El Museo de los Desplazados: An Anarchive as an Epistemic Practice of Urban Activism

Abstract

This article analyses the Museo de los Desplazados (Museum of the Displaced), a collaborative platform conceived by the Left Hand Rotation collective to foster shared reflection on gentrification processes. This project takes the form of a collective and decentralised digital archive, functioning as an open, ‘in-process’ collaborative tool. Within the context of the proliferation of self-organised digital archives, this study explores how the Museum acts as a dynamic social object that articulates dispersed narratives. Drawing on Derrida’s concept of the ‘anarchive’, the research validates the hypothesis that there is a direct relationship between the profiles of autonomous collectives and their specific epistemic practices. The findings reveal that activists utilise the archive as a tool for legal defence, ‘heat-of-the-moment’ ethnography, and networking, thereby resisting ‘archival violence’ and constructing collective counter-memory. Ultimately, the Museum demonstrates that memory is not a guarded site, but a living network built through horizontal and rhizomatic collaboration.

1. Introduction

This article analyses the Museo de los Desplazados (Museum of the Displaced; hereinafter, the Museum), a collaborative platform conceived by the Left Hand Rotation collective for collective reflection on gentrification processes. This project takes the form of a collective and decentralised digital archive, with a marked artistic and audiovisual focus, conceived as an open and incomplete collaborative tool, and thus ‘in process’. The analysis of this social object is justified by the contemporary rise in community archives, defined by Flinn (2007) as the “grassroots” activities of documenting, recording and preserving the heritage’ of a community in which the community itself takes control of its own historical narrative. One manifestation of community archives is the proliferation of self-organised digital archives created by collectives and social movements, which represent an emerging and relevant political practice today. Its relevance lies in the fact that, far from being a mere repository, as will be demonstrated throughout this article, the Museum reveals itself as a dynamic social object whose function is based on articulating what would otherwise remain dispersed and disjointed. The archive is thus also a viable and necessary medium for legitimising forms of knowledge and cultural production in the present, situated in a hybrid space where activism and academic work converge.

This emergence of self-organised archives raises fundamental questions, as it challenges traditional conceptions of memory and power. The fluid nature of these platforms opposes the archive as a ‘fixed place of storage’ (Featherstone, 2006) and confronts the logic of ‘archival violence’ (Derrida, 1995) that excludes and silences. Therefore, the study of this case necessitates an inquiry into the intrinsic relationship between the collectives’ profiles, their epistemic practices, and the way they conceive this space of resistance. As we shall see, the Museum invites us to question the logic of the traditional archive, proposing instead the concept of the ‘anarchive’ (Derrida, 1995). This is understood as a space of resistance that focuses on what power excludes, operating autonomously from the local level and expanding through decentralised collaborative practices.

Based on the above, the objective of this text is to analyse the intrinsic relationship between the collectives’ profiles, their epistemic practices, and their conception of the archive, understanding the latter as a space of resistance that challenges the logics of archival violence. More specifically, based on this case study, it analyses the role of the Museum as a social object in the articulation of urban struggles against gentrification processes. To this end, framed within a larger ethnographic project on activist archives, this text studies the Museum as a paradigmatic case: an archive embodied in a collaborative digital platform that, far from being a mere repository, reveals itself as a dynamic social object whose decentralised artistic, documentation, and/or struggle practices resonate with the Derridean notion of the ‘anarchive’ (Derrida, 1995).

Under these premises, the present article is structured into several sections. The first section serves as a theoretical framework, addressing the archival turn in the social sciences, the critique of the traditional archive based on Jacques Derrida’s ‘archive fever’ (mal d’archive) (Derrida, 1995), and the emergence of activist archives as forms of counter-memory and political projects (Ashton, 2017; Kurtović, 2019). This is followed by methodological notes describing the design of a larger ethnographic project and the adaptation of the ethnographic method to the virtual environment for the study of this case. Thirdly, the case study is presented, focusing first on the subject of the research, the Left Hand Rotation collective, the origin of the Museum, and its connection with theories of the right to the city; and subsequently on the object, the Museum itself, which will be analysed in detail, with particular interest in its collaborative dimension across hundreds of decentralised nodes worldwide. Finally, the analysis of results will examine the implications of its digital, collaborative, and decentralised nature, and the epistemic practices detected among its collaborators, leading to preliminary conclusions that attempt to synthesise the findings in relation to the concept of the anarchive.

