7. Archiving Loss: Reconstruction, Simulation, and Historical Value

How does loss acquire historical and evidentiary form? At a moment when the past may be reconstructed through lost media environments or simulated without any referent, the ways objects and images are granted the status of pastness, damage, or historical survival have become urgent.

Scholarship from Derrida’s Archive Fever to Hal Foster’s “archival impulse” has shown that records actively produce rather than simply preserve historical meaning. More recent work by Sara Callahan on the archival turn in contemporary art and Roland Meyer on AI image generation has sharpened questions of visual authority and trace. Yet the medial and institutional conditions under which loss becomes legible and meaningful have received less attention.

Two contrasting examples indicate the session’s scope: the V&A’s reframing of Me at the zoo, where a born-digital object acquires epistemic status through reconstruction of an earlier platform environment; and fake archives such as The Archive In Between, circulating across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and print compendia, which use AI-generated imagery to produce documentary credibility and the appearance of a past without any originating event. In one case, historical value is stabilised through reconstruction and collection; in the other, it is generated through simulation and circulation.

Papers are invited from across periods and media addressing reconstruction, musealisation, fabricated damage, pseudo-documentary form, simulated pastness, and the unstable relation between trace and evidence.

The half-day session will open with a framing introduction, followed by four papers and a concluding discussion.

.Themes: Archiving, Simulation, Evidence

Lead Convenor: Karina Pawlow, Saarland University, Germany

To submit a Paper to this Session, please follow the guidance on our website and complete the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal Submission Form.