Unsunk Archives

This chapter explores how four of these artists, Dennis Adams, Bruno Boudjelal, Dalila Dalléas Bouzar, and Nadja Makhlouf, have excavated photographic archives of decolonization, reframing them as sites of retrospective reading and effectively proposing new forms of custodianship over this contested historical material. It expresses that archive-based artistic practices offer multidirectional ways of reading archives, moving beyond the state-led discourse on national sovereignty. The chapter, then, undertakes the work of “un-archiving” such practices from the “archival turn” in contemporary art, to borrow a term from Lynne Huffer. In an attempt to rethink poststructuralism's relationship to postcolonial theory, Huffer proposes the “un-archiving” of Algeria from the archive of French philosophy, taking her cue from a deleted passage about the anti-colonial revolution in the Cogito and History of Madness lecture held by Jacques Derrida in 1963.