2. From Traditional Archives of Power to Activist Archives: The Emergence of the Anarchive

The Maite Albiz Women’s Documentation Centre (Centro de Documentación de Mujeres Maite Albiz) is a project by a working group of the Biscay Women’s Assembly (Asamblea de Mujeres de Bizkaia). Since the 1980s, it has focused on archiving and documenting the ideas and activities of feminist movements in the Basque Country. Across the Atlantic, the Brooklyn-based Interference Archive (NY) has explored the relationship between cultural production and social movements since 2011 through an open-access archival collection, fostering critical and creative engagement with the history of social struggles. Both collectives are merely two examples of the proliferation of self-organised archives created by social movements and collectives. This represents an emerging political practice that challenges traditional conceptions of memory and power. This practice is part of a contemporary rise in community archives, which Flinn (2007) defines as the “grassroots” activities of documenting, recording and preserving the heritage of a community where the community itself takes control of its own historical narrative. Interest in this phenomenon is such that the Spanish Government recently established the Historical Archive of Social Movements (Archivo Histórico de los Movimientos Sociales) with the aim, according to its website, of “gathering, disseminating, and providing access and research to this essential part of the Spanish documentary heritage” and the “transformative power of citizenship”. However, this text directs its attention precisely towards those self-organised archives that, thus far, have not been recovered (or patrimonialised) by institutions. As Flinn et al. (2009) argue, these independent community archives are often established specifically to challenge the ‘limitations and exclusions’ of mainstream heritage institutions, ensuring that the memories of those in conflict with the state or capital are preserved on their own terms. In this regard, sociologist Featherstone (2006) notes that the traditional archive has historically been linked to large institutions and the State, functioning as a warehouse for national memories and an instrument of control and surveillance. Nevertheless, in the digital age, life is increasingly lived “in the shadow of the archive”, expanding the criteria for what is deemed worthy of being archived. The opposition to the archive as a fixed place of storage is thus framed within discussions on the “will to archive” in contemporary culture and the changing nature of the archive in the digital era.

The critique of traditional archival science is based on this, understanding the archive as something broader than a conventional repository of documents, in line with the so-called “archival turn” in the social sciences and humanities of the mid-1990s (Featherstone, 2006). This turn is related to the digital turn—as both a technological and epistemological shift—but also to the economic and political impact of neoliberalism. Consequently, as will be demonstrated in this text, it is also related to the speculative and extractivist processes of land use which, like gentrification, are part of a deeper process embodied in the global model of the capitalist city (Rodríguez-Medela et al., 2016, pp. 16–17). This city, as philosopher Lefebvre (1974) suggested, has increasingly become an object of direct consumption, requiring postmodern urbanism to facilitate the displacement of populations from urban centres.

Derrida (1995) deconstructs the traditional notion of the archive, arguing that it is not a mere deposit of objective documents but a site of power and authority (arkhé), where it is decided what is preserved and what is forgotten. That is, it is simultaneously the origin of memory and the norm that organises that memory. This structure is governed by an “archontic principle” that selects, domiciles, and imposes an official order on what is remembered and what is forgotten:

The archons are first of all the documents’ guardians. They do not only ensure the physical security of what is deposited and of the substrate. They are also accorded the hermeneutic right and competence. They have the power to interpret the archives. Entrusted to such archons, these documents in effect state the law: they recall the law and call on or impose the law. To be guarded thus, in the jurisdiction of this stating the law, they needed at once a guardian and a localization. Even in their guardianship or their hermeneutic tradition, the archives could neither do without substrate nor without residence.

(Derrida, 1995, p. 10)

“Archive fever” (mal d’archive) is thus a compulsive desire to return to the origin and to preserve everything—a drive that is simultaneously creative and destructive, and which dialogues directly with Freudian psychoanalytic theory on memory and repression. In this sense, it links the desire to archive to both life drives (preservation) and death drives (repetition and potential destruction). Derrida emphasises that the materiality of the substrate (paper, digital) is crucial for the formation of memory, concluding that the archive is a dynamic battlefield between memory and forgetting, power and repression.

The anarchive emerges precisely at the limits of this logic, representing the radical and necessary counterpart to the institutionalised archive. It is not a mere synonym for passive forgetting, but an active force of subversion and resistance. The anarchive is the “violence of forgetting”, the “over-suppression”, and the “possibility of killing” the very law that the archon of the archive bears. The anarchive is, therefore, the manifestation of the death drive operating from within the system, challenging the integrity and permanence of the official record. Rather than a mere vacuum, the anarchive is the blind spot where institutional memory fails and local autonomous initiative emerges, resisting any attempt at total control and ensuring that no official narrative can ever be complete or eternal.

In this same logic of relating power and archives, anthropologist Stoler (2002) has examined how colonial archives are sites of power and omission, where absences and silences are as significant as the material preserved. In this regard, Caswell (2014) notes that community archives function as sites of resistance against the ‘symbolic annihilation’ suffered by marginalised groups in dominant records—a process where these groups are either omitted, silenced, or represented as a problem. Faced with this archival violence, the activist archive proposes a ‘representational belonging’ that legitimises the existence of displaced subjects. In this context, the emergence of activist archives, as suggested by anthropologist Kurtović (2019), does not seek nostalgia for a past, but rather recovers unrealised potentials and feeds contemporary political imaginaries. This approach aligns with the anthropological debate on the validity of archival sources, which suggests that what matters is not only “veracity stricto sensu”, but also the discourse articulated through them as a reflection of the mentality and ethos of an era (Carvajal Contreras, 2025).

The archive is thus also a viable and even necessary medium for legitimising forms of knowledge and cultural production in the present. Activist archives, created by and/or for citizen collectives and social movements, are therefore forms of counter-memory and critiques of the current system (Ashton, 2017; Kurtović, 2019); they are political and sometimes creative projects—as in the case of the Museum—that challenge traditional categories and explore new documentation methodologies, becoming new political projects in themselves. Ashton (2017) develops a feminist archive model (both material and digital) situated within the broader context of activism and feminist organisation. For her, the feminist archive is a circular process whose objective is to create the society we wish to see evidenced. In this sense, the act of archiving is not subsequent to the struggle but an integral and formative part of it. Furthermore, the work of archiving contributes to women’s empowerment by allowing them to take control of their own history and develop problem-solving skills. This work of representational justice further generates what Caswell et al. (2016) term an “affective impact”, by allowing individuals to suddenly discover their own existence and struggles reflected in a historical narrative, thereby validating their political subjectivity. Feminist archives, as activist archives, are critical tools with the potential to dismantle patriarchal, capitalist, heteronormative, and racist structures. They achieve this by preserving histories containing acts of violence, strength, and resistance, which are often excluded from institutional archives. Kurtović (2019), for her part, analyses activist archives such as the Archive of Antifascist Struggle of Women of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Yugoslavia (AFSW). She argues that, unlike other post-socialist archives that seek to settle scores with communism, these archives seek to recover and reuse the unrealised potential of Yugoslav socialism. The goal is to recover, through contemporary political imaginaries, a transformative historical subjectivity necessary for the current political moment.

