‘Marked for destruction’ does not happen by accident or as a result of casual negligence; it is a deliberate action made on the request of the expert who draws a distinction between inactive files-those which take up space without ever being requested or augmented-and active files, which remain open to the future. In other words, the institutional archive, which is created, maintained, and used as a system, can become burdensome, and requires a supplementary system to facilitate its own destruction. The ideology behind the creation of the archive is the same which takes the decision to destroy it. To the archival specialist, important files are those which are requested by researchers and journalists, or which continue to expand in size over time. Forgotten files are, necessarily, those which deal with marginal events or less important individuals: the things that no one cares about. The archive is a manifestation of civilisation: an embodied desire to preserve the contiguity, plurality and contradictions that together make up a collective memory. At the same time, it is inevitably a reflection of a culture’s awareness of its own memory. During periods of decline, that memory begins to fade, which is when the specialist is brought in to distinguish what is important from what is trivial.
—Iman Mersal, Traces of Enayat, tr. Robin Moger
