Archival Textures

Archival Textures is a publication series edited by Tabea Nixdorff. It was founded with the intention to find and (re)distribute writings of the past that can inform our current vocabularies of solidarity and resistance against normative perspectives on our bodies, desires, and forms of cohabitation. Taking this intention seriously also means to allow the work to be disrupted by what deeply disturbs and scares us in the present moment.

The publication series Archival Textures seeks knowledges that are continuously obscured by normative perspectives on our bodies, desires, forms of cohabitation and expression. This entails critically tending to the site of the “archive,” as many institutional collections reinforce these normative perspectives and understand knowledge as something which can be classified, authorized, and recorded into a single intellectual framework. With Archival Textures, we draw from unlikely holdings of established archives and turn to local community archives, personal collections, and conversations to find writings of the past that can inform our current vocabularies of resistance and solidarity. By way of (re)assembling, translating, transcribing, annotating, and supplementing archival texts, the publications weave a poetic texture of knowledges, situating them within a transnational and intergenerational fabric of belonging. Each book is edited with a subversive strategy in mind, and is a testament to affective, collaborative practices and modes of research, building on queer, Black feminist thought.

With Archival Textures, they aim to make archival research on feminist design strategies – as developed and employed by previous generations in the Netherlands and through transnational solidarity – available in print and in English translation. Several small printed publications are focusing on a strategy such as ‘amplifying’, ‘(re)claiming’, ‘building’ or ‘mapping’, through the lens of archival textual and visual material from the so-called Second Wave Feminist Movement, with a focus on queer, anti-racist, intersectional initiatives. Reproductions of the archival materials are accompanied by English translations, editorial notes and transcriptions of intergenerational conversations.