One must question, therefore, whether in certain contexts it is still appropriate to speak of the archive, or if the Derridean concept of the “anarchive” is more pertinent. The anarchive is not the absence of an archive, but its counterpart: it represents what the institutional archive excludes or leaves out. It is the residue, the ungovernable or uncontrollable part that the logic of archiving—in its attempt to order and fix memory—inevitably generates. It resists both power and forgetting: the anarchive opposes archival violence and the death drive, which inherently forget and silence that which does not fit within their structures of power (Derrida, 1995).

3. Methodological Considerations for Ethnographies in Decentralised Digital Archives

This research is part of a larger ethnographic project on activist archives entitled ‘Activist Archives: An Ethnography of the Epistemic Practices of Self-Organised Citizenship’, the primary objective of which is to help understand contemporary modes of political participation in activism and how these are articulated through archives that mediate the production of knowledge used to intervene in public affairs. In this regard, the Museum case study is one of the nine cases that constitute the scope of this framework project.

Conducting an ethnography of an archive hosted on a web portal—https://www.lefthandrotation.com/museodelosdesplazados/ (accessed on 13 January 2026)—implies the adoption of methodological practices that are likewise virtual. This approach, commonly popularised as ‘virtual ethnography’ (Hine, 2000), requires the adaptation of the ethnographic method—including ethical considerations—to the study of computer-mediated interactions or the social and cultural practices associated with the use and production of the Internet (Estalella & Ardèvol, 2007). This necessity becomes even more pressing when dealing with cases that bring together a more or less dispersed community; for instance, migrants (Wijaya et al., 2022) or, as in the present case, activists spread across different and distant locations worldwide, under equally diverse circumstances.

Consequently, the majority of the ethnographic fieldwork, conducted between 2024 and 2025, was carried out virtually. With the exception of two participant observation sessions during two activities organised by Left Hand Rotation Madrid, the remaining observation and monitoring sessions of the ethnographic object—in this case, the Museum’s website and its related social media—as well as the interviews, were conducted virtually with individuals and collectives dispersed in locations as varied as Malaga, Madrid, Abu Dhabi, Santiago de Chile, and Mexico City.

Of the six in-depth interviews conducted, five were held with individuals and collectives who collaborated with the Museum, and a final one with Left Hand Rotation as its primary promoters. From the numerous collaborations available—the portal currently hosts 114 pieces—a total of five were selected based on geographic location, the personal/political profile of the interviewee, and the content of the piece. Within the Spanish context, two proposals were selected: the images and reflections from the action #gentrificatourtriball in the Malasaña neighbourhood, Madrid (2010), by the collective Todo por la Praxis (TXP)—for whom “the Museum is more of an anarchive than an archive”—and Castizo Urban Politics in the La Latina neighbourhood, Madrid (2011), by Álvaro Carrillo, who legitimises the role of the Museum amidst the uncertainty that “today it feels as though everything is at hand”, although in his view, “it is not truly all at hand”.

Within the Latin American context, three pieces were chosen: Barrio Egipto, in Bogotá, Colombia (2011), a multidisciplinary work by the collective Arquitectura Expandida (AXP), who conceive the Museum as an “archive that knows other archives”; the photographic work Mérida 90, on Mexico City (2011) by Livia Radwanski, who distinguishes between the “there” where the archive is located, and the “here” which “is where we engage in dialogue”; and finally, Notas en torno al barrio (Notes on the Neighbourhood), regarding the Italia neighbourhood in Santiago de Chile (2012), a graphic proposal by the architect and anthropologist José Abasolo, who joined the Museum with the aim of “collaborating in this mapping of global cases”.

The foundation of this work also incorporates a series of reflections on my active relationship with the Museum and with Left Hand Rotation in general between 2009 and 2016. This essentially consisted of a collaboration in the ‘Documentation’ section regarding the urban transformation of Granada, with several publications produced by the La Corrala Anthropological Studies Group, of which I am a member. This was followed by active participation in the workshop “Gentrification is Not a Lady’s Name” (Gentrificación no es un nombre de señora) in Murcia, alongside the organisation of parallel activities; and finally, the production of the collective book Cartografía de la ciudad capitalista. Transformación urbana y conflicto social en el Estado Español (Mapping the Capitalist City: Urban Transformation and Social Conflict in the Spanish State) (Rodríguez-Medela et al., 2016), coordinated by La Corrala and published by Traficantes de Sueños. In this volume, Left Hand Rotation contributed a final chapter as a “toolkit”, presenting the potential of the “Gentrification is Not a Lady’s Name” workshop in the struggles for the right to the city (Left Hand Rotation, 2016, pp. 293–306).

