Iman Mersel: Howdunnit #1, Archives & Crimes

To enter a collective archive is to carry an anonymous corpse on your shoulders. You are not investigating how this corpse met its death so much as feeling impelled, somehow, to fill in the gaps that render it anonymous. Whether or not you are hoping to tell the story and share it with others, you might be able to give this corpse a name and lend a meaning to its life. The corpse is the researcher’s question. Urgent, mysterious, distorted or even inconsistent, it is a question that issues from the present—the here and now—but which lacks the language required to speak it.

This publication is part of Howdunnit, a series conceptualized by Kayfa ta in 2022. The first two books in this series are Archives & Crimes by Iman Mersal and Panorama by Merle Kröger.