Defines Archive Fatigue and explores its implications on archival practices and interpretations.
This paper defines Archive Fatigue as the exhaustion produced when evidence accumulates faster than listening. It argues that archives can silence through absence, but also through excess: voices may be buried inside administrative forms, colonial categories, mistranslations, institutional metadata and documentary abundance. The paper reframes the archive as a surface of translation, restitution and care rather than a warehouse of kept material. It treats classification, ordinary life, ritual, house, threshold and metadata as political forms. Archive Fatigue asks the living archive to return position to what it holds: context, relation, name, uncertainty, dignity and possible routes of interpretation.
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Anto Lloveras (2026) studied this question.
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