Description

Archives in Flux is a participatory collage-making workshop and living installation that brings anthropologists and members of the public together to explore grief as a collective, unfinished, always ongoing process.

It asks: how can we grieve together rather than alone? How do we grieve more than one thing at once—personal loss alongside political, economic, ecological, and historical violence? And how might we collectively witness ongoing colonial harm enacted through capitalism, neoliberalism, and systemic erasure?

The project is inspired by Erin Manning’s concept of the anarchive, whereby an archive is reimagined to be not a static repository of the past, but a living field of traces that reactivates experiences and pulls them into the present, readying them for future iterations. The anarchive exists only through participation. Nothing is complete, fixed, or individually owned. Fragments are continually made, altered, and reassembled, allowing grief to remain in motion rather than resolved.

Participants will work with open-ended prompts about interrupted futures, loss, and repair, and respond through collage, drawing, writing, photography, movement based drawing. Shared materials include reproduced maps, archival images, fictionalised fieldnotes, thread, charcoal, redaction tape, and materials participants bring themselves. Contributions may remain unfinished and alteration by others is encouraged.

Anthropologists participate not as experts, but as collaborators—placing alongside public contributions, their abandoned questions, failed methods, or concepts that now feel ethically broken. Through collective collage-making, Anthropology is treated as a vulnerable public practice: one that holds grief collectively, witnesses with care, and experiments with futures otherwise, without forcing closure.