According to Harding, “While
the collector … discriminates between objects, the archivist accumulates with
no declaration of what specific value that material may hold for future users.”
(Harding 2002). It seems that a museum collection entails generating meanings.
As Eugene Dillenburg quotes, the museum collection is ‘a “unique contribution
to the public by collecting, preserving, and interpreting the things of this
world.”’[1] On the other hand, it seems that
archive’s most dominant feature is an accumulation. But what kind of
accumulation? Is archive like an old, forgotten piece of furniture accumulating
dust?
Archive is an action, a
place and an object that bares the future yet without meaning. Harding writes: ‘Derrida proposes that
archives offer the opportunity for a new persona: the “historian of promise” …
(who) would work at the vertiginous moment of suspense at which the future is
unknown and unknowable”. (Harding 2002). This poetic expression, a “historian
of promise” implies someone who is capable of looking simultaneously in two
opposite directions.
Situating this discussion in
the field of maternal subjectivity, it takes me to the births of my sons where
I found myself directly engaged with the unknown and unknowable future. Here I
am the archivist. I, the woman who gives birth, am surrounded by objects such
as scissors, containers, bed-sheets and towels, all sterile; immersed in an
action of the most enormous dimension: life or death. In this building,
hospital or home, the former maintains institutional order whereas the latter
maintains a more subjective, private order ‘something’ commence and command, my
child. Like the archive, the mother is situated between the public and the
private.
[1] Eugene Dillenburg is assistant
professor for Museum Studies in Michigan State University. Eugene Dillenburg’s
‘What, if Anything, Is a Museum?’ American Association of Museums. (2011).
Retrieved January 2011 from http://www. aam-us.org/aboutmuseums/ whatis.cfm.
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