Walking the Digital Archive

A Museum Without Walls

Abstract

Archives are commonly conceived as safe spaces for the preservation of our shared histories, as storehouses where the past is shelved, classified, and catalogued inside their walls. However, archives also appear as venues of erasure and marginalisation, where the voices of objects of memory and intimate possessions get lost due to their presence, as mundane objects within the formal structures of record-keeping and preservation. Keeping this in mind, this essay introduces to its readers the Museum of Material Memory, founded by Aanchal Malhotra and Navdha Malhotra in 2017. This virtual museum offers an alternate paradigm of archiving, one that is digital, personal, and effective. As a crowd-sourced repository of material culture, it abstains from the rigidity of institutional archives, and rather curates a mosaic of lived histories and memories through the objects of everyday life from or before the 1970s. This essay explores the Museum of Material Memory as a ‘museum without walls’, a concept that challenges the very boundaries and conventions of historical preservation. The aim here is to take the reader on a digital walk by foregrounding individual memory as a legitimate source of archival knowledge.