the archive is not a building
john ros
july 2026
what gets kept
The critical discourse around socially engaged and participatory art has, for the better part of three decades, been organized around The archive has never been a neutral record. It is a set of decisions — about what counts as evidence, whose labor is legible, whose history is allowed to persist. When Fred Wilson arrived at the Maryland Historical Society in 1991, he did not bring new objects. He reorganized the existing ones, placing iron slave shackles alongside ornate Baltimore silverware, leaving pedestals conspicuously empty where busts of Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass and Benjamin Banneker should have stood. The institution had the busts of Napoleon Bonaparte and Andrew Jackson. It did not have the others. Wilson’s question — whose truth is on exhibit, whose history is being told, who owns it — names hierarchies. It exposes oppression. It is, finally, a question about the labor of keeping.
As Lisa G. Corrin writes in the catalogue for Mining the Museum, Wilson “establishes that Mining the Museum will explore not what the objects mean but how they mean.”01 But the deeper point is structural. The Maryland Historical Society did not fail by accident. It succeeded at exactly what it was built to do: to preserve the self-image of a founding elite, to encode their version of Maryland’s history as the version, and to render invisible the lives and labor of those who did not belong to that founding class. The archive, and those presiding over it, chose exclusion and erasure.
Okwui Enwezor extends this analysis in Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, opening with Foucault: “the archive is first the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events.”02 Photography enters this framework as an inherently archival object, because the camera, in Enwezor’s terms, is “literally an archiving machine.”03 Every photograph carries within it a set of power relations about what was deemed worth recording. The photograph is already an argument about value.
Together, Wilson and Enwezor give us a critical vocabulary for understanding how institutions manage the past. They leave the harder question unanswered. The archive did not fall into power’s hands after the fact. Power built it. The archive is one of empire’s instruments, and always has been.
the limit of the open door
Institutional critique is a necessary practice. It is not, on its own, enough.
Wilson’s installation made the Maryland Historical Society’s collection available to communities it had long excluded. He changed how the collection could be seen. He made its silences audible. Corrin describes the project as designed to “provoke dialogues within museums, not only about them.”04 That distinction matters. Wilson worked from inside the institution’s authority, using its own collection against its own narrative. The result was transformative. Visitation reached record numbers. The institution was forced into a sustained public reckoning with what it had chosen to keep and what it had chosen to suppress. By any measure, it worked.
And yet the institution remained an institution. The collection remained its collection. The conditions under which history was produced, acquired and legitimized — those conditions were exposed, troubled, held up to scrutiny. But they were not reorganized. Wilson excavated the archive from within. He did not — could not, operating within that frame — dismantle the logic that made the excavation necessary.
Enwezor traces a genealogy of artists who have done related work — from Duchamp and Broodthaers to Zoe Leonard and Walid Raad — who have used archival form to construct counter-narratives, to hold open the contradictions in the historical record rather than resolve them. These are powerful practices. But Enwezor’s framework, like Wilson’s intervention, operates primarily within the epistemological terms of the Western art world — within the logic of the exhibition, the catalogue, the institution that commissions the critique. The archive gets interrogated inside the room the institution built. The interrogation stops at the door.
The archive is a technology of empire. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, in Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, writes that “the term ‘research’ is inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism.”05 Knowledge production functioned alongside land theft, racial classification and administrative control, producing Indigenous peoples as objects to be studied rather than agents of meaning. Lola Olufemi, working from a different angle, arrives at the same place: “The archive, with its shadows and gaps, is a colonial invention in narrative consistency.”06 Both writers refuse the assumption that the archive is a neutral structure into which power has been smuggled. The archive was one of the technologies through which empire produced itself as truth.
