Chapter ASPIRATIONAL ARCHIVES 

Aspirational Archives juxtaposes three community archives encountered during the fieldwork on which this manuscript is based. Drawing on the narratives of the places of The Dzjangal, Tiburtina and Los Arenales, this Chapter reflects on collective memory and the archival process as a counter-response to the mainstream narrative of contemporary migration. In the first part, the three archives —the Jungala Radio, the photographic archive of Tiburtina and the Living archive of Los Arenales — are not examined from the official perspective of an archive constructed through the institutionalization of cultural heritage. Rather, this section proposes an alternative approach to migration archives based on the anthropologist Anyun Appadurai's theories of 'archives and aspirations' (2003), which he builds on the philosopher Ernst Bloch's concept of the 'not yet' (1923) as a guiding force for the temporal space of possibility. This led me to consider these archives with an ‘anarchive' (Battaglia et al., 2020) lens of placemaking, resistance and aspiration as a counter-response that challenges the traditional notion of the archive by the dominant history.

The second and third parts of the Chapter are the unfolding of the archive through ethnographic vignettes and co-authored contributions involving listeners and creators of these archives. Here I experiment with the (re)presentation of each archive out of its own nature: sound, image, voices. Aspirational Archives analyzes the idea of the counter-archive in relation to convivial practices, community resistance and aspirations. As well as the dynamic nature of migration and its constant confrontation with the border regime. The process of creating archives of collective migratory memories breaks with the classical idea of the archive as a legacy of institutional, state and formal structures. These archives open the possibility of preserving collective memory through participatory and collaborative processes based on territorial reclamation.