Gabriella Giannachi. The MIT Press, 2016.
We often think of archives as repositories of objects belonging to the past, but in Archive Everything: Mapping the Everyday, Gabriella Giannachi pushes back on this premise and its limiting effect on archives’ role in society. Giannachi, a scholar of English and performance studies, takes an interdisciplinary approach in her study of the nature of the archive and how it can be used to influence the present and shape the future. While the book can feel overwhelming due to its many areas of study and extensive use of theorists such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, its case studies do provide useful examples of Giannachi’s ideas in action.
Giannachi begins with a hefty introduction focusing on Foucault and Derrida, and their theories on the mutability of the archive and the power it holds depending on its nature and who controls it. She argues that the archive is an apparatus that can incorporate everything from museums to architecture, artwork, and mixed reality. It is both a location and an action, or, as Derrida puts it, the “Archiving archive.” As an apparatus, the archive is “capable of producing its own subjects and inserting them within a broader economy” (Giannachi 182). By shaping our understanding of the past, she argues, it changes both the present and the future. Because Giannachi has identified the archive as present in so many different forms and functions, she divides her book into descriptions of different disciplinary approaches. I found this all rather dense initially, but Giannachi makes sure to reiterate her thesis as she takes you through multiple fields and case studies.
As you might expect from its title, the book’s first chapter focuses on archival history. Giannachi discusses the historical evolution of the archive, drawing on archaeologist Michael Shanks’s theories on Archive 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0. This refers to the different stages of how the archive functions in society: Archive 1.0 is as a management tool, 2.0 is the digitized and accessible archive, and 3.0 is the animated archive that engages with the community. She successfully argues that we can now add 0.0 and 4.0 to the list, with Archive 4.0 proving the most relevant to her argument. Archive 4.0 is the evolution of archives into existing on multiple platforms, including within the human body. She posits that contemporary archives have begun to fall into themselves, becoming “meta-archives.” These archives exist on different platforms, in many formats, and rely on self-aware users, who contribute to these multimedia projects. One example she cites is ArtMaps, which allows users to examine 70,000 artworks belonging to the Tate through Google Maps, placing the works in their geographical context. Users can add their own locations and ideas to ArtMaps, creating an Archive 4.0. A strength of this book is that when Giannachi gets a little heavy-handed with the theory, she provides you with a real-life example with images to ground her ideas in the practical.
Giannachi continues her multidisciplinary approach, using theories from the fields of archeology, performance studies, memory studies, and art history. Unfortunately, after the first chapter, she mostly leaves archival scholarship behind, which can be frustrating for an archivist and feels short-sighted, particularly in regards to her case studies. She explores the increasing instinct to self-archive as a result of the rise of social media and the drive to preserve ourselves and our past within the digital economy. Archive 4.0, and modern archives are in a state of unrest, having had to adapt to the digital revolution.
In the chapter “Archives as Archeological Sites,” Giannachi lays out her ideas on mapping. While these can be applied literally, as with ArtMaps, Giannachi seems more interested in another of Shanks’s “archeographical” ideas, that of deep maps. These are maps that represent a place by including the past and present, fact and fiction, and the memories of those that lived there, which does sound suspiciously similar to an archive. Giannachi takes this route, arguing that archives are relational, fluid, and should be placed in context so that they can operate “as laboratories for the performance of presence and identity” (34). In short, if we understand where archives originate and who contributed to them, they can better influence the present and act as a memory aid. She applies this idea to the Women Art Revolution online archive, a feminist artist archive that unfortunately no longer exists in its original form. As I have no background in archeology, I found this chapter rather difficult to understand, but I eventually parsed out Giannachi’s thesis on archives as deep maps. I was more engaged when she utilized the idea in her chapter on the Diasporic Archive, a term she uses to refer to any archive concerned with diasporic communities. This is the book’s strongest and most grounded chapter, discussing archives that trace the movements of communities of African descent by sourcing items from their members. She successfully connects these examples to later chapters on curiosity cabinets and contemporary art. For many archivists reading this text, it is these case studies that would offer the most value and intrigue.
I wanted to read this book because I am interested in the overlap between performance studies and archival practice. While reading those relevant sections, I was glad to have that background knowledge, because I felt somewhat at sea in her other chapters on archeological theory. Once I did understand her arguments, they proved convincing and many of the case studies that make up the second half of the book are interesting, but I would not describe this book as practical. In fact, her lack of engagement with contemporary archival theory feels like a missed opportunity to fuse the work of the archivist with her theses. Giannachi is a very good writer and clearly an excellent scholar, but this book will appeal mostly to theorists and to those looking to broaden their knowledge of how other disciplines interact with and change our understanding of the archive.
Emily Crow, Project Research Associate at the Yale Center for British Art