This forces a harder question than institutional critique typically asks. It is not enough to reorganize the collection, to add the missing busts, to expose the silences in the catalogue. “Taking apart the story, revealing underlying texts, and giving voice to things that are often known intuitively does not help people to improve their current conditions. It provides words, perhaps, an insight that explains certain experiences – but it does not prevent someone from dying.”07 Smith is naming what critique cannot do on its own. Critique that never touches material conditions is performance. The deeper question is: what are the conditions under which history gets produced? Who is authorized to document, to preserve, to name? What forms of knowing are recognized as knowledge at all, and what is systematically excluded from that recognition? These are political questions seated in aesthetics. They demand more than the museum can give.
what survives outside
Maura Finkelstein’s The Archive of Loss: Lively Ruination in Mill Land Mumbai is set in postindustrial Mumbai, in the mill district where textile workers and their families continue to live among factories that have been shuttered, sold and redeveloped. The state narrative frames these spaces as zones of disappearance — sites of abandonment waiting to be absorbed into official heritage projects or redeveloped out of existence. Finkelstein refuses this framing. “The vitality of ruination is often mistaken for absence and emptiness.”08 What looks like absence is occupation, sustained life, ongoing practice.
The archive Finkelstein documents lives in bodies, in the smell of grease on clothing, in the choreography of machines, in the rhythms of the chawl — the working-class housing structure where textile workers and their families have lived for generations. The chawl is what Finkelstein, drawing on Andreas Huyssen, calls a palimpsest — a place where multiple historical layers remain visible in the same physical space, industrial past and postindustrial present written into the same walls. It is also what she calls, drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin, a chronotope: a place where a particular kind of time is possible. Not clock time. Not redevelopment time. A time made of care and labor and memory that capital cannot reorganize.09
Finkelstein names this directly as queer time. She reads Elizabeth Freeman on the practice of “trail[ing] behind actually existing social possibilities: to be interested in the tail end of things, willing to be bathed in the fading light of whatever has been declared useless.”10 Chawl dwellers, in Finkelstein’s reading, are trailing behind Mumbai’s conception of progress and have been declared useless as productive urban citizens. Their time refuses what Freeman calls chrononormativity — the enforced temporal pattern of productivity, developmental progress and market rhythm.11 Women caring for neighbors, children playing in alleys, smells of food and grease mingling across thresholds. These are ongoing practices of social reproduction — forms of labor that sustain collective life outside the logics of capital and state recognition. They exist in a different time than the one the redevelopment plan requires.
Michelle Caswell, working from inside archival theory, names the mechanism directly. What the redevelopment plan does to the chawl, and what the museum does to the histories it refuses to keep, are the same act. Caswell calls it chronoviolence: the imposition of a single linear progressive time that renders any other temporality illegible. “To steamroll nonlinear temporalities enacts ontological and epistemic violence on minoritized world views.”12 The archive enforces a chronology. It decides what counts as past, what counts as present, what is worth carrying forward. Communities whose lives do not fit that chronology get written out. Against this violence, Caswell names chrono-autonomy — the community’s right to hold its own time, to activate records according to its own temporal structures, to refuse the institution’s schedule of what should be remembered and when. Chrono-autonomy is the temporal form of the archival practice this essay has been circling. The mill workers hold it. The counter-archive is a different time.
This is what I have been doing in my own practice. día a día buen día is an ongoing record of everyday tasks — a daily ledger of what I do, from waking to sleep. It has been in daily practice since january 2021. Wake, coffee, admin. Prep breakfast. Studio. Video meeting, studioELL. Prep and eat dinner. Head to bed. Each day gets named. Some tasks are left off — a reminder that even inside exhaustive documentation, choice and privacy shape the archive. The work counts as labor and is a slow refusal at the same time. It is a maintenance practice. It is an archive. It is held.
For four years these lists lived on my website, publicly. In September 2025, under the increased surveillance of the current authoritarian regime in the United States, I stopped publishing them in real time. The practice continues. The record continues. What changed is who has access to it. “Absence like presence is part of the record.”13 The archive that stays visible to the institution is not the only archive. Sometimes the archive going private is what keeps it alive.
The mill workers know things the state archive cannot hold. They are the ones sustaining life in the forgotten. They are the ones keeping practices alive that the redevelopment plan has declared over. Finkelstein tracks their labor with care. The labor is not hers. It belongs to them. Her sentence — that they “are not misrecognized … but nonrecognized. Similarly, they are not invisible: they are unvisible”14 — names the work being done to keep them outside the frame of what counts. Nonrecognition is active. It is a practice, and it takes labor to sustain. The mill workers live in a different time than the one the state has imposed on them, and their archive lives in that different time. That is why it survives.
