20 Seconds Issue 9: The Archive details the stories of individual archives all over the world. It is in the archive that we fight to reclaim histories and to act as allies to those who no longer have the means to do so, often as a result of colonial violence. It is in the archive that power balances must be destroyed and built back up again in new, more just distributions. For all our questions about how we ended up here—with multiple genocides supported and/or funded by the “democratic” West—we can find the root of that racist, xenophobic oppression and ideology in archives, historiography and museology.

There is a method to this archival inquiry, and it is not armed resistance. That is our privilege. It centres on an idea put forward by Italian historians like Giovanni Levi and Carlo Ginzburg, called microhistory. Scholars like Ginzburg posited that by shifting our focus from larger historical canons to smaller anomalous characters and the lives they lived, we might not only be able to validate their stories as worthy of being told, but we might also learn something more representative of events as they played out on a larger scale.

20 Seconds Issue 9 is a reminder that archives are contentious places, worthy of our attention and action. They are reflections of a very basic concept: To forget is a privilege, and a grave error.

Featuring:

GAUNG

Pwani Twapes

Journey into the Blue Dimension

Marcela Paniak

Wandering Translators

Dónal Foreman

Giorno Poetry Systems

Archivio dei Movimenti di via Avesella

A Fidai Film