20 Seconds Issue 9 Out Now!
Order "The Archive" online
20 Seconds Magazine Issue 9, “The Archive,” is out now!
Featuring: A Fidai Film, Archivio dei Movimenti di via Avesella, Dónal Foreman, GAUNG, Giorno Poetry Systems, Journey into the Blue Dimension, Marcela Paniak, Pwani Tapes, wandering translators
The Archive:
Archives are sites of revolutions. Archives are loaded guns, and weapons found in old cabinets—in need of a good cleaning. Archives are the wars where memories are torn out of a generation’s chest so that memory becomes pain. In the violence of societally numbing bureaucracy and propaganda, archives are the places closest to home where the truth is painted over; where the story gets “too complicated” to have an honest, straightforward answer. Archives, in other words, are mirrors—for us, our societies. It is in the archive that we learn about who we were, who we are going to be and, maybe—if we can cut through the smog of oppressive capitalism and moral apathy—who we are today.
It is in the archive that we fight to reclaim histories and to act as allies to those who no longer have the means to do so, often as a result of colonial violence. It is in the archive that power balances must be destroyed and built back up again in new, more just distributions. For all our questions about how we ended up here—with multiple genocides supported and/or funded by the “democratic” West—we can find the root of that racist, xenophobic oppression and ideology in archives, historiography and museology.
There is a method to this archival inquiry, and it is not armed resistance. That is our privilege. It centres on an idea put forward by Italian historians like Giovanni Levi and Carlo Ginzburg, called microhistory. Scholars like Ginzburg posited that by shifting our focus from larger historical canons to smaller anomalous characters and the lives they lived, we might not only be able to validate their stories as worthy of being told, but we might also learn something more representative of events as they played out on a larger scale. Through this lens, 20 Seconds Issue 9: The Archive details the stories of individual archives all over the world; it is a reminder that archives are contentious places, worthy of our attention and action. They are reflections of a very basic concept: To forget is a privilege, and a grave error.
Daniel Melfi
Listen to AnaRosa Ibañez for 20 Seconds Issue 9:
Listen to John Giorno for 20 Seconds Issue 9 :
Listen to wandering translators for 20 Seconds Issue 9:
Listen to Zuhura & Party for 20 Seconds Issue 9:
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Stay tuned for information regarding our upcoming launch events:
Dispaccio (Naples) on Thursday, 26 June, 2025
(Berlin) on TBD, July 2025
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