What does it mean when an archive no longer exists? When it has been destroyed through war, when obsolescence sets in, when historical neglect has erased knowledge central to its holdings? How do we remember when the charge of urban development overwrites the struggles archived in a street’s façades? How do we build a new archive and spaces for memory—cultural, personal, political, otherwise—when institutions withhold and stay silent? Should it matter that the fate of digital and online art could be deletion?

These are some of the questions evoked in this issue of Art + Australia, 'The Fever: Part Two'. This edition teases out threads that emerged in Part One and is filled with provocations, propositions and personal archival projects that query the role of an archive for collective practice and reclamation.

At times challenging, at others poetic; the issue—with contributions by artists, critics, historians and a poet—turns to the archive as a self-willed and conceptual space, one to be intervened in and created anew. 

The issue begins with a contribution by the Palestine Reading Group, a collective of artists who initially huddled in a circle to read work by Palestinian authors as an act of solidarity. For ‘The Fever’, the artists—Kim Feng Cheong, Perin Gulsen, Rosie Isaac, Raafat Ishak, Keiran Molaeb, Lara Oluklu, Lisa Radford and Azza Zein—have transposed knowledge gleaned from their collective reading into an imagined University for Gaza. Many Palestinian libraries, archives and universities have been destroyed in recent years.¹ In response, the reading group have collated a library of texts and write towards ‘a hopeful future’, imagining and drawing ‘objects and spaces that are yet to be’.

While the Palestine Reading Group look from a present ‘brutal context’ to a possible future, Matariki Williams (Ngāi Tūhoe, Ngāti Hauiti, Taranaki, Ngāti Whakaue, Te Atihaunui-a-Pāpārangi) article Archive in the Land starts from an encounter with te Tiriti o Waitangi, a document deeply embedded in Aotearoa’s history. From peering at the document behind bulletproof glass, Williams expands outwards, tracing archives found in art and the land. Interspersed with the voices of Archie Moore, Jeanine Leanne, Jazz Money and Moana Jackson, Williams’ article creates a chorus of Indigenous artists and thinkers that destabilises the authority of sequestered and static paper trails that ‘sought to define and redefine our identity and future at will’.

In overt and covert ways, the act of withholding, cataloguing and possession that underpin Western archives mirror the imperial logics that abetted their formation, which continue to have repercussions on those colonised. Looking to Trawlwoolway artist Julie Gough’s 2022 work p/re-occupied Hugh Magnus notes that Gough ‘positions the archive as the nucleus of a continuing cultural forcefield, maintaining colonial divisions to (physically and metaphorically) fence Country off from its rightful custodians.’ Magnus discusses how Gough’s startling archival interventions, movement through Country and reparative gestures expose the ‘false perception of cultural absence’ of Tasmanian Aboriginal people, to challenge colonial divisions manufactured by the archive.

Every act of archiving paradoxically excludes and destroys as much as it seeks to preserve. The selection and care of certain objects frequently tell us the narratives and histories deemed important enough to maintain. That this is neutral or self-evident is frequently challenged by artists. Here in two counter-archival projects we see how poet Brandon K Liew and artist James Nguyen create their own collections, assembling the peripheral to contend with broader nationalist narratives that sustain an object or text's cultural relevance.

Poet Brandon K Liew’s contribution A Wasteland of Our Own draws together voices and readings of and by post-war Malaysian poets. Coveting their work for many years, Liew sought out the poets, many of whom were still active. Compiled as an assemblage of videos, poetry readings and interview excerpts with poets Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, Wong Phui Nam, Latif Kamaluddin and Salleh Ben Joned, Liew’s assemblage is part of an ongoing archive for future generations.  

James Nguyen’s Collection of Anglo-Australian Arts comprised of pieces of ‘Australian history’, acts to provide an alternate purview to think about national narratives of the penal colony, war, white history and the gold rush. In Nguyen’s hands these objects become a critical mnemonic for narratives previously unread or sidelined by a homogenising proprietary whiteness. In Archival Retribution: The Nguyen Collection of Anglo-Australian Arts in Context Nguyen traces how he came to acquire these objects, what he has discovered about them and their value as pedagogic and artistic tools that continue to expose narratives often neglected.

As we developed Art + Australia’s own digital archive we have been conscious of digital obsolescence and deletion that seem to be the fate of much online content. It is an issue and problem that Olivia J Bennett confronts head on, critically examining institutional deficiencies and neglect in the preservation of digital artworks. Bennett charts recent museum, publishing and artistic projects that have suffered from digital mismanagement and asks, ‘is every disappearance a failure, or does vanishing create space for new, less institutionalised forms of memory and circulation?’

This too is a question posed by artist and editor of Darpa Press Rowan McNaught's artistic contribution “Not a Spectral Line Excited”: How to Recall a Standard. McNaught turns to the Request for Comments (RFC) archive that has circulated since 1969, proposing technical standards to unify the systems and protocols that make up the internet. McNaught’s Memo somnographically intervenes into the RFC archive, enfolding readers in a dream, drawing us back to the anarchic beginnings of the RFC before its present status as an artless mixture of corporate capture, administrative bureaucracy, and reactionary anti-bureaucracy. 

And while this and the first issue of 'The Fever' radically departed from what may be traditionally considered an archive, in the final contribution to this issue Adrian Fernandez’s Archiving a City: The Heidelberg Project in Detroit goes yet further. Taking the notion of an archive to the street, Fernandez discusses the sedimented layers of a city’s history accrued in Tyree Guyton’s total artwork the Heidelberg Project in Detroit. Frequently at risk of arson, gentrification and government intervention, Fernandez describes Guyton’s immense installation as a ‘city archive’, one that has continually enfolded civic narratives of racism, activism, economic collapse and community building into its bricolage.  

The contributors to 'The Fever: Part One and Two' take us on many detours that constantly revise, animate and interrogate what an archive is and how it can be used. Amidst this feverish activity artists and thinkers restlessly contend with what is inhibited by an archive’s structure, its narratives and what is omitted. To create and reimagine the archive has become a powerful method for artists and thinkers to expose its powerful impression on the present and how, paradoxically, alternate forms of remembrance may lead us towards a more equitable future. Embedded across 'The Fever: Part One and Two' we see how art and its discursive network untangle the lineages of power that pervade the archive, seeking to articulate alternate forms of cultural preservation through art and praxis.