Host(ag)ed by the Institution: Digitization Between Heritage Preservation and Decolonization
Our time is one in which headlines regularly feature news about this or that death-world. This article studies the use of digitization undertaken from afar to preserve heritage that is under fire. Based on the example of the old city of Aleppo, it explores the possibility of imagining a decolonized digital archive for preserving Aleppine built heritage, and of the broader Global South. Since 2012, the Syria war catalyzed the establishment of remote research and digital archival efforts, primarily supported by European and North American institutions, with the intention of preserving Syria's cultural heritage to rebuild it postwar. Rather than looking at just the end product of documentation, my contribution examines the funding, access, and discourses around cooperation with local actors and digital tools used to conduct preservation from afar. Digitization emerged as a solution to a temporal dislocation – a matter of preserving what has already been lost. By storing a digital entry of a destroyed building, preservation has a cryobiological aspect: dead entries are shut away in a safe repository. This practice perpetuates the colonial legacy of knowledge production within a paradigm of preservation by determining how the loss is mourned, remembered, and yet to be rebuilt. To decolonize means to invoke and conjure the suppressed spectres and narratives of this paradigm. By excavating the injustice of the digital archive, it is possible to distil the pattern of hosting archives for purposes of preservation, one that is akin to hostaging. Un-hostaging preservation demands un-hosting the archive in Western institutions.