AAVV, Foam Magazine #59: Histories, 2021

Archives are all around us: in the form of family albums, or the community, city and national archives. We tend to perceive them as places and spaces where memories and evidence of histories are kept, preserved, indexed and certified; as repositories of traces, and treasure coves of relics and narratives. However, they are also very complicated entities, as the construction of archives all too easily lends itself to the curation, staging, erasure and manipulation of histories in ‘the public eye’. The new issue of Foam Magazine focuses on the archive as subject and looks at contemporary ways of engaging with archival images, and their remediation as a form of activation and critical analysis. The relationship between photography and the archive is a symbiotic one, but also an inherently problematic one, which is why the questions addressed in this magazine relate to its construction, and place decolonial approaches at the centre of the conversation.