Archiving Care: A Counter-Archive for Artistic Precarity
A living, consent-based archive co-created by marginalized artists whose work is too often forgotten, extracted, or erased from institutional memory.
Practices that hold this archive
Trauma-aware care
Accessibility focus
Digital safety tools
Renewable consent
Artist-controlled view
Community care
Non-extractive ethics
Anonymous or named
Right to be forgotten
Context-rich stories
About Us
Archiving Care: A Living Counter-Archive
Our project responds to a long-standing crisis: the systemic erasure of marginalized artists’ labour, legacy, and cultural knowledge.
Many artists are invited into institutions only during heritage months or short-lived REDI initiatives, after which their contributions disappear from view. This creates a cycle where institutions benefit from temporary visibility while the artists’ work is forgotten once the spotlight fades.
The Counter-Archive of Care interrupts this cycle by offering an alternative memory infrastructure grounded in care, consent, and collective authorship.
Many artists are invited into institutions only during heritage months or short-lived REDI initiatives, after which their contributions disappear from view. This creates a cycle where institutions benefit from temporary visibility while the artists’ work is forgotten once the spotlight fades.
The Counter-Archive of Care interrupts this cycle by offering an alternative memory infrastructure grounded in care, consent, and collective authorship.
What makes this archive different?
Our counter-archive centers care, consent, and community. Artists decide how their work appears, how long it stays, and who is able to access it.
Our commitments
We practice renewable consent, non-extractive access & the right to be forgotten, building a memory space that can change as artists’ needs change.
Who holds this work
Artists, organizers, and cultural workers co-govern this project, sharing responsibility for ethical memory, community safety, and how the archive evolves.
How it works
How the counter-archive works
Our process is simple, ethical, and grounded in meaningful consent. Artists decide how their work lives in the archive, and they can change their decisions at any time.
Upload your work
Add images, zines, audio, writing, or multimedia pieces, plus any brief notes that feel important.
Enter the archive
Your work appears in the archive according to your visibility choices as part of a living, evolving collection.
Renew or remove anytime
Update your settings, tweak visibility, or remove your work from the archive whenever it feels right for you.
Update your narrative
Add new context, reflections, or materials over time so your entry grows alongside your ongoing practice.
Set your visibility
Choose whether your work is public, community-only, or private so it’s only seen by the audience you trust.
Control your consent
Decide how long your work stays online and if it can be shared, cited, or used beyond the archive.
Join the Counter-Archive of Care
Help build a living, consent-based archive that protects the stories, labour, and creative memory of marginalized artists. Become part of a community that refuses erasure and practices care, solidarity, and agency.
Who this is for
Who This Archive Supports Most Deeply
A collaborative space that uplifts artists, audiences, researchers, and cultural workers by offering safety, agency, ethical engagement, and protection against erasure.
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Artist controlled visibility
Renewable consent in use
Institutional ownership
For artists and creators
Share work with renewable consent and control over visibility.
For community members & peers
Witness and support lived experiences through care centered engagement.
For educators & researchers
Use contextualized materials within artist set boundaries.
For cultural workers & institutions
Explore care based models for ethical, long term memory.
Latest Additions
Latest from the Archive
A growing collection of artworks, stories, and creative responses from marginalized artists navigating precarity, identity, and care.
Portraits of Care and Precarity
Intimate visual stories capturing how artists hold themselves and each other through unstable conditions and emotional labour.
View story
Performance and Moving-Image Stills
Film frames and performance documentation exploring embodiment, protest, and collective presence.
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Zines and Mixed-Media Spreads
Handmade pages, collage layers, and annotated fragments documenting lived experience outside institutional formats.
View story
Featured works
Uncover New Voices In The Archive
A living collection of works by marginalized artists, showing how care, precarity, joy, and resistance are held in everyday creative practice.
Intimate visual stories of care
Zines, collage, and text based works
Audio, video, and performance pieces
Portraits of care and precarity
A collection of intimate photo works that follow artists through studios, homes, and community spaces. These portraits show how people navigate survival, burnout, and support networks in real time. Together they trace the everyday gestures of care that hold artists up inside systems of precarity.
Zines and mixed-media spreads
Handmade zines, collage pages, scans of sketchbooks, and layered text fragments that carry DIY memory practices. Torn edges, tape, handwriting, and photocopy grain become part of the storytelling. These works foreground queer, feminist, and community-rooted narratives that deliberately live outside institutional formats.
Archival documents and lived records
Flyers, letters, contracts, receipts, grant emails, and screenshots that expose how institutions invite, frame, and sometimes abandon marginalized artists. Marginal notes, redactions, and timestamps reveal what is said officially and what remains unsaid. Together they map patterns of tokenism, bureaucratic violence, and quiet forms of resistance.
Performance and moving-image stills
Photographs, film frames, and documentation of live actions, rituals, rehearsals, and stage experiments. Blurred motion, grain, and partial views emphasize that not everything has to be captured fully to be remembered. These images hold the energy of performances that center embodiment, protest, vulnerability, and collective presence.
Sound pieces and voice-based works
Audio recordings, voice notes, interviews, poems, ambient soundscapes, and experimental compositions. Breaths, pauses, background noise, and overlapping voices become part of the archive, not errors to erase. These works make space for stories that do not fit neatly into images or text, foregrounding listening as a form of care.
A constellation of artists, peers, supporters, and caretakers who make this archive a living, relational space — holding one another through care, collaboration, and shared presence.
Meet the People Who Shape This Community
Community
Amir Dulatov
Website Developer
Developed the entire website and designed all of its content, shaping how the archive is presented and experienced online.
Anna Jiang
Project Member
Presents this project through visual work and collaborative moments that help introduce the archive’s purpose and care-based approach.
Timothy Park
Project Member
Shares and presents the project’s digital structure, highlighting how the archive protects artists through consent and visibility tools.
Shunyu Chen
Project Member
Helps present the project by focusing on narratives of care, burnout, joy, and the everyday realities this archive is meant to support.
Leah Sota-Yemane
Project Member
Introduces the project through access-centered practices, showing how transcripts, captions, and multi-format paths welcome more people in.