Building a Counter-Archive: Performing the Lost Histories of Migration and Exile
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1995), Jacques Derrida redefines the archive as a site where memory, power, and law intersect. Far from neutral, the archive operates through inclusion and exclusion—determining what is preserved or erased. Building on Derrida’s insights, this article examines how artists Doris Salcedo, Arkadi Zaides, and Marina Davydova confront the violence of disappearance and the politics of erasure within the context of forced migration and exile. Through close analysis of Salcedo’s Palimpsest (2013–2017), Zaides’ Necropolis (2019), and Davydova’s Museum of Uncounted Voices (2023), the article explores how each work reimagines the archive as an embodied, performative space. Drawing on Heiner Goebbels’ concept of the aesthetics of absence, it argues that these artists construct meaning not through presence, but through erasure, silence, and trace. Human actors are replaced by non-human agents—objects, sounds, and data—that evoke the missing and ungrieved. The article situates these works at the intersection of performance studies, memory theory, and migration studies, showing how performative practices illuminate the spectral dimensions of historical violence. Together, these artists offer a counter-archive—one that resists institutional authority, foregrounds absence as an ethical space, and restores the disappeared to collective memory through acts of performative remembrance.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it