Art Metropole

#16655

Public 71: against oblivion: community archives, building alliances

Editors

Susan Lord and Janine Marchessault

Price

$20.00

Date

2025

Publisher

public 71

Format

Periodicals

ISBN

0845-4450

Size

19 × 24.7 × 1.7 cm

Length

187 pp

Genre

Indigenous Art & Artists

PUBLIC 71: Against Oblivion brings together artists, archivists, curators, and scholars whose work challenges institutional forgetting and reclaims histories marginalized or threatened by dominant regimes. Through essays, dossiers, case studies, and artistic interventions, contributors mobilize archival practice as resistance, care, and possibility. Through essays, dossiers, case studies, and artistic interventions, this issue highlights practices that deliberately work against oblivion, showcasing how audiovisual archives are being redefined by the communities who steward, use, and activate them.

In the twenty-first century, new approaches to archival collections are shaping collective histories informed by regional, local, activist, and cultural communities—rather than solely by nationalist frameworks. These practices are advancing a decolonial understanding of “memory institutions” (public archives, galleries, museums) and the ongoing, underresourced yet critical work of “accidental archives” (media distribution centres, co-ops, academic institutions, public libraries), as well as private and personal collections. Across these spaces, transformative knowledge mobilization is taking place: community organizations, governmental bodies, and academic archivists are working together to extend access, deepen collaboration, and build new models for shared memory.