Finally, given that community archives have become a central area of discussion within critical and social archival studies since the 1970s—and most particularly in recent years—this research is also grounded in a dialogue between social anthropology and the most relevant specialised literature in archival science (Flinn, 2007; Caswell, 2014).

4. El Museo de los Desplazados: A Case Study of Urban Activist Archives

The following section presents the case study conducted on the Museo de los Desplazados, structured into two parts: the first focuses on its trajectory and primary content, while the second examines the role of the various collaborators who participated in the interviews. This latter part explores the pieces shared on the Museum’s portal by each participant, alongside the relationships and aims established within this space. Subsequently, in relation to these findings, the following section will present the analysis of the results of this research.

4.1. ‘Artivism’ and the Right to the City: The Origins of the Museo de los Desplazados

The Museo de los Desplazados is one of the projects of the artistic or ‘artivist’ collective Left Hand Rotation. Left Hand Rotation consists of two artivists who never provide their personal names or show their faces publicly on social media or in publications, thereby avoiding any personal gain for the sake of collective recognition. It is composed of two individuals from different parts of the Spanish State who met during their university years at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Complutense University of Madrid. An affinity for conceiving art and audiovisual production as a potential resource for social struggle lay at the heart of what would eventually become a collective in 2005. Later, Left Hand Rotation moved its central base from Madrid’s Malasaña neighbourhood—a local paradigm of gentrification—to the city of Lisbon, where they have been based for over a decade.

In Lisbon, we immersed ourselves fully in the housing struggle collectives; completely. We poured our souls into it. There came a point where our identity as a collective was further diluted, and we became simply two members of the Lisbon collectives, primarily handling audiovisual and communication matters within them.

(Left Hand Rotation, May 2025)

Since then, Left Hand Rotation has been developing projects that ‘articulate intervention, appropriationism, recording, and video manipulation’. One of their recent projects is Monumento Catástrofe: A Volta ao mundo em 80 catástrofes. This proposal is itself an archive of spaces and places, combining audiovisual and textual formats. On one hand, it includes the documentary Monumento Catástrofe (2022)—a road-movie through Portugal travelling across sites of catastrophe as a movement against the dual paralysis of despair and indifference. On the other, it features the open-access trilingual book A volta ao mundo em 80 catástrofes (Left Hand Rotation, 2022), a global tourist guide mapping 80 monuments—across many countries and every continent—erected to catastrophes and collective deaths (epidemics, femicides, colonialism, slavery, wars, ecocides, etc.). This project questions the monument as a representation of hegemonic power in public space and the manipulation of collective memory. This contribution, alongside others such as the aforementioned book Cartografía de la ciudad capitalista (Rodríguez-Medela et al., 2016), places the archival work of Left Hand Rotation within a hybrid space “where academic and activist work frequently converge”, reconfiguring it as “a site and practice integral to knowledge making, cultural production, and activism” (Eichhorn, 2013, p. 3).

Around 2005, when the term ‘gentrification’ was scarcely known in Spain, the two members of Left Hand Rotation began to address the problems associated with it. They utilised information-gathering methodologies that hybridised artistic practice and direct action, based on observation and theoretical study. One of these early artivist actions was the ‘Ghost Billboard’ (Cartelera Fantasma)1 at the now-defunct Cines Luna in the Malasaña neighbourhood, which as of today has been converted into a modern four-storey gym. Left Hand Rotation took advantage of the empty billboard of these forgotten central cinemas to post posters discussing drug trafficking, sex work, and video surveillance in the popular Plaza María Soledad Torres Acosta. This was followed by other interventions and joint actions with other collectives, such as TXP, with whom they carried out a poster-pasting campaign against gentrification—‘Neighbourhood Menu’ (Menú de barrio)—which, as they recount, became ‘massive’.

Following this, from 2010 onwards, they began developing workshops in numerous cities, first in Spain and later abroad (primarily in Europe and Latin America). The workshop titled ‘Gentrification is Not a Lady’s Name’ (Gentrificación no es un nombre de señora) gained particular popularity, arising as a response to the analysis of the role of culture in gentrification processes. The workshop’s positive reception in its first host cities quickly led to its popularisation among other collectives, especially through social media. This success was also due to the name of the workshop itself—an ironic phonetic analogy between what was then a clunky neologism mostly restricted to academia (‘gentrification’) and certain traditional Spanish female names belonging to older generations that have now fallen into disuse (e.g., Adoración, Ascensión, Consolación, Purificación…).

We were appearing first [on Google]; it was surreal. And of course, with such an ironic phrase and name as ‘Gentrification is Not a Lady’s Name’, which has since been copied and replicated in many places. Well, we are pleased about that.

(Left Hand Rotation, May 2025)

From this workshop emerged the idea of collectively constructing an archive that would serve as both a network and a collaborative platform.

