ARTchivist's Notebook: Archives as time travel
Archives as time travel
The past is never dead. It's not even past. -- William Faulkner
It's a new year, still shadowed by COVID, and I wish the recent past could die. But even amid the malaise of a seemingly eternal pandemic, there are things to be excited about, chiefly season 2 of "Beforeigners," which came out a few weeks ago on HBO Max. (This post will be a bit familiar if you follow me on LinkedIn, where I posted about the first season.) In the Norwegian show, it's as if the archives come to life in the middle of a police procedural. What better vehicle for making the past relevant in the present?
If you haven't seen it, the titular "foreigners" are not immigrants from different places, but from different times. Through a mysterious time-travel phenomenon, present-day Oslo has become a temporal mashup, with citizens from the present, the 19th century, the Old Norse world, and prehistoric times cohabitating, each maintaining something of their original way of life. This means sidewalks stacked with crates of chickens, horse-drawn carriages intermingling with cars, and goats roaming the halls of apartment buildings only to become tomorrow night's dinner.
(HBO)
What's mind-bending is that all of these "timeigrants" are from the same place. They all belong and lay claim to the city, although they speak different languages, practice different cultural rituals, and hold disparate, albeit historically appropriate world views. The show is not only an allegory for how we treat geographic immigrants, but also a literal depiction of layering different times and attitudes in a single place. It suggests how different realities (temporal, geographic, or otherwise) might coexist, even if they conflict.
It reminds me of Michelle Caswell's new book, Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work, which blew my mind with its advocacy for non-hegemonic, non-linear ways of understanding time in the archives. In Hindu, Afro-futurist, and in many queer and Indigenous traditions, time is not linear, but a cyclical phenomenon in which "progress" is illusory. In the cultural heritage world, we like to think we're preserving the past for the benefit of the future. But what if history just repeats itself and things never actually get better? What does it mean to preserve a past that is never really over?
With its inter-temporal marriages and trans-temporal people (those who choose to adopt the lifestyle, dress, and manners of another time), "Beforeigners" brings Caswell's argument for cyclical notions of time to life. In the show, expertise from other times often provides answers to present-day challenges. For example, in season 1, Alfhildr, a timeigrant from the Old Norse world who has become a police detective, recruits some Old Norse friends who use their medieval-era tracking skills to help her find a murder location deep in the forest, in the middle of the night.
Archival records are like these travelers from the past. What can we learn from the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic to help us through this present pandemic? What stories from the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s are useful in our current moment of racial reckoning? What do the suffragettes have to tell us about today's struggles over voting rights? Caswell rightly asserts that it's not enough to just collect and preserve. Archival records need to be activated now, particularly those she calls "corollary records" from moments and events that echo what's happening in the present. In this way, archives not only help us understand that history repeats; they show us how "the past" continues to flow unceasingly through our present.
Thanks for reading! If you have any comments or questions about this issue, please feel free to get in touch. Or follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter @SharonMizota.
ARTchivist's Notebook is an occasional newsletter musing on the intersection of archives, art, and social justice by me, Sharon Mizota, DEI metadata consultant and art writer.
I help museums, archives, libraries, and websites transform and share their metadata to achieve greater diversity, equity, and inclusion. Contact me to discuss your metadata project today.