This is where the limits of institutional critique become most visible. Wilson’s intervention required the Maryland Historical Society’s permission. It required the institution to voluntarily submit to reorganization, to agree not to refuse Wilson access to any part of the collection. The power to allow the critique remained with the institution. The mill workers ask for no such permission. They live, they work, they keep what matters, and they do all of this without waiting to be authorized. This is a different kind of archive entirely. It answers to the people who carry it. It refuses to be housed. It persists precisely because it has never been absorbed into the logic of preservation and legitimization that the institution depends on.
Smith makes a parallel argument from inside methodology. Decolonizing knowledge is about reconstituting the conditions under which knowledge is produced. The work begins with a set of questions she frames directly: “Whose research is it? Who owns it? Whose interests does it serve? Who will benefit from it? Who has designed its questions and framed its scope? Who will carry it out? Who will write it up? How will its results be disseminated?”15 These questions are the measure of whether the work is accountable to the people whose lives it claims to hold.
Together, Finkelstein, Smith and Olufemi point toward something Wilson and Enwezor gesture at but do not fully arrive at: the possibility of an archive that is not housed, not institutionally legitimized, not preserved on the institution’s terms. An archive that lives in practice — in the ongoing labor of communities who have always known things the institution refused to keep.
maintenance and keeping
Mierle Laderman Ukeles wrote, in 1969, a manifesto naming what no one in the art world would name. She drew a line between two instincts: “The Death Instinct: separation; individuality; Avant-Garde par excellence; to follow one’s own path to death—do your own thing; dynamic change,” and “The Life Instinct: unification; the eternal return; the perpetuation and MAINTENANCE of the species; survival systems and operations; equilibrium.”16 The avant-garde produces. Maintenance keeps the produced thing alive. The first gets the attention. The second does the work
Ukeles named the labor directly. “Maintenance is a drag; it takes all the fucking time … The culture confers lousy status on maintenance jobs = minimum wages, housewives = no pay.”17 That second sentence is the whole argument compressed. Value is assigned by a culture, which decides which labor it will count and which it will disappear. Maintenance is refused because admitting its centrality would expose the dependency — the new requires the keeping, the spectacle requires the upkeep, the museum requires someone to dust it. Her proposal was to bring that refusal up to consciousness: “now, I will simply do these maintenance everyday things, and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them, as Art.”18 The proposed exhibition was titled CARE. Four years later she enacted the argument at the Wadsworth Atheneum, on her hands and knees, washing the museum’s front steps and sidewalk. The piece was called Washing/Tracks/Maintenance: Outside (1973).19
Not only did Ukeles name that maintenance labor is invisible. She named that value itself is culturally assigned. If a culture decides which labor counts, then a different culture can decide differently. The postwork imaginaries Kathi Weeks writes about20 — futures where human flourishing rather than productivity becomes the measure of social value — begin here, with the recognition that value is neither natural nor eternal but produced through the daily labor of a culture assigning it. Maintenance also operates in a different temporality. It is not developmental time. It is not the linear progress the museum sells. It is repetitive, cyclical, ongoing — the temporality of Freeman’s queer time, of the chawl, of the daily list held privately. Maintenance is what the archive requires to survive at all. The refusal to see that labor is the temporal violence Caswell names.
Ukeles closes with the line: “MY WORKING WILL BE THE WORK.”21 The keeping is the practice. The upkeep is the content. There is no separate art that the maintenance supports. The manifesto refuses the hierarchy the art world runs on. The making is the made. The continuing is the finished. Accepting this would collapse the field. The gallery cannot sell what has not been separated from its making. The catalogue cannot credit what has no discrete author. The museum cannot collect what refuses to hold still. This is why the manifesto sat unabsorbed for decades.