…the first one was in Bilbao, at the Faculty of Fine Arts, invited by the Akme event. For that workshop, we prepared an action with the students involving commemorative plaques in Bilbao (…) And the other thing we brought was the Museo de los Desplazados. We said, ‘besides doing an action, let’s do something with the Fine Arts students to try and raise their awareness, because they are potential gentrifying agents like us’ (…). The Museum of the Displaced Facebook page (Gentrificación no es un nombre de señora), was created precisely in 2010 as a result of the Bilbao workshop. It now has around twenty-something thousand fans, which is quite a lot, of course, but at that time…

(Left Hand Rotation, May 2025)

One of the primary strengths of the workshop, and a cornerstone of its success, is its ‘glocal’ focus—one of the articulating axes of the Left Hand Rotation project. No two workshops are the same. While the common aim is collective awareness and political action regarding a global issue—the displacement of populations caused by gentrification processes—the design and materialisation of each workshop are distinct, based on the particularities of the city where it takes place. The aforementioned workshop in Murcia, in which I had the opportunity to participate actively in October 2014, focused on the conflict in the Santiago El Mayor neighbourhood. Residents there had been denouncing the socio-spatial segregation caused by the railway line that separated them from the rest of the urban environment for over two decades. A first phase in a local social centre, where some of those affected explained the problem and participants collectively designed actions, was followed by a series of activities in the public spaces of Murcia. These included, for example, ‘Absurd Speed: Breaking the Barrier’ (Velocidad absurda, supera la barrera), an action in the central and tourist-heavy Plaza de Las Flores that sought to directly challenge passers-by regarding the conflict over the undergrounding of the tracks in the south of the city; or a dérive through the conflict zone that ended spontaneously in a protest led by a large banner reading ‘Undergrounding Now’ (Soterramiento ya). The primary results of this comprehensive workshop were documented shortly after in the film Absurd Speed (Velocidad absurda).

Thus, the Museum began: a space from which to reflect collectively on the impacts of gentrification through audiovisual tools and interventions in public space. Almost two decades later, the Museum is presented on its website as a ‘collaborative platform offered as a tool for collective reflection on the conflicts associated with gentrification processes’, attempting to rescue ‘that which is lost’ in such processes. In other words, the city is seen as an archive in itself—as an ‘archive already in ruins’ (Benjamin, 2000).

These photographs appeared in a very—as I would say—‘casual’ or ‘haphazard’ way. They were the result of going out to lunch in the neighbourhood every day at different places, and at this time Instagram was just emerging. So, what I did was take a photograph of the façade. I started recording the neighbourhood, and later I began to realise that, clearly, in some of the photographs I had taken, the façade had quickly begun to change.

(Abasolo, on Santiago, February 2025)

The Museum thus connects directly with ‘Right to the City’ theory. The thought of authors such as Lefebvre (1968) and Harvey (2012, 2008) grounds this right within the context of a theoretical and practical struggle against capitalist urbanisation and the mode of production it perpetuates. In this sense, the Museum is an artivist practice that breaks with the logic of the capitalist production of urban space by creating an ‘alternative place’ and promoting its collective re-appropriation through the construction of a shared memory—a counter-memory. It is, in itself, a ‘space of hope’ in Harvey’s (2006) sense, a place where social struggle gains visibility and coherence through archiving. Its collective and decentralised nature, which allows each city or area to be autonomous in its conclusions, aligns with Lefebvre’s (1968) ‘citizen-centred’ vision of social change, as it emphasises the agency of collectives and social movements to create and transform the city, making urban space a site of collective struggle and the renewal of social bonds.

Alongside the axis of gentrification, they propose that of glocalisation, understood as ‘working from the local’ in order to ‘address the global conflict’. To this end, the project is embodied in an ‘archive’—a medium for which they propose two purposes: to serve as a tool for raising awareness of gentrification processes and generating empathy with them; and to be an open, collaborative platform ‘in process’ regarding conflicts over the right to the city.

4.2. El Museo de los Desplazados as an Open Collaborative Platform for Collective Reflection

The Museum is articulated through a website and utilises technologies such as Vimeo and open-source databases (MySQL) to organise its materials. This technical infrastructure supports its function of articulating what would otherwise remain dispersed and disjointed, serving as a tool for collective reflection on the conflicts associated with gentrification processes. But who prevents this dispersion? And what is being prevented from dispersing? Left Hand Rotation clarifies that the Museum is ‘in process’ and possesses a ‘collective’ scope, because:

…it exists thanks to the participation of local collaborators who, through their recordings, give shape to this container; its unique value lies in the personal and unrecordable experiences that everyone acquires in the process. Each city or area develops its own specific lines of inquiry and retains autonomy to reach its own conclusions. We propose working through interrelations with profiles potentially at risk of being displaced by gentrification processes, in actions involving the documentation of these processes or the dissemination of information to those profiles.

Among the collaborations—which by December 2025 totalled 114—the website highlights the three most recent: Lisbon Memories: Jojo’s Struggle (Manu Huertas), a photographic project about “the disappearance of Lisbon’s charm and essence and the loss of traditional professions through the eyes of Jojo, a bootblack who has worked for decades in Lisbon’s Baixa”; Excellent Location (Excelente ubicación; La Gran Paternal), an urban intervention on the role of artists in the gentrification of Buenos Aires; and City Occupied: A short documentary (City Occupied team and Maurício Brugnaro Júnior), an audiovisual piece on extractivist pressures in the urban spaces of Cape Town, São Paulo, and Bogotá. Although these three projects correspond to five different countries and three continents, they react against the same phenomenon—with their own local particularities—and in the same manner: through audiovisual artistic production with a marked political orientation that seeks to make visible the conflicts and struggles for territory and to connect with other experiences elsewhere on the planet. This has been the purpose of the Museum since its inception:

…one of the premises was that aesthetic criteria should not be a determining factor for entering the Museum. We work with art as a tool, but it should never be a reason for exclusion. It is a tool that does not seek aesthetic elitism, perfection, or virtuosity. What interested us was not so much the artistic dimension of the collaboration (which, if present, was very welcome and appreciated), but the fact that through recording, observation, and being attentive to what happens in one’s territory, one could collectively generate critical thought. Furthermore, there was obviously a political criterion, because the Museum of the Displaced could never host an apology for gentrification.

