Bearing Witness

Articulating an Archival Practice

Abstract

The number and intensity of conflicts that our age is a witness to are both perplexing and overwhelming. With ongoing instances of wars, conflicts, insurgencies, genocide-level pogroms, riots, bombings, state & extra-state actions and operations, the people of our age have diversified the terminology pertaining to aggressive friction and violence. Furthermore, indirect violence and softer modes of conflicts – whether as forms of patriarchal, ethnic, racialised, colourist, ableist, or gendered enforcement of domination, or the colonial and caste-based extensions of supremacy – continue to alienate us from each other on a daily basis. We live in an age of rising ethnofascism and disintegrating democracies, where conflicts, pandemics, and human crises have become yet another tool for capitalist societies to recycle pain.