A Complex Situation

For the past few weeks, I have been tracking the genre of the folder — the file, the paper container, I am talking with a friend and she reminds me of the feeling of holding a rope in your hand as you tie together bureaucratic documents, a specific gesture of movement across documents she remembers from Lahore, and I remember from Karachi — I think about containers, the hand movements and cultural histories of gestures around them, and—not to bring Marshall McLuhan into this but to bring McLuhan into this—how an archival medium shape the content it holds. I think of the work that hands do around files, and how different filing systems require different gestures, what codes are your hands permitted in which archive? Are you allowed to reach freely for a file? Are you handed one? Do you approach the archival holding with trepidation or are you allowed to be careless? Which archival settings, conditions, loneliness-es allow for freedom and which for surveillance? Are you working with dust, or are you working with clean sheets? Who is doing the cleaning, and who is maintaining the cleanliness and order of an archive/anarchive?

These questions seem to me to be an exercise in thinking about units of difference within and across cultural archives. The archive — hands moving across the sky. But what lends an archive such solidity that we are able to articulate it as a singular entity? While I work within the Reel Asian film festival archives, I happen to visit the ArQuives, another archival setting in Toronto. I see that Ali Kazimi’s film, Narmada: A Valley Rises (1994) makes an appearance in the Desh Pardesh festival holdings in 1998 at the ArQuives, and then the same film appears in the Reel Asian film festival archive in 2025, when the festival screened Kazimi’s film, and organized a post-screening discussion, too.


Desh Pardesh’s 1998 program featuring Ali Kazimi’s film, Narmada: A Valley Rises (1994), from the South Asian Visual Arts Centre (SAVAC)’s “Rare Footage and Documentation” collection Screening and Discussion of Narmada: A Valley Rises (1994) at Reel Asian International Film Festival 2025

In the ArQuives, I find archival content about ALoT,  a Toronto collective formed in the 1980s, which I then find in Reel Asian Film Festival’s archives as part of Amanda Ann-Min Wong’s short film, The Way We Are (2020), screened as part of the 2020 Reel Asian film festival. The ArQuives hold the content — the short film, part of the festival archive, tenderly explores the lives of the people embedded in those archival materials. I think about the relationship of these files to each other, housed in different institutions and databases, in separate folders, digitally and materially.

Digitized resource on the ALoT from the ArQuives: https://arquives.ca/asian-lesbians-of-toronto-flyer/

(Edited) Film Still from The Way We Are (2020)

What would it mean to take seriously the logic of separation that archival folders enact? What would it mean to take seriously the notion of borders enacted through institutions by the transformation of something-that-happened into ‘data’ that is put into files, an order of discrete-ness put into place on information that might exist as a messy web that runs through multiple archives in the city (and across the globe actually)? And what is there to gain or lose from such an approach?

Within the context of information studies, the file and the folder, the vertical cabinet containing files, have all been theorized as part of a lineage of information which is designed to be extractable and more efficient to retrieve as part of an institution’s functioning. My research in Pakistan, though, has taught me that the authority of the file is fragile; for example, when the 2022 floods hit Karachi television’s script library, the files broke open. The structural integrity of the folder did not hold. It is not going to hold, I think, against the forces of nature and the forces of history, which continually ask us to think across time and space, regardless of where an archive is located. In Pakistan’s media archives, I learnt that archives are made of dust; I learnt that archives can be made of waste; I learnt that garbage and waste is a system of its own. So then how do we re-think filing and classification systems that I think must acknowledge their own fragility? Not necessarily as a weakness, but as, Andrea Gibson once said, “the wound is the place the light enters.” It is important to think about this fragility because it is not, in fact, a problem/paradigm/risk that belongs solely to the Global South — climate crises can continue to affect filing systems, materials anywhere; the risk is embedded in the fantasy of solidity that the file enacts but that comes apart over time; there are lessons to be learnt from how to believe in this fragility and know that it is there. So how do we learn a method to work with archives that deeply acknowledges a container’s fragility, and that treats files and folders as open concepts rather than closed ones?

 Photograph from my fieldwork in Pakistan’s television archive in 2024

There is something about the festival archive, one whose classifications are still in formation, one that is being put together and resourced, that feels emotively and materially different than my experience at the ArQuives, for which classifications and retrieval systems have been in place for years now, and much more formalized. In the ArQuives, my hands are stiff — I am careful and clinical, requesting files in advance and finding them laying before me on a table when I arrive, awaiting my scholarly gaze. In the festival archives, and perhaps because I am engaging this archive through the designation of art, I feel much more playful. I notice that there are many different types of containers: there is a jar in one of the shelves containing festival memorabilia. There are binders and there are manila folders. There is a big, hand-made foam folder that Khanh has made to store posters, sourced from left-over signage. I consider what forms of engagement, modes of scholarship, research, classification allow for the play to exist; allow for relationality to evolve and recruit materials from within and across archives to speak to each other. I find myself almost insistent upon a form of engagement that allows my hand and my heart to put my archival endeavours in the Global South™ in conversation with here, where there is winter. A selfish desire for the form of the file to be open to play. Perhaps that could help us imagine an archival order in which files and folders—across institutions, across countries, across continents—speak to one another? Am I dreaming too big?


I wrestle with this question and consider: in the festival archives, there is a drawer of unsorted material in which the logic of the manila folder is not set-in-stone. In this drawer, I come across one empty folder, titled “A Complex Situation”. Nobody knows what the complex situation is, or what it refers to, but we simply know that it is complex! I hold this folder open and look at its orange assertion-of-being. I am delighted by its emptiness, by its inability to fit in, its open relation to the world around it. In the absence of contextual information, I decide to fictionalize the folder and its story:

Folding

The whole order of things rests here. This is the container at the beginning and at the end of the world, this material gesture from within the maze of information that will rest here borderless, mobile, swallowed every part of this, every part of memory, in your heart and in your face, in your face! In your face there are many things, and I am faced with everything, the totalizing force of the world is not heaven or hell but simply this. I want you to remember dust. I want you to remember that we have always begun with desecration, and detritus is the most foundational part of the story, if not the story. I want you to remember the floods coming, I want you to remember the wayward shaking upon which all solidity is built, I want you to remember the secrets and the stories, I want you to remember the underbelly, heavy, lovely, frightening, I want the wanting remembered, I want the turning away remembered, I want complexly and simply free free freedom, I want to love my fate, I want to hear ringing from the world —


sweet sweet yes, yes
be everything.