Extending recent media archaeological preoccupations, this essay examines the Argentine excavation project and art book, La Biblioteca Roja: Brevísima relación de la destrucción de los libros (2017), and suggests the particular importance of such comparative “(an)archaeological” inquiries into the technical systems essential to knowledge cultures and their evidential power regimes today. Combining multiple media and interdisciplinary methods—from visual drawings, essays, personal reflection, interviews, cultural analysis, forensic science, photographic documentation, and small press publishing—La Biblioteca Roja is a compelling experiment in dissident memory, as well as artifactual storytelling. The essay stresses its relevance as a rupture and intervention in current digitally informed, bioinformatic technical systems and knowledge cultures, and inquiries into continuities as well as differences between the technical systems of book cultures and more contemporary digital knowledge cultures, particularly with regard to their efforts to secure and territorialize knowledge and power through technical means that erase, destroy, and dismiss other knowledges and through them, other modes of life.

Keywords:
artifactual storytelling, dissident memory, media archaeology, book culture, Argentinian literary and media arts, La Biblioteca Roja
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2019
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