Archives are typically understood to be collections of historical documents that provide information about places, organizations, and people. As Ariella Aïsha Azoulay insists though, the archive is more than a dialectic of presence and absence told through documents from the past. She proposes that documents in the archive are active elements that speak to our political present. With this in mind, we will examine the ways that archives preserve and organize visual information, with a particular focus on the fraught relationship between performance and its documents. We will consider ways that artists and curators work in, around, and through the concept of the archive, as well as social movements that have formed their own para-institutional archives. By way of Saidiya Hartman, we will read against the grain of the archive to consider the unknown persons, collectives, and multitudes who are often not represented there. The word “archive” is both a noun, meaning the site where documents are housed, and a verb, the activity of placing, storing, and organizing documents in that house. Archives are often located in buildings run by institutions, but not always. They are also kept in shoe boxes and basements, in seed banks and in our bodies. There are Do-It-Yourself archives, living archives, digital archives, and accidental archives. There are archives of resistance and there are forms of resistance that subvert or transform the contents of the archive. Archives are comprised of letters, diaries, notebooks, sketches, memos, calendars, photographs, newspapers, statistics, emails, audio recordings, floorplans and scores. Even with this abundance of material though, archives are inherently incomplete and rife with omission. We can learn a lot about an archive by studying not just its contents, but the methods, logics, and structures that inform the way materials are organized. In this class, we will explore all these premises and more to uncover the deep political stakes embedded in the archive.