This is the missing term in the conversation between Wilson and Finkelstein. Wilson exposes what an institution refused to keep. Finkelstein documents what survives when an institution withdraws entirely. Ukeles asks a third question: who does the keeping, and is that labor visible as labor at all? Michelle Caswell answers from inside the archival field. She rejects the cast of the archivist as a “passive maintenance worker, neutral technician, or even worse, ‘handmaiden’ to historians,” and reframes the work as “a messy engaged commitment to co-liberation.”22 The naming matters. Maintenance refused as labor is also maintenance refused as care, refused as politics, refused as the place where the work of keeping people in the record actually happens.
The mill workers do this labor. So do the caretakers of every community archive Caswell writes about. So did the community that made ima possible for five years, and so does the ongoing maintenance of the archive it left behind. So does the daily list I keep of what I did today. The labor is continuous across all these sites. Its refusal by institutions is what makes each site vulnerable to disappearance. Its practice by communities is what makes the counter-archive possible at all. This is why the archive that lives in practice cannot be reduced to a lesser form of the archive that lives in the museum. The museum depends on maintenance labor it refuses to acknowledge. The counter-archive is that maintenance labor, named as itself, held as itself, understood as the practice it requires.
what is kept
Michelle Caswell gives the practice its name. She writes in Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work, that “it is precisely those who have been disempowered by oppressive systems, those who have been ‘symbolically annihilated,’ those whose histories have been ignored, maligned, misrepresented, and/or grossly distorted by mainstream memory institutions … who feel the need to create their own community archives, often at significant financial and personal cost.”23 Symbolic annihilation is her term for the harm: “the under-representation, mis-representation, and/or absence of minoritized communities in the historic record, together with attendant feelings of exclusion and erasure.”24 The community archive is the response — built by the people the institution would not keep, on terms the institution does not set, for reasons the institution does not need to understand. The archive is a record of the resistance
What gets kept is the trace of the labor that refused to disappear.
intermission museum of art — ima — operated from 2000 to 2005. It used the language of the museum because that language carries authority, and because claiming it, even provisionally, was its own kind of argument. ima had no building of its own, no permanent collection, no endowment, none of the apparatus that makes an institution legible as an institution to the people who fund and credential them. What it had was programming, exhibitions, a community of artists who showed up and made things happen in spaces that were never designed to hold them.
In A People’s Art History of the United States: 250 Years of Activist Art and Artists Working in Social Justice Movements, Nicolas Lampert writes about the Chicago labor history bike rides organized around the Haymarket sites: “those who participated in the action formed a community, learned about various histories, engaged in dialogue and had a shared experience.”25 The archive is not only the object. It is the act of gathering, the route taken together, the conversation that happens along the way. This is what ima was, and what any exhibition that mattered has ever been. The show closed. The gathering became the record. The record continues in the practices the people who were there carried forward into their own studios and lives.
For five years ima was public. Projects have expiration dates. When staff left and funding dried up, we could not keep it going. The project ended. What remains exists now as a private digital archive — images, documentation, ephemera, the residue of five years of collective work.
Residue is not what is left over. Residue is what remains. The word carries the trace of the labor that made it. What ima did during those five years — the exhibitions, the conversations, the artists showing up, the space held open for what would not otherwise have had room — is not gone because the doors closed. It is held in the residue. The residue is the archive. Keeping the archive is the ongoing form the work now takes. It lives on a hard drive. It lives in the people who showed up. It lives in the practices they carried into their own studios and lives after ima closed. Caswell’s framing lands here: community archives “value people over stuff. The stuff—what gets collected—is only as important as it enables connections between people, who use the stuff to share stories, transmit memory, and build relationships.”26 The point is not visibility to outsiders. The point is that the community holds its own evidence, on its own terms, answerable to no one else’s legitimization process.
ima’s archive, in its current private form, is closer to that model than to the museum it once gestured toward. What it preserves is not curated for an outside audience. It is kept — by me, mostly, now — the way you keep something that matters to the people who were there, whether or not anyone else ever sees it again. It is not a diminished form of archive. It may be a more honest one. Caswell calls this kind of work “liberatory memory work,” positioning archivists as people “who have a responsibility to activate records in the now in support of temporal, affective, and material justice.”27 The institution that houses an archive determines what survives and on whose terms it can be retrieved. When the institution ends and the keeping continues anyway, something has shifted in who the archive answers to.