(Left Hand Rotation, May 2025)

From all these pieces, the five previously presented in the methodological section were selected for fieldwork. In this order, the AXP collective from Bogotá discovered the Museum through another local audiovisual documentation collective—Territorios en Lucha—whose members had previously participated in a workshop given by Left Hand Rotation in the La Perseverancia neighbourhood. Their objective was to use the platform as a medium to disseminate their work in the Egipto neighbourhood, as they found it to be a ‘fantastic platform’ with great clarity and communicative capacity regarding ‘displacement’. For AXP, the Museum was an extremely useful and valuable medium for making visible and positioning their audiovisual documentation work on the Egipto neighbourhood in Bogotá, allowing them to join a broader network sharing similar concerns and methodologies. Regarding the importance of archives for collectives and social movements, they conceive them as fundamental for activism and the reclamation of rights. They serve to systematise community work and to position narratives—for example, in legal proceedings or against false media narratives:

…it has tremendous value, a great deal, for activism; and [it has] the [value] of systematisation, which remains a problem.

(AXP, on Bogotá, February 2025)

The Brazilian photographer based in Mexico City, Livia Radwanski, met Left Hand Rotation directly during one of their first workshops in the city. When she decided to share her ethnographic archive on the Roma neighbourhood, Radwanski sought—as she explains—to be alongside other works from different disciplines: “it was the idea of creating a network, also being able to talk about the other problems that were happening elsewhere”. For her, her piece is an ‘ethnographic archive in the heat of the moment’ (en caliente), using photo-sequences that allow for the narration of an urban and social story; hence, the Museum is an ‘archive of archives’.

That is to say, the people who are collaborating, in turn, have their own archive, and this is like a kind of synthesis or refinement, a small capsule of what they have. And if you stop to think about it, it is an ethnographic archive. They are there, in the heat of the moment. Sometimes it is not the most aesthetic thing because you aren’t thinking in that way.

(Radwanski, on Mexico City, March 2025)

The architect Álvaro Carrillo, then resident in Madrid, like many other collaborators, discovered the Museum through a workshop given by Left Hand Rotation in Madrid, which addressed the conversion of the Malasaña neighbourhood. From there, he began a dialogue about his project, ‘Castizo Urban Politics’, in which he proposed an urban agenda for a built environment rather than a traditional building project. As in the previous case, Carrillo also sought dialogue with other disciplines. Noting that the documentation and works in the Museum were ‘inspiring’, Carrillo believes their potential lies in immediate access to valuable information:

…having this at hand is always cool. Especially today, when it feels like everything is at hand and yet not everything is at hand… I don’t think it’s a thing of the past, far from it.

(Carrillo, on Madrid, April 2025)

From Santiago de Chile, José Abasolo—architect, photographer, and anthropologist—found the Museum through his network of national collaborators at a time when platforms like Facebook or the now-defunct Twitter were popularly used. It was then that he decided to share his work on the Italia neighbourhood, which was undergoing a profound and devastating urban transformation—with demolition as a trend—resulting from “the pressure of real estate agents and the speculative market”. His ultimate goal, he tells us, was to “collaborate in this mapping of global cases”. Regarding the importance of archives for collectives and social movements, he conceives them as

…a very necessary tool, provided it is in relation to communities or neighbourhoods; that is when the archive as a tool takes root or gains importance as a construction of identity, of memories associated with certain contexts.

(Abasolo, on Santiago, February 2025)

The Madrid-based collective TXP has known the Museo de los Desplazados since its inception, as they had already shared activist spaces with Left Hand Rotation even before the ‘Gentrification is Not a Lady’s Name’ workshop, during the period when the latter still resided in Madrid. The selected piece, ‘Gentrificatour Tribal’, warned, among other issues, about the appropriation of traditional identities brought about by the gentrification process in the Malasaña neighbourhood: “…like the Palentino bar, which has also been transformed into another pseudo-hipster bar”, they explain. For TXP, the importance of archives lies in

…the construction of narratives. And now more than ever, due to the confusion that exists with the handling of information, and especially ‘fake’ information. Having a reliable source archive is key, isn’t it? But of course, we always talk more about ‘anarchives’ than ‘archives’. The archive has more vertical structures.

(TXP, on Madrid, March 2025)

Furthermore, the website also features a ‘Documentation’ section where one can find everything from written documents and studies on diverse territories to links of interest, further audiovisuals, or varied publications related to the themes, ranging from essays to comics produced in different locations. This transnational reach of the project is another of its main characteristics, with locations currently in South America (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Uruguay), Central America (Panama), North America (Mexico, USA, and Canada), Europe (Germany, Bulgaria, Spain, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Portugal, and the UK), Asia (China, Indonesia, and Turkey), and Africa (South Africa).

The synergy of the Museum’s collective nature and its transnational scope makes this digital archive a space that is no longer housed “in large buildings like national libraries” and whose “control and formation of information cease to take the form of the panopticon with its bureaucratic forms of control and surveillance”, so that “knowledge flows more freely through decentralised networks” (Featherstone, 2006, p. 596).

