Abstract
This article rethinks the preservationist reflex that equates archival care with permanence. Drawing on post- and decolonial theory, it provincializes endurance as a historically situated ideal and foregrounds global traditions where disappearance, opacity, and cyclical renewal structure memory. It reframes vanishing as custodianship rather than neglect, introducing a taxonomy of protocols of epistemic disappearance—temporal, spatial, relational, semantic, and material—and a grammar of vanishing that operationalizes them as design tools. Extending to institutions, it outlines seasonal, dismantling, shadow, and nomadic archives as forms that measure success by their capacity to end well. A concluding framework articulates five principles—vanishing as care, duration as a right, opacity as protection, haunting/refusal as presence, and non-survival as integrity—through which disappearance emerges as an ethical horizon of custodianship.
Recommended Citation
Civallero, Edgardo
(2026)
"An Architecture of Vanishing: Toward a Protocol of Archival Disappearance,"
Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies: Vol. 13, Article 14.
Available at:
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/jcas/vol13/iss1/14