Josh Watkins

Collection of literary submissions in a variety of formats

Inside MAKE #16, “ARCHIVE,” you will find stories, poems, essays, conversations and visual art oriented around concepts of memory, preservation, photo negatives and negative hands, disappearing/reappearing faces, letters sent and never received, lost and recovered traces; in short, the archive (or its simulacrum). One is reminded of Jacques Derrida’s “Archive Fever”: “The concept of the archive shelters in itself, of course, this memory of the name arkhe [rule, government, beginning, origin, first place]. But it also shelters itself from this memory which it shelters: which comes down to saying also that it forgets it.” Archives are assembled to remember a first place, an origin site that houses historical codes and modes of order, but they are also, weirdly, selective mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion that strategically forget, reassemble or reorder the objects of memory. An archive remembers inasmuch as it forgets, stores away (for later), blurs, and obscures. The archive you will encounter in these pages is one that plays with these notions, and we hope you will enjoy it.