Finally, regarding the relevance of the Museum in a future present, its promoters are clear:

In this era of the ephemeral and the rapid consumption of information, if there are no reference points, if you don’t understand that you come from a current that goes much further back than you, you are lost. The power of social movements will always be feeling part of a current that comes from a long way off. Today we cannot take the freedoms we have for granted, because we are seeing how quickly they can be taken away. In that sense, the archive today is more necessary than ever. And always with that non-totalitarian dimension, not confusing the tool with the purpose. That is, because sometimes we are a bit neurotic about what we like; we like archives and sometimes we forget why we make them.

(Left Hand Rotation, May 2025)

5. Analysis of the Case Study

Regarding the ways of ‘doing’ and ‘being’ of the Museum, it is a digital, collective, and decentralised archive with a marked artistic and audiovisual focus. The project was initially launched by the Left Hand Rotation collective from Madrid, eventually achieving a notably transnational scope, with significant prominence in recent years from Portugal and various Latin American countries. It is composed of all the contributions received, and the role of Left Hand Rotation is limited to hosting these proposals alongside their own. This implies that it is an ‘in-process’ archive, open indefinitely. This leads one to wonder whether it is, in fact, an anarchive. As suggested by the interviews and returning to Derrida (1995), the anarchive can be understood as a space of resistance that focuses on what power excludes, operating autonomously from the local level and expanding through decentralised collaborative practices. It thus becomes a political project that challenges traditional categories and demonstrates that memory is a living network constructed collectively.

As a result of the online analysis of the portal and its other instruments, as well as the interviews conducted, the Museum is configured in various interrelated ways, functioning as a rhizome, which carries several implications. The first refers to its digital format. The digital age, in line with the ‘archival turn’, draws attention to the possibilities for escape that open up for the archive. This nature opposes the archive as a fixed ‘place’ of storage (Featherstone, 2006).

The second implication concerns the collaborative dimension of the Museum. This ‘collaborative platform offered as a tool for collective reflection’ stands out for its active character and its function as a meeting point and connection for diverse struggles. It even becomes an ‘archive of archives’, as the Mexican photographer Livia Radwanski stated in her interview, revealing that the Museum synthesises and presents capsules of others’ collections, interconnecting what would otherwise remain dispersed. In this regard, mutability and interconnection are essential characteristics of the anarchive, which is not fixed in a single place but flows through networks.

In Mexico, the issue of gentrification was not being discussed; it was the beginning of this topic. I came from New York—Brooklyn had been completely gentrified—so I arrived with that mindset and interest. We began a dialogue. They left a comment on my Vimeo video saying, ‘this is great’, so we started talking and they said, ‘hey, your project is incredible, wouldn’t you like to be a collaborator on our platform? We’re building this page’. For me, it was a source of pride to be able to participate in this dialogue.

(Radwanski, on Mexico City, March 2025)

At that time, I thought it was very cool to share my work and for it to be alongside works that shared certain aspects, even if some were from totally different disciplines. I suppose at that time it made me feel good to suddenly be able to talk to people from other fields that weren’t just architecture.

(Carrillo, on Madrid, March 2025)

Directly related to the possibilities of the digital and the collaborative dimension is the third implication: decentralisation. It is a decentralised collaborative platform because the digital format allows it, and because that is how Left Hand Rotation conceived it. From its inception, the Museum has been configured as a decentralised network of collaborators who function autonomously, such that Left Hand Rotation limits itself to hosting and disseminating the proposals of the collaborators, as well as their own. In their own words: ‘This is a Museum where anyone can enter and anyone can build the Museum.’

The fourth implication is a product of the synergy of the previous ones, which contributes to the Museum being an ‘in-process’ archive, open indefinitely. It is not a static archive. It is a dynamic social object that embodies and facilitates an anarchic practice, resisting the institutional logic of the archive. If, for Kurtović (2019), post-socialist archives do not seek nostalgia but use the past to generate a future, the Museum similarly does not seek to glorify a lost past but uses stories of displacement to strengthen present and future struggles. However, being ‘open indefinitely’ does not mean it must last forever but rather respond to the circumstances of a specific time and place. In this sense:

…last year [contributions] arrived from several countries, but now it is not so active in the sense that we write less to people saying, ‘hey, I’ve seen these materials, what do you think about collaborating with the Museum?’. And also, because, as it ran in parallel with the workshops, as we worked and got to know different contexts of struggles against gentrification, contacts emerged that made sense to direct towards the Museum. We have also moved towards other topics, because there came a point where we felt that there is already a lot on gentrification; it’s not like before, when it was something where sharing information was more necessary.

(Left Hand Rotation, May 2025)

In short, the Museum is a space of resistance that fulfils the function of counteracting dominant narratives, offering a space for the construction of a collective memory from the perspective of communities—their counter-memory. Its focus on testimony ‘in the heat of the moment’ (en caliente) demonstrates that it does not simply seek to store the past, but to use it as a tool for present and future struggle.

Archives that also have an activist and rights-claiming focus are fundamental, and one realises that often—and this happens a lot in Latin America—people do a lot but systematise very little.

(AXP, on Bogotá, February 2025)

Digital escapism, decentralised collaboration, and an ‘unfinished’, in-process nature are also characteristics of the anarchive, which embodies the nemesis of the institutionalised archive. Instead of forgetting, it emerges as an active force of subversion and resistance (Derrida, 1995), and as evidenced by the interviews, it is not fixed in one place but flows through networks. In this sense, the concept of the anarchive was explicitly introduced during the fieldwork by the TXP collective, who understood it as the practice of establishing connections in a ‘spontaneous and rhizomatic’ way, as a way of acting and producing knowledge that is liberated from institutional norms. In turn, Left Hand Rotation showed great interest in this concept, focusing their work on collaboration with other collectives and demonstrating a model of distributed knowledge that resists being appropriated by a single structure.

