"What do you do with the archive once it has let you in? What do you do if it resists your touch, if it starts to slip away from you and crumbles to ashes in the fragments' lack of framing?"

The fourth volume of the con·stel·la·tions series emerges from a collab­oration between the artist Julia Lübbecke (Former Dorothea Schlegel Artist-in-Residence) and After Accumulation, a working group concerned with the archive as a site where selective visibility, dynamics of power and the desire for preservation intersect (EXC 2020 & CRC 1171 Affective Societies, Freie Universität Berlin).

The Dirty Archive combines a photographic docu­mentation of Lübbecke's exhibition Kleber und Falten (2023–2024; photographs by Dorothea Dittrich) with contributions by Sima Ehrentraut (Constellations), Julia Lübbecke and Kira Dell & Laura Seidel (Neun Kelche) that critically engage with archival practices and the archive's inherently compromised materiality.

   

Julia Lübbecke, Sima Ehrentraut, Kira Dell & Laura Seidel. The Dirty Archive. con·stel·la·tions 04. Hamburg: Textem Verlag, 2025 (open access).