Abstract
This manifesto emerges from the urgencies of ecological degradation, mass displacement, and the fractured narratives left in the wake of colonial, technological, and institutional violence. It proposes the formation of living archives—organic, networked, and embodied—as a collective strategy for preservation, resistance, and regeneration. As artists, cultural workers, and memory-keepers, we reject the extractive logic of mainstream culture production and assert the necessity of re-rooting practices grounded in care, reciprocity, and multiplicity. This is a call to reclaim memory as a site of transformation. This is a call to shift from linear time to cyclical knowing, from isolated authorship to entangled collaboration.
Introduction: A Soil Disturbed, A Signal Interrupted
We write from shifting ground—both literal and symbolic. From regions marked by migration, typhoons, and colonial legacy. From screens that connect but also flatten. From archives erased, overwritten, or buried. Our practices are shaped by displacement—not as absence, but as momentum. In an age when memory is weaponized or discarded, we ask: What does it mean to remember in a way that restores? What does it mean to collaborate in a system designed to isolate? What are the technologies of kinship that can mend what has been severed? This manifesto is both map and mycelium: a structure for shared rooting and a call to regenerate the soil of collective imagination.
Thesis: A Networked Ecology of Care
We believe that memory, when activated, becomes resistance. That archives are not containers but gardens. That displacement, though painful, reveals new paths of kinship and possibility. We believe in the power of collective authorship, in slowness, in rituals of re-connection. In a world that fragments, we reassemble. We are not a brand. We are a binding.
Principles and Pillars
I. Memory is a Political Act
We reject the idea of the neutral archive. Every choice to document—or to erase—is an act of power. Our work reclaims memory as a generative force, one that resists dominant narratives and plants alternative futures. We honor stories that are oral, fragmented, embodied, and intergenerational.
II. The Archive Must Be Alive
We do not collect to contain. We build archives that breathe, mutate, and regenerate. The archive is not a tomb. It is a living network that gathers soil, sound, metadata, fiber, myth. It does not only exist online or offline—it pulses in between.
III. Displacement Is Not Absence
Our work centers the displaced—not as ghosts of a lost origin, but as agents of transformation. We trace routes of forced movement, colonial extraction, economic exile. But we also celebrate adaptation, hybridity, and the emergent cultures of migration.
IV. Technology Is Not Neutral
We engage digital tools with care, skepticism, and play. We use blockchain not as spectacle, but as structure. We use platforms to archive, connect, and disrupt. But we also know that technology reproduces inequality—and so we approach it critically, not blindly.
V. Collaboration Over Extraction
We value slow process over fast production. We create ecosystems, not hierarchies. We listen before we speak, ask before we document, and share before we claim. Ours is a refusal of tokenism, and an insistence on long-term mutuality.
Counterforces and Contradictions
We are aware that the very tools we use—digital platforms, social media, curatorial formats—are often implicated in the systems we seek to dismantle. We know the archive can be co-opted. That “inclusivity” can become a market strategy. We remain vigilant of flattening, of aestheticizing suffering, of over-intellectualizing grief. We do not always succeed. But we hold ourselves accountable. We remaster, recompose, and re-root.
This is not a finished statement. This is a living field. We invite artists, writers, technologists, and community workers to co-compose new grammars of memory. We ask institutions to step back, to listen, to unlearn. We call for exhibitions that are porous, for research that is embodied, for archives that can be held in a hand or whispered across oceans. Let us build together: not just exhibitions, but ecologies. Not just networks, but kin.
Acknowledgments / Influences
This manifesto is shaped by the theories and works of thinkers, organizers, and artists engaged in decolonial memory work, digital resistance, and regenerative culture, including: Saidiya Hartman, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Ariella Azoulay, Rasheedah Phillips, and many more unnamed and everyday collaborators whose ancestral wisdom we draw from.
Signed
TLYR Collective
formerly known as CryptoartPH
From the Archipelago, 2025