Lexicon for an Affective Archive

'This beautiful compilation, which appeals to the senses like an exhibition catalog, invites the reader to engage with multiple reflections on specific archives, to think critically and holistically about the field of archiving, and to contemplate the monograph in itself as an affective archive (i.e., an endless process of memory-making). Interdisciplinary, multinational, multilingual, and multicultural, each of the work's distinguished contributing authors was asked to provide an entry or visual intervention that, to them, represents a particular archive, and to assign one word that sums up its affective core. Together, the entries that make up this lexicon show that the vocabulary of archiving is anything but definitive or prescriptive—it is personal, contextual, and variable. Blank space is also provided in the volume, inviting readers to record their own thoughts and functioning as an impetus to make them notice the impact of their own process of archiving or recording memories. This printing of the English edition is the product of the project's curators Palladini (Kunsthochschule Weissensee, Berlin, Germany) and Pustianaz (Università del Piemonte Orientale, Italy), and is based on the original 2015 publication, Leksykon Archiwum Afektywnego, edited in part by Katarzyna Tórz, head of programming at the Polish Audiovisual Institute.'