these entanglements in four sessions: 

1. The Colonial Archive

   In our first session, we establish a shared conceptual framework for understanding the colonial archive as an epistemic regime rather than a neutral container of historical evidence. We examine how archival power operates through classification systems, administrative genres, scientific taxonomies, and protocols of preservation and exclusion that rendered populations, territories, and forms of life governable and comparable. Central to the discussion are questions of epistemology: what counted as evidence, who was authorized to produce knowledge, and which experiences or modes of knowing were systematically erased. In this session, epistemic violence provides a critical vantage point to examine this foundational inequality and foregrounds the archive as an active producer of historical realities, laying the analytical groundwork for the sessions that follow.

2. Material Archives, Living Ecologies

   Moving beyond textual records, the second session foregrounds material, ecological, and multispecies archives as sites where colonial power and violence were enacted and preserved. Focusing on natural history collections, museum objects, landscapes, and conservation infrastructures, we conceptualize the archive as an ecological formation shaped by extraction, classification, care, and decay. The session explores how imperial collecting practices transformed environments and generated knowledge while simultaneously registering processes of depletion, extinction, and loss. By attending to the afterlives of collections and the material fragility of archival remains, the panel reflects on the ethical and political stakes of working with archives that preserve nonhuman life while documenting its destruction. Overall, the session aims to expand the notion of the archive to include material processes, multispecies entanglements, and environmental change shaped by colonial regimes, and to reflect on the ethical and political stakes of working with such archives today. Material and ecological violence functions here as an analytical lens to trace how colonial archival practices transformed living beings and environments into extractable, classifiable, and preservable matter.

3. Experiences in the Archive

   Our third session turns to the archival reading room as a spatial and affective contact zone where researchers, archivists, and materials encounter one another. Rather than treating archival research as a purely intellectual practice, the panel examines how sensory engagement—handling, touching, smelling archival sources—and the spatial organization of reading rooms shape interpretation, access, and whose bodies and ways of knowing are accommodated or marginalised. In this context, we pay particular attention to the often-invisible labor of archivists and to the ways architectural design, institutional rules, and embodied presence reproduce or challenge colonial hierarchies. From this perspective, the reading room emerges as a political space in which the colonial past continues to be negotiated in the present. The undercurrents of affective and institutional violence will guide our reading to examine how archival spaces, procedures, and norms can reproduce hierarchies, even in moments framed as neutral scholarly encounters.

4. Reimagining the the Archive

   The final session invites participants to critically engage with and move beyond the epistemic and material boundaries of the colonial archive by interrogating what constitutes archival material, how such material may be accessed, and the forms archives can take in contemporary contexts. The session examines case studies of archival institutions that are actively transforming their practices, alongside theoretical interventions that challenge conventional understandings of the archive. Epistemic repair functions as a guiding concept in this session, foregrounding practices that unsettle colonial authority, challenge archival norms, and create space for alternative forms of knowledge and sovereignty. Central to this discussion is a reassessment of what qualifies as “trusted” sources of knowledge. Western archival traditions have historically privileged the presumed authority of written documents; this session instead foregrounds alternative modes of knowledge transmission, including oral traditions and embodied practices such as song and dance. In doing so, it explores the expanded possibilities of the archive when it moves beyond rigid, inherited frameworks.

See the PROGRAMME.
 

Please register at jannes.thode(at)zmo.de until March 15th. After registration, we will send you the reader via mail.