The archive, in its variables of collecting private or public documents, relating to a person, family, municipality or state, is configured as a circumscribed place, with limited access or reserved for specific users. Its historical connection – especially the archive as institution – with power and various forms of long-standing hegemony, while it has contributed to arousing its fascination and a certain aura of mystery in recent decades, has been paralleled with a profound questioning and recognition of its problematic “neutral technology” (Azoulay, 2019).

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To consider that a collection of written texts, visual works, volumes, and photographs, and moving images composes a corpus can lead us back to the etymology of the Latin term, which takes on this meaning much later. Before, it referred to a body, individual, person, or living being, as well as a corpse, inanimate body, matter, organism, and structure. If we then maintain the polysemy of the corpus to diversify the archives in which they live, we will suddenly find ourselves faced with a variety of typologies that expand the very notion of the archive, push it out of protective walls, dirty it, contaminate it and regenerate it, making it living matter and in constant metamorphosis (Coccia, 2020).

We can read this corpus as an archive that self-generates, feeds itself, feeds back, tells itself, passes on, and lets itself be consulted. A system of knowledge that owns itself as an archive, which “should be seen as a contact zone between past and present but also between temporally diverse and interconnected processes of documenting and consuming information” (Tortorici, 2018), available to be activated and put into relation in a constant becoming in transformation. What can this approach teach us about the wonder, the abject, the beauty, the waste in the planet when they become “haunted archives of livingness” (Subramaniam, 2024)? In this context, photography emerges as a central medium through which haunted archives are constituted, activated, and contested. Photographs not only preserve the visual remnants of ecological and political violence, but also act as spectral witnesses — carriers of both memory and omission. What role does the photograph play in embodying “livingness” or decay? How can photographic archives resist the logics of extractivism, classification?

Confronted with climate change, overdevelopment, ecological devastation, environmental crises, energy dependence, poverty, reproductive injustice, unsustainable agriculture, and food insecurity, to name just a few, “seeking to understand the world as embrangled in its histories is the urgent project before us.” (Subramaniam, 2024) How can we look at the geological traces, at the rivers’ flow, at the accumulation of waste, at the dialects of folk proverbs and storytelling, at “invasive” plant species, at the physical space occupied to store our digital data and see them, observe them, sense them and create through them? Would we be able to look at them with the attention devoted to documents preserved and protected in archives without falling into the trap of “classification, tagging, and naming of different groups to form a human index” (Azoulay, 2019), or – by contrast – would we be able not to forget or ignore them but rather to embrace a project of care?

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