Archive, an essay by Niloo Sharifi

The ideas that underpin our creative programme are Sanctuary, Archive and Commons. We have invited three writers to reflect on these pillars and what those themes in relation to the library space mean to them. The final piece is by Niloo Sharifi, who explores archive, its cultural significance for community and identity, how it is often damaged or erased as a tool of oppression, and the ways in which we reach across generations and cultures through what we save and how we save it.

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Archives are collective memory. They are progress saved; they allow communities to trace their own past and preserve knowledge. Everyone who’s ever mourned a lost phone or laptop full of irretrievable files knows the pain of data loss. It feels like losing a part of yourself. 

Destroying the archive  has historically been used as a tactic of conquest. In December 2023, Israel destroyed the Central Archives of Gaza City, which contained thousands of important historical documents. In the 16th century, Catholic priests destroyed most Mayan codices in their quest to convert the population to Christianity. History is full of this stuff. Archives are a target because they contain life force. Like gaslighting in relationships, destroying archives facilitates abuse - without access to its own truth, a culture loses agency and can be overwritten more easily. 

‘We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained […] superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction.’ - Diego De Landa, Relación de la Cosas de Yucatàn, 1566

When I was 17, I was involved in a project about the ‘81 Toxteth Riots at KCC Live, a community radio station. We did archival research and interviewed people who were there, including a police officer. Learning about the racially motivated brutality, and two-tier policing that led to the riots, opened my young mind. I remember being appalled a few years earlier by the 2011 riots, implicitly trusting the messaging on the news which framed it as senseless violence. I started to think about how these things spring out of deprivation, suffering and mistrust. Attention to archives provides context, preventing narratives from being manipulated by those who benefit from misunderstanding between groups. 

I experienced the same thing in 2020. Nick Smith asked me to write a response to his exhibition at Output Gallery, ‘Where Were You When It Was Sh*t?’ which was made using found archival footage of Liverpool. It was lockdown and I went digging online in my bedroom, looking for old writing about Liverpool. I found crazy stuff, like a note begging Queen Elizabeth for money in 1571 signed ‘her majesty’s poor, decayed town of Liverpool’. 

I looked through newspapers in the Liverpool City Archives and found articles about the cholera riots of 1832, which happened because people believed cholera was a made-up conspiracy to cover up body snatching by the medical establishment. Loads of body snatching was happening in Liverpool’s docks. Corpses were being stolen and sold to doctors for dissection and it made people paranoid. They ended up gathering around a hospital, breaking the window and attacking the doctors. The cholera patient inside died without treatment.  

Reading about all of that during the time of 2020 anti-mask protests made me want to get off this sick ride. It made me see that cosmic scousers caught in the anti-government ideology to spiritual psychosis pipeline are suspended in an intergenerational standoff between power and the people it lies to. An atmosphere of constant justified paranoia breeds wild theories - the idea that humanity’s misfortunes unfold out of an interdimensional war with the Annunaki is not really that much crazier than what is actually going on. It honestly radicalised me to an extent that felt like a mystical experience, my whole body was filled with holy awareness of this twisted fate, the karmic helter skelter we can’t stop spiralling through. 

That’s the power of archive. It restores a lost connection; in the estranged lands of the past, we find ourselves. Patterns hiding in the turn of centuries reveal themselves and bestow understanding. The Queue Up And Dance archive allows us a brief glimpse into a happier genealogy - images of Quadrant Park show people having fun in the slim, happenstance margins of freedom occasionally granted by circumstance. People came from all over the country for a night there. The flyers and party photos feel warm and innocent; they evoke the fragility and honesty of youth, how it’s both fleeting and forever. 

Every second that passes we lose something, and we’re doomed to die and forget. So we cope; we snap photos, write diaries and songs, paint portraits. We decorate our lives with them. We leave our memories behind - then we collect them and keep them safe. There’s a living kernel of experience in archives. We cherish them because they are the residue of what is lost, something we get to hold onto. 

Whether its fringe beliefs about alien races altering human DNA to shorten our lifespans and curtail spiritual growth, tales of Atlantis, or stories in holy books about ancestors living for thousands of years, cultures across the world both past and present continually produce popular myths about lost epochs of human longevity. It reveals a shared anxiety about our limited biology, and a sense that we’re capable of learning so much more than one lifetime allows. 

In this way, archive becomes a medium for humans to recover some of that mythic longevity - growing together beyond the ravages of time, and beyond the veil. The human impulse to document for posterity finds urgency in the promise of death, and produces material that allows us a measure of collective evolution, beyond the meagre decades of our lives. 

nil00 is a musician, writer, filmmaker and fine artist that reaches out into the cold digital plane, sorting through the fractals in search of human warmth. 

Working fluidly across mediums, nil00’s music, digital media and art pushes the boundaries of traditional storytelling.