Lost Unities: The materiality of the migrated archives

Using images from the Museum of British Colonialism’s ‘Lost Unities’ virtual exhibition, this brief photo essay elaborates the material aspects of the displacement of archives to London from 37 former British colonies. The journey of the so-called Migrated Archives has been discussed by historians and archivists in political and technical terms, but through the lens of materiality, this piece seeks to understand these records through the space they occupy, the presences and absences they instantiate, their distances and journeys, to uncover insights into the meanings of their material displacements. It does this by exploring the spaces the records occupy and the spaces they leave empty. It applies the notion of ‘records-in-motion’ to chart how the Migrated Archives changes meaning, value and substance through the decontextualisations and recontextualisations of the processes of displacement. The essay then turns to the affective experiences of being close to or far from archives, the significance of place in displacement and the work that these papers – as material supports rather than as texts – do while they are displaced. Finally, the essay engages with the digital, to trouble the concept of digital repatriation by demonstrating the way that the digital introduces and sustains distance.