Shadow Index
02.09.2025
What escapes the archive? What lingers in its margins, in what it misreads, or never registers? My project begins with the conviction that archives are not neutral repositories of memory. They are active structures of selection, omission, and control. They shape what is remembered and how remembering is governed. The archive is not merely a container of collective memory, but a complex, charged site of power and erasure.
Inspired by Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever and Alain Resnais’s film All the World’s Memory, the project invites engagement with a “shadow index”: materials that resist, fall out of, or undermine dominant archival structures.
Derrida describes the archive as a "toponomological" space, defined by both place (topos) and law (nomos), and structured by exclusion. Resnais’s film presents the Bibliothèque Nationale as a vast and beautiful mechanism of memory production — a bureaucratic organism where knowledge becomes abstracted, frozen, and unreachable. It evokes an unease: the sense that the impulse to record may distance us from meaning. Michael Rothberg’s theory of multidirectional memory reinforces this idea, presenting memory as dynamic, negotiated, and relational. Together, they gather into a curatorial practice shaped by partial visibility, silences, and resistance to categorisation. This leads to the search for other ways of holding memory, arising from the unease with systems that strive for control, clarity, and permanence.
My engagement with archives begins with a desire to understand the place I come from — Lower Silesia, a region that was part of Germany before the Second World War. Life here means being constantly surrounded by traces of displacement, absence, and layered histories. It is also deeply rooted in my childhood: the emotional center of which was my grandparents’ house, once owned by a German family. The objects, smells, and textures of that space — and the quiet, ghostly tension it carried — shaped my early sense of history and memory. Since then, I have worked with institutional and vernacular archives, as well as with the memory of landscapes.
Derrida describes the archive as a "toponomological" space, defined by both place (topos) and law (nomos), and structured by exclusion. Resnais’s film presents the Bibliothèque Nationale as a vast and beautiful mechanism of memory production — a bureaucratic organism where knowledge becomes abstracted, frozen, and unreachable. It evokes an unease: the sense that the impulse to record may distance us from meaning. Michael Rothberg’s theory of multidirectional memory reinforces this idea, presenting memory as dynamic, negotiated, and relational. Together, they gather into a curatorial practice shaped by partial visibility, silences, and resistance to categorisation. This leads to the search for other ways of holding memory, arising from the unease with systems that strive for control, clarity, and permanence.
My engagement with archives begins with a desire to understand the place I come from — Lower Silesia, a region that was part of Germany before the Second World War. Life here means being constantly surrounded by traces of displacement, absence, and layered histories. It is also deeply rooted in my childhood: the emotional center of which was my grandparents’ house, once owned by a German family. The objects, smells, and textures of that space — and the quiet, ghostly tension it carried — shaped my early sense of history and memory. Since then, I have worked with institutional and vernacular archives, as well as with the memory of landscapes.
Illustration: still from Alain Resnais
I imagine that the archival exploration in Hollabrunn could unfold along several intertwined threads. One would focus on material and geological traces. One of these local structures is the Habaner ceramic tradition offers a tactile, non-verbal form of memory. The hand-painted vessels speak of displacement, resilience, and cultural transmission through craft. Another thread is the natural deposits of amethyst in the region. These formations suggest a deep-time, non-human archive — luminous and persistent. Their memory is mineral, not narrative. Alongside the stones, guides and handbooks on precious minerals evoke how knowledge is shaped and aestheticised. Local archives — municipal documents, maps, and personal collections — add another layer. These fragments of public and private memory form overlapping and contradictory narratives that resist coherence. Folk stories and informal knowledge passed through oral tradition offer yet another kind of archival logic — one that shifts in form and meaning over time. And finally, the Ernstbrunner Wald, one of the largest oak forests in Central Europe, offers not only ecological density but temporal complexity. It is not a backdrop, but an active material witness — layered with histories, affects, forms of decay, and resilience. Forests like Ernstbrunner Wald carry memory in a more-than-human dimension: of disappeared life forms, former ecologies, and disrupted timelines. They hold ghostly traces of what no longer lives but remains. To me, non-human archiving is a way of thinking beyond anthropocentric systems of knowledge, and asking what it means to witness, to endure, and to carry memory outside of language.
During the seven weeks of the residency, I will work with these different registers of memory — material, ecological, institutional, and informal, to shape a curatorial framework and develop the idea of a future open call. This will not be a theme defined in advance; it will emerge from the place itself, through attention, research, and the unfolding of time spent there. The Shadow Index is not a fixed theme. It is an evolving question: how do we work with what resists capture, and what forms of knowledge arise in its place?
During the seven weeks of the residency, I will work with these different registers of memory — material, ecological, institutional, and informal, to shape a curatorial framework and develop the idea of a future open call. This will not be a theme defined in advance; it will emerge from the place itself, through attention, research, and the unfolding of time spent there. The Shadow Index is not a fixed theme. It is an evolving question: how do we work with what resists capture, and what forms of knowledge arise in its place?
