e-misférica is a biannual, peer reviewed web journal published by the Hemispheric Institute. The Summer 2012 issue focussed On the Subject of Archives from the varying perspectives of contributors from across the Americas. In “Artist Archives: Experimentation in Peruvian Art about the Memory of the Armed Conflict”, Olga Rodriguez Ulloa considers how Peruvian artists have used archival material in their work to challenge the government’s attempts to suppress the public memory of Peru’s violent conflict (1980-2001). In “Save As”, Diana Taylor contemplates how the meaning of the word ‘archive’ has changed in the popular imagination in a time when so much information is stored online, potentially endlessly unfixed and alterable, no longer even able to masquerade as being representative of a fixed point in time for future researchers. These and other essays in this issue draw attention to the questions of how archives can contribute to our understanding of the past in a myriad of ways: by their presence or absence, use and misuse, by the way in which they are collected and presented, and by their changing nature in this new, digital age.