A ‘Case of Cases’: Exploring the Collaborative Platform

The individuals and collectives interviewed operate at the intersection of art, activism, and urbanism. Their documentary practices are not neutral; rather, they reflect their specific profiles and the contexts of their respective struggles. These practices exist in a productive tension with the logic of the institutional archive, often gravitating towards the anarchive. Such practices can be grouped into three general categories:

First, political practices have been identified, which may be directed toward political action in general (for instance, actions of visibility and denunciation) or toward more specific areas, such as the defence of subaltern groups in legal proceedings. In the former sense, we can situate the Left Hand Rotation collective itself, which, from an artistic standpoint, maintains that they ‘have always been’ and continue ‘being an action collective’. This category also includes collaborators such as TXP, for whom the construction of counter-narratives in the gentrification process of Malasaña is simply one more resource to, as they explain, ‘start working and setting up a platform called Antitriball’. In a more specific sense, for AXP, the archive serves a dual purpose: it is a resource for social struggles and resulting legal proceedings, and simultaneously a mechanism for positioning and constructing counter-narratives which, once archived, also become counter-memories. Their archival work materialises through the use of diverse languages (community cinema, cartography) to generate a counter-memory that is, above all, a tool for active defence in legal processes and for providing visibility against hegemonic narratives. This practice stands in clear opposition to the ‘archival violence’ noted by Stoler (2002), as it consciously generates that which the institutional archive would omit.

Second, there is evidence of ethnographic practices. In this regard, photographer Livia Radwanski and architect-anthropologist José Abasolo personify the conception of the archive from the perspective of ‘heat-of-the-moment’ ethnography. Their work, based on the construction of relationships of trust, captures direct testimony and daily life. Here, the archive is not a space for preservation but a process of producing history at the very moment it is lived. This approach expands the criteria of what is ‘worthy’ of being archived (Featherstone, 2006) by giving centrality to marginalised voices and lives.

Finally, a third group consists of mediation and networking practices. Urbanist Álvaro Carrillo, for example, focuses on the ‘process’ of mediation and urban activation. His conception of the archive moves away from the final product and focuses on the means to articulate networks and connections, aligning with a conception of knowledge that is generated and flows through human interaction. This fluidity is a manifestation of the resistance to being encapsulated by an archon (Derrida, 1995).

6. Conclusions

To summarise, the findings of this research clearly address the questions posed at the outset of this study. The analysis of the Museo de los Desplazados as a paradigmatic case of an activist archive validates the central hypothesis of this research: there is a direct relationship between the profiles of fully autonomous collectives and their epistemic practices. Ultimately, the Museo demonstrates that community archives are essential for the political agency and the autonomous vitality of the city. Activists conceive the archive as intrinsic to their work—whether as a tool for legal defence, a medium for ‘heat-of-the-moment’ ethnography, or a way to articulate networks. This conception allows them to resist the logic of ‘archival violence’, which seeks to exclude and silence. These independent spaces provide crucial opportunities to challenge hegemonic narratives and reverse the symbolic silence historically imposed on displaced populations.

Regarding the role of the Museum as a social object in the articulation of urban struggles, it is far from being a mere online repository. It reveals itself as a dynamic social object fulfilling multiple functions. The Museum is configured as an anarchic space that facilitates and embodies this resistance by functioning as a ‘collaborative platform’ and an ‘archive of archives’. It does not attempt to govern or appropriate information; instead, it articulates it in a fluid and horizontal manner. The rhizomatic nature of the Museo confirms its role as a space where the value lies not in the guarded document, but in its affective power and the community’s capacity to recognise itself, validate its experience, and mobilise through its own shared history. Its value lies precisely in its capacity to provide visibility to what would otherwise remain dispersed and in its focus on living memory—or counter-memory—to influence the struggles of the present. It thus serves to counteract dominant narratives, offering a counter-narrative and a space of resistance for the construction of collective counter-memory from the perspective of those living through the conflict.

Ultimately, these results have a substantial theoretical implication: the case study of the Museo de los Desplazados clarifies how the archival practices of collectives and social movements can overcome the ‘archive fever’ (mal d’archive) described by Derrida (1995). Instead, collectives such as Left Hand Rotation, in collaboration with a vast and extensive network, are constructing an anarchive: a space of resistance that focuses on what power excludes, operates autonomously from the local level, and expands through decentralised collaborative practices. By overcoming the limitations of mainstream institutions, the Museo functions as a living network that transforms memory into an active tool for urban resistance. By functioning as an aggregator and facilitator, the Museum becomes a clear example of a new form of archiving that prioritises human connections and the articulation of the ‘ungovernable’. It demonstrates that memory is not a place to be guarded but a living network to be built collectively.

Finally, the implications of this research open several future lines of work: to further develop the ethnographic project as a whole, expanding the comparative analysis with the other cases that make up the framework project to better understand the modes of political participation in contemporary activism. Furthermore, it would be pertinent to explore the long-term implications of these epistemic practices within the spheres of political advocacy and legal defence, analysing how ‘heat-of-the-moment’ testimony and the generated counter-memory translate into concrete effects on the ways in which the city is ‘made’.