Submit your work
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.
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.
Our Values
How This Archive Holds Care
We build the archive around care, consent, and community, so that every interaction with the work protects artists rather than extracting from them.
Care centered practice
We center emotional safety, context, and relationships when sharing work.
Renewable consent
Artists can change or withdraw consent whenever they need.
Community stewardship
Artists, organizers, and cultural workers co hold and guide the archive.
Anti extraction
Use of work always follows artist set limits, never institutional ownership.
Accessibility
We use clear language, gentle entry points, and flexible ways to engage.
Optional visibility
Artists choose whether work is public, community only, or private.
Context rich memory
Each submission keeps artist written framing attached to it.
Right to be forgotten
Artists can request complete removal, and we honor that fully.
Ask a Question
Understanding the Archive
Why This Counter-Archive Exists
Learn how this counter archive was built, why it centers marginalized artists, and what care, consent, and shared responsibility look like in practice across our policies, tools, and everyday use.
A counter-archive is a community-governed space that holds memory through relationships rather than institutional control. It centers care, context, and choice, allowing artists to define how their work lives, circulates, and changes over time.
Our Foundations
This project is shaped by key theoretical frameworks:
These frameworks shape how we design, curate, and care for the archive, guiding every decision away from extraction and toward accountability. They help us hold memory with renewable consent, shared authorship, and an ongoing responsibility to the artists whose work lives here.
Radical Empathy — Caswell & Cifor
We treat archives as relationships, centering care and responsibility.
Risky Archives — Cowan & Rault
We use renewable consent and flexible visibility instead of forever access.
Staying With the Trouble — Haraway
We remain with difficulty, holding precarity and care without erasing it.
DIY Zine Practices
We follow DIY, queer, and community zine traditions: handmade, shared, alive.
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.
View story
Zines and Mixed-Media Spreads
Handmade pages, collage layers, and annotated fragments documenting lived experience outside institutional formats.
View story