Introduction with Lorenzo Pezzica

Archives are not repositories of the past, but fundamental technologies for the production of power in the present. Every archive selects what will be remembered, stabilises information, makes its reuse possible and increases the capacity for action of the system that controls it. In the specific case of “our” archives, every autonomous archive builds a shared memorial capacity, makes available the positive or negative experience accumulated by struggles, prevents collective knowledge from being dispersed, and increases the capacity for action of future generations. It is a political repertoire aimed at action.

A question arises, however: that of memorial inequality — an asymmetrical distribution of the capacity to produce memory, and consequently to preserve it, with significant political implications. Certain historical subjects, such as states or the great noble houses, have been able to accumulate and transmit — in some cases for centuries — enormous quantities of experience, to transform them into organised knowledge, and to reuse them indefinitely in order to increase their power and impose a narrative meant to legitimise the existing social order. Other collective subjects — despite the many ways in which, from below, peoples have managed to pass down a part of what is called popular “wisdom” (a wisdom often, though not always, made of rebellion against the abuses of the powerful) — instead live in a condition of constant memorial precariousness. That is, they experience a continual loss of their own experience, due to the inability to preserve and transmit it, or to the impossibility of doing so because of the repression that inevitably befalls attempts to build a narrative alternative to the one that legitimises the domination of the few over the many. It is no coincidence that, as the rebels of history have learned at their own expense, the worst condemnation — or, if you like, the most bitter defeat — is the damnatio memoriae.

The asymmetries of “memorial capacity”, as we might positively define the power to produce memory, are often hard to perceive in everyday life, immersed as it is in that present time in which the dimension of action prevails, yet they produce deep and lasting effects. Communities without archives, and movements that struggle to preserve their own experience, are often forced to start over from scratch each time.

Freedom, in this perspective, also consists in being able to autonomously build one’s own collective memory, from which to bring forth a narrative capable of making an impact on the society in which one lives; and the fundamental “political” problem is, first of all and once again, to become aware of one’s own power.