Reassembling Europe in an Dissenting Archive of Human Mobility

The paper contributes to the broader question how Europe as a political and cultural space is negotiated in the context of human mobility by critically assessing efforts of the “Colours of a Journey” (CoJ) collective to create a translocal archive of human mobility. CoJ develops archival practice and design to record multiplicity of “events” (and “non-events”), experiences and memories that are enacted, articulated and transmitted translocally and in which everyone and manywhere can become an archivist of heterogeneous experiences of human mobility. While particularly focused on the newcomers to Europe in the context of the European summer of migration, this archive maintains that assemblages of people on the move (but also regimes that attempt to govern these constellations) are ephemeral and defined by difference, multiplicity and contradiction as opposed to sameness, unity and consensus. As such, it contests spatial and temporal representations of Europe and human mobility by Frontext's Eurosor and Jora (Tazzioli, 2018). To understand how Europe is re-assembled in an archive that aims to disrupt the possibility of enclosing knowledge about mobility and migration within a particular regime, the paper connects ontology of difference and consequent problematization of European multiplicity (Biebuyck, Rumford, 2012) with the growing scholarship on emergent, ephemeral archives (Baldacci, 2016). In line with Stoler’s (2018) discussion of a Palestinian archive as dissensus, the paper envisions an archive as an open site that documents a multiplicity of interconnections of places, people, experiences, memories and temporalities and this way uncovers new geographies and temporalities of emerging global scapes. Focus is placed on the role of texts, sound, images and digital networks in de- and re-territorialisation of knowledge to better understand how truths and events are produced, transmitted and translated in the context of human mobility.