Archives are far too often equated with static fact-vaults — dusty shelves of paper, clean boxes that speak truth to willing ears. But archives are not objective. They are edited silences, repositories not only of what was kept back, but of what was left out. Their apparent objectivity hides a quiet choreography of power: who is remembered, who is omitted, and who never even had the chance to speak in the first place. To that extent, the most revealing element of any archive isn't what it includes — it's what it doesn't have.
The power of an archive is not in the record but in its selection. Every collection is a result of the choices of archivists, institutions, and their societies. What is considered "significant" — a legal charter, a photo, a diary — is filtered through culturally informed glasses that are gendered, raced, classed, and imperial. For centuries, these glasses have silenced margins. The silence concerning the enslaved, the colonized, the poor, or the undocumented is not accidental; it is structural. Their erasure teaches us as much about the current that constructed the archive as it does about the past it seeks to conserve.
Michel-Rolph Trouillot has previously argued that "silences enter the process of historical production at four crucial moments: the moment of fact creation, the moment of fact assembly, the moment of fact retrieval, and the moment of retrospective significance." In other words, history is not an unequivocal narrative but performance — and archives are its stage. The silences surrounding what is spoken and what is erased reveal the quieter violence of oblivion. An empty folder, a lost photo, or a blacked-out name tells a great deal about whose histories broke the complacency of the master narrative.
This silence is abusive, yet productive. The absence of trace incites speculation, fancy, and re-make. Scholars, artists, and activists alike turn more and more to what Saidiya Hartman has called critical fabulation — the use of imaginative narrative to fill in the historical gaps without forgetting that such reconstitution is always speculative. In this way, the archive stops being a tomb and becomes a seedbed — a place where new histories can take root, driven by empathy and ethical imagination.
Digital archives have compounded the situation. On the one hand, the internet promises to democratize preservation: anyone can digitize, post, and circulate material once off-limits in ivory towers. Yet digital abundance can equally reinstall silence by obscuring nuance in noise. Algorithms, as archivists, curate invisibility — not in boxes and labels, but in search rankings and metadata. Forgetting is now mechanized in this new dispensation, and erasure faster than before.
At the same time, communities began to reclaim archival power. Decolonial and grassroots archives — from Black feminist zine collections to Indigenous oral history projects — resist the institutional bias of the traditional archive. They emphasize presence over preservation, living memory over frozen record. They resist the idea that knowledge must be written down to be true, that oral cultures, rituals, and collective memory are not as worthy as parchment or pixel.
The ethical issue, then, is not so much how we store history, but how we listen to it. To "hear" an archive, one has to read it contrapuntally — follow its silences, question why certain voices are absent, and decline to equate absence with blankness. Silence is not nothing; it is the fruit of suppression, resistance, or pain. The challenge to the modern historian or artist is to interpret silence not as absence, but as a symptom of the forces that condensed it.
Thus, archives are alive. They carry the breath of their creators' prejudice and the intention of those that read them later. Every session with an archive is an act of translation — not just deciphering what a document says, but what it does not say. And doing the act of translation makes the reader culpable of history's rewriting. We do not so much discover the past; we help to invent it.
The secret existence of archives is that they are haunted. They are home to ghosts of people who never consented to be remembered, and to the silences of those who never could be. Their silences hum beneath the surface, reminding us that history is not an edifice but an ongoing one. To address those silences in good faith is to understand that the truth is never whole — it is shattered, contested, and full of potential.
Finally, what we're referring to as the "archive" is not a building or a database but a mirror. It gives evidence of the values of the society that built it — and the bravery of individuals who will look into its dark corners. The job of the future is not to fill all the blanks, but to be present with the silence and inquire what the silence has to tell.