Boundary archive¶
Summary: Mademli's central concept in chapter-1-crisis-and-nationalism. A boundary archive is one in which "media and technologies of preservation, restoration, and exhibition resist the process of monumentalizing history by embracing partiality and acknowledging the liminal in its material translation." The concept extends Susan Leigh Star and Geoffrey Bowker's boundary-object theory into the field of archival practice.
Sources: cinema-of-marbles-draft-2025-12-30.md, section 1.1.4 ("Framing the Boundary Archive," lines 568–741); reprised throughout the dissertation.
Last updated: 2026-05-24.
Origin in boundary-object theory¶
The concept is built directly on Susan Leigh Star and Geoffrey Bowker's "boundary objects" — objects that maintain "interpretive flexibility" across overlapping social worlds while remaining recognizable enough across those worlds to serve as means of translation. Mademli quotes Trompette and Vinck: "the invisible infrastructures to which boundary objects contribute via the conventions and standards they channel."
She also quotes Huang and Huang: "If [boundary objects] have different meaning in different social worlds, but their structure is common enough to more than one world to make them recognizable means of translation, the management of boundary objects is key in developing and maintaining coherence across intersecting social worlds."
Why "archive" and not "object"¶
The shift from boundary object to boundary archive moves the analytical frame from a single artifact to a system of preservation, exhibition, and restoration. The boundary archive is not merely an archive that contains boundary objects — it is an archive whose own technical-institutional infrastructure is itself in a boundary position, refusing the imperative to nationalize, monumentalize, or close off the meaning of what it holds.
The Manakia film stock as paradigm¶
The concept is grounded in a material specificity: the two-millimeter perforation deviation in the Manakia brothers' Bioscope-300 film stock, which made the footage flicker when run through standard projectors. This flicker is treated not as a defect but as the boundary archive's signature property — "the destabilized, flickering image renders visible the technologies that manufacture vision, redistributes agency, and re-directs our attention to the processes of mediation."
Topology and typology¶
A recurring claim is that "the typological function of the archive is inextricable from its topological one." Boundary archives operate at borders — the Greece / North Macedonia frontier, the dissolved Ottoman vilayets, the Aegean coast — and their topology is part of what they preserve and contest. The map and the archive are not separable.
Against immutable mobiles¶
The boundary archive is positioned against Latour's and Law's immutable mobiles: objects "produced by inscription and transported back to the center, and then combined with other such objects." Where the immutable mobile travels while retaining its internal state (a marmorized form), the boundary archive remains mobile precisely by not retaining that state — by allowing partial, situated, interpretively flexible relations.
Where else the figure recurs¶
- The Manakia collection itself, when read as transnational heritage rather than national property (Ch 1).
- views-of-the-ottoman-empire as a deliberately open-ended, fragment-based curatorial practice (Ch 1).
- The Shit and the Fan / LabA as a counter-curatorial mini-archive (Ch 3).
- the-caravan-project in its rhizomatic phase, before retreat into festival distribution (Ch 4).
- archipelago-network is read as not quite a boundary archive despite its rhetoric (Ch 4) — a useful negative case.