This is where Ukeles returns. ima’s digital archive is not curated, exhibited, footnoted. It is maintained — files moved from one drive to another, the unglamorous work of making sure nothing gets lost between formats — and some things did get lost. MY WORKING WILL BE THE WORK. The maintenance is the art.
the archive outside the institution is the archive
The archive is what people keep. Everything else is a subset of that.
The museum is a subset. The state archive is a subset. The library, the collection, the endowment, the acquisition committee, the deaccession policy — all of it is a subset of the older, larger, ongoing practice of communities holding onto what matters to them. Communities have been keeping their own archives for as long as there have been communities. The institution learned from the community makers. It seized what was already being kept, credentialed it, priced it, walled it, and then told us the version behind the walls was the real one. The real one has always been outside. It has always been the record of the labor that refused to disappear.
This is what Wilson could not do from inside the Maryland Historical Society, no matter how sharp the intervention. The institution’s authority stayed with the institution. This is what the mill workers are already doing in the ruins of the Mumbai textile industry, and have been doing every day for decades, without an art world audience and without any need for one. This is what Ukeles enacted on her hands and knees on the steps of the Wadsworth Atheneum. This is what Smith calls researching back, what Caswell calls liberatory memory work, what Olufemi calls imagining otherwise. Different vocabularies. One practice.
Sometimes the counter-archive is not additive. Sometimes it takes the form of pulling the state’s version down. In 1927 a Chicago streetcar driver named O’Neil veered off his route and drove his streetcar full speed into the base of the Police Monument — a statue erected to commemorate the 1886 Haymarket affair from the perspective of the police, and one the city’s working class had contested for decades. Asked why, he said simply that he was sick of seeing that policeman with his arm raised. Lampert writes that by then, “the failure of schools to teach its history, and a concerted effort by the city of Chicago and the federal government to erase its presence from public space all added to the steady disappearance of the memory, with consequences for future generations — primarily keeping the public uninformed about its own labor history.”28 August Spies, one of the four Haymarket martyrs executed in 1887, had said from the gallows that “the day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you are throttling today.” Lampert records this line as inscribed on the base of the Haymarket Martyrs’ Monument at Waldheim Cemetery, attributed there to Albert Parsons, also hanged that day.29 O’Neil’s streetcar and the workers who gathered again and again at Waldheim were carrying the same record forward — one by refusing the state’s monument, the other by tending their own.
Creative labor is archival in its own right. The workshop, the reading group, the studio without walls, the meal cooked for a community gathering, the lesson taught outside the syllabus, the daily list of tasks written down and held privately, the exhibition mounted in a rented space — these are archives. They are also work. They are also refusal. They do not need the institution to ratify them and they never did. The permission you have been waiting for is not coming. It was never yours to wait for. The archive is already in the work.
Olufemi says it plainly: imagining otherwise “means an end to the figure of the Individual Artist altogether. Only then can we begin to conceptualise political organising as creative space.”30 The individual artist is the institution’s unit. The institution needs a name to credential, a body to fund, a signature to sell. Community collective practice is much harder to credential. The institution tries other tactics: it absorbs, it appropriates, it neutralizes what it cannot name. And what this collective practice produces — the pamphlets, the political journals, the poems, “all the bits and pieces used to construct the rise and fall of political life”³¹ — is the archive. Not the record of the archive. The archive itself, in the form it takes when the institution will not hold it.
Wilson asked the Maryland Historical Society: where am I in this museum. The question was the right one to ask of that institution at that moment. It is not the question we ask now. The question now is what we are making, with whom, and who it is for. The counter-archive does not ask where it is in the museum. It builds the room, holds the space, keeps the record, transmits the practice and refuses to disappear. It requires no permission. It is not asking to be seen by those who would prefer not to see it.
