Rearchiving: Storytelling for a Creative and Connected Generation
We are living in a world in flux. From global pandemics to cultural erasure, from digital overload to generational disconnection, the pace of change can feel dizzying—disorienting. In the face of this instability, something powerful is happening: a creative generation is standing up. Not just by dreaming of new futures, but by looking back—with intention, reverence, and imagination.
For many of us, especially in Black communities, inheritance often doesn’t come in the form of wealth, property, or trusts. It comes instead through photographs, whispered stories, handwritten recipes, grainy VHS tapes, and heirlooms tucked into boxes under beds. These are our treasures—fragments of memory and legacy that form the fabric of who we are. They offer context, pride, and place. They are our inheritance.
But what happens when we do more than just preserve? What happens when we reinterpret, recurate, and reimagine those fragments through the lens of now?
“What happens when we reinterpret, recurate, and reimagine those fragments through the lens of now?”
Today’s creatives are reclaiming those archives not as static history, but as raw material for meaning-making. They are reworking memory into vision. They’re curating, remixing, and retelling family narratives to make sense of their place in the world—and to offer others a path toward rootedness in a time of uncertainty.
This is what I call rearchiving: a creative framework that uses personal and cultural archives to recurate, recreate, and retell stories for a world that is simultaneously created and connected. Rearchiving is more than a practice—it’s a form of agency. A way to reclaim what was lost, reimagine what was lived, and retell it with creative power.
Because in a world that constantly moves forward, rearchiving is how we return—so we can rise.
The Tenets of Rearchiving
At its core, rearchiving is built on three guiding principles—each rooted in a practice of reflection, reclamation, and creation:
Rememory
Coined by Toni Morrison, rememory refers to the act of remembering experiences—not just from our own pasts, but from the lives of those who came before us. Rearchiving involves confronting, feeling, and honoring those memories, no matter how fragmented or emotional. In this way, memory becomes not just an act of looking back, but a portal for emotional connection and hopefully, healing.Story Revival
Through rearchiving, forgotten or overlooked narratives are revived. These may be tales handed down orally, half-remembered names in old photo albums, or family lore buried in silence. Story revival is the act of bringing those histories forward—breathing new life into them and allowing them to move again through us.Creative Retelling
We are not bound to retell stories exactly as we found them. Rearchiving encourages creative retelling—using photography, collage, poetry, film, or digital storytelling to make old narratives newly resonant. It invites us to remix, reinterpret, and reimagine, making these stories accessible to new audiences and meaningful to our connected, creative generation.
These tenets work together to transform rearchiving into more than a method—it becomes a living, breathing practice of cultural and personal preservation, creative expression, and future-building.
A Generation of Creators and Curators
What makes rearchiving so powerful right now isn’t just the need for meaning—it’s that we finally have the tools to meet that need at scale.
This generation isn’t just consuming culture—we’re creating it, curating it, remixing it in real time. With smartphones in our pockets, editing software at our fingertips, and platforms that reach the world in seconds, we’ve inherited the most advanced tools for storytelling in human history. The line between artist, historian, and audience has never been thinner.
But in the face of cultural instability, this abundance of expression can feel disorienting. Detached. Overwhelming. Rearchiving offers a counterbalance: a framework that gives our creativity roots. It invites us to channel our tools toward intentional storytelling—reviving family histories, honoring cultural memory, and shaping narratives that resist erasure.
We have the means. We have the reach. Rearchiving shows us what to do with it.
Ascension: My Rearchiving Story
Rearchived collage created by Gavin Guidry
In 2022, I took a family trip to Louisiana for my 30th birthday. My grandmother had always been the storyteller of our family, weaving vivid oral histories about our roots in the South. This time, I wanted her to show us—walk us through the towns, cemeteries, and stories that shaped us.
But beneath it all, I was searching for something deeper—my own legacy.
What I found was far greater than I imagined. My existential questions were eclipsed by the immense stories of love, death, triumph, and rebirth that carried my family from Louisiana to Los Angeles and beyond. I realized that I wasn’t just seeking meaning—I was inheriting it.
Now, I understand: my legacy is to continue legacy. To preserve and retell these stories just as my grandmother did. Ascension—the project that came from this journey—was born from this revelation. Through archival photos, layered collages, and documentary film, I created something that felt both deeply personal and universally relatable.
The mystique of being a historian, documentarian, or curator can now be a thing of the past. Because if I could do this—armed with curiosity, love, and a camera—so could any creative who has a grandmother, aunt, uncle, mom, or dad with a closet full of old photos.
Ascension is my story, but there are millions more.
Rearchiving as Resistance and Revival
For marginalized communities, especially Black and Indigenous people, rearchiving is a form of resistance. It reclaims narratives that were ignored, distorted, or erased. It gives us the power to tell our own stories—not just as they were, but as they matter now.
Imagine a zine that remixes a great-grandmother’s letters with modern poetry. A film that overlays 1960s civil rights footage with contemporary protest clips. A digital collage that pairs ancestral family photos with futuristic Afrofuturist visuals. These are acts of rearchiving—where the archive is not a tomb but a toolkit.
From Preservation to Participation
Archiving has traditionally been seen as something static: to store, to preserve, to protect. But rearchiving invites participation. It’s an evolving, creative, and collaborative act. It encourages families to revisit the shoebox of old photos not just to reminisce, but to create: new albums, new stories, new meanings.
We no longer need to wait for institutions or historians to validate our legacies. With rearchiving, every person becomes an artist of their ancestry, a narrator of their own origin story.
A Call to Rearchive
As we look to the future, we carry our past with us—not as a burden, but as a map. Rearchiving helps us remember where we came from, understand where we are, and envision where we’re going.
So dig up those old tapes. Scan those love letters. Listen to the elders and remix their wisdom with your own. Rearchive, and let the story unfold—again and anew.