The archive is not a building. The archive is what refuses to disappear. It is the residue of a life spent making things that mattered to the people who were there. It is the hard drive on the desk, the list held privately, the community that carries the practice into rooms the institution will never enter. It is care that outlives the funding cycle. It is teaching that outlives the syllabus. It is the exhibition that closed and the work that continues. It is you, reading this, and the people you are keeping alive by holding onto what they made. It is us, together, keeping.
endnotes
01 Corrin, Lisa G., editor. Mining the Museum: An Installation by Fred Wilson. The Contemporary and The New Press, 1994, p. 14.
02 Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Pantheon Books, 1972, p. 129. Quoted in Okwui Enwezor, “Archive Fever: Photography Between History and the Monument.” Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, International Center of Photography and Steidl, 2008, p. 11.
03 Enwezor, Okwui. “Archive Fever: Photography Between History and the Monument.” Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, International Center of Photography and Steidl, 2008, p. 12.
04 Corrin, Mining the Museum, p. 10.
05 Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. 3rd ed., Zed Books, 2021, p. 1.
06 Olufemi, Lola. Experiments in Imagining Otherwise. Hajar Press, 2021, folio 18.
07 Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, p. 3.
08 Finkelstein, Maura. The Archive of Loss: Lively Ruination in Mill Land Mumbai. Duke University Press, 2019, p. 56.
09 Finkelstein, The Archive of Loss, p. 95. Finkelstein draws the palimpsest reference from Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford University Press, 2003), and the chronotope reference from M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (University of Texas Press, 1981).
10 Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Duke University Press, 2010, p. xiii. Quoted in Finkelstein, The Archive of Loss, p. 95.
11 Finkelstein, The Archive of Loss, p. 96, drawing on Freeman’s concept of chrononormativity from Time Binds.
12 Caswell, Michelle. Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work. Routledge, 2021, p. 39. Caswell also names chrono-autonomy as one of three aims of liberatory memory work, alongside self-recognition and redistribution of resources, throughout the book.
13 ros, john. día a día buen día. Ongoing since january 2021, https://www.johnros.com/projects/dia-a-dia-buen-dia/. Public real-time updates suspended september 2025. The project continues as an ongoing daily practice held privately.
14 Finkelstein, The Archive of Loss, p. 33.
15 Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, p. 10.
16 Ukeles, Mierle Laderman. Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! 1969, sec. I.A.
17 Ukeles, Manifesto for Maintenance Art, sec. I.C.
18 Ukeles, Manifesto for Maintenance Art, sec. II.A. The exhibition Ukeles proposed in the manifesto was titled CARE.
19 Ukeles, Mierle Laderman. Washing/Tracks/Maintenance: Outside. Performance, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut, July 22, 1973.
20 Weeks, Kathi. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Duke University Press, 2011.
21 Ukeles, Manifesto for Maintenance Art, sec. II.A. Capitalization in the original.
22 Caswell, Urgent Archives, p. 22.
23 Caswell, Urgent Archives, p. 16.
24 Caswell, Urgent Archives, p. 83. Caswell first introduced the term “symbolic annihilation” in archival studies in Michelle Caswell, Marika Cifor and Mario H. Ramirez, “‘To Suddenly Discover Yourself Existing’: Uncovering the Affective Impacts of Community Archives,” American Archivist, vol. 79, no. 1, 2016, pp. 56–81, drawing on Gaye Tuchman’s earlier use of the term in media studies.
25 Lampert, Nicolas. A People’s Art History of the United States: 250 Years of Activist Art and Artists Working in Social Justice Movements. The New Press, 2013, p. 76.
26 Caswell, Urgent Archives, p. 18.
27 Caswell, Urgent Archives, p. 93. “In the now” is italicized in the original.
28 Lampert, A People’s Art History, p. 71.
29 Lampert, A People’s Art History, p. 74. Lampert attributes the line, as inscribed on the base of the Haymarket Martyrs’ Monument at Waldheim Cemetery, to Albert Parsons. The line is more commonly identified in the historical record as August Spies’s last statement before his execution on November 11, 1887; both Parsons and Spies were among the four Haymarket defendants hanged that day.
30 Olufemi, Experiments in Imagining Otherwise, folio 115.
31 Olufemi, Experiments in Imagining Otherwise, folio 115.