Recording the unrecorded: Counter archiving statelessness and displacement in Ireland

By Dervla Potter  | ISSUE 28

caption: Srk* shows me a photograph he has taken of himself: his back to the camera, a flag draped over his shoulders, his gaze stretching out across a lake. Nothing in the image reveals his immigration status nor claim for recognition. Instead, the photograph holds something no official document has: an assertion of presence; of being seen on his own terms. All photos courtesy of Srk and Ivan

For people on the move, positioned by nation-states and their institutions as outside what Benedict Anderson famously termed the national “imagined community”, visibility within official archives is overwhelmingly mediated through the gaze of the state. The official archive mentioned here refers to the assemblage of state institutions, bureaucratic practices and documentary regimes such as refugee determination processes, national registries and institutional documentation through which stateless and forcibly displaced people are recorded, categorised and governed.

The power and violence of official archives

Official archives are not passive repositories. As Melanie Hogan argues, archives possess ‘discursive power’, meaning they do not simply store information but actively enable certain claims to legitimacy while foreclosing others. For stateless and displaced people globally, this archival power can be insidious. 

Record keeping systems such as censuses or national registers can be weaponised as tools of erasure, rendering populations administratively invisible. The Rohingya, stripped of citizenship in Myanmar in 1982 and Palestinians subject to decades of disposession and ongoing genocide provide stark examples of how official records work as tools of dehumanisation and erasure.

Archives, whether produced by the state or the displaced themselves, can be mobilised against those seeking sanctuary and recognition. As demonstrated by Josipovic’s research,  personal digital archives such as photos and messages located on smartphones are routinely confiscated and used to question the truthfulness and worthiness of claims during refugee determination processes. By examining counterarchiving practices, this article challenges archival regimes that organise “migration memory” according to state priorities and instead foregrounds forms of knowledge and experience excluded from official records.

Counter-archiving as knowledge production

Archives do not belong exclusively to the state. As Arjun Appaduari reminds us, archives can take on different meanings for migrants themselves. When migration disrupts connections to language, culture and familiarity, archiving can become a way of deciding what to carry forward, rebuilding what has been taken, and safeguarding what is needed to maintain identity across borders.

Srk’s photograph belongs to this kind of archive: created as part of an ongoing doctoral project in Ireland in which participant-generated images and text serve as both material and method to articulate experiences of statelessness and displacement.

Yousif Qasmiyeh’s assertion that ‘only refugees can forever write the archive’, challenges the authority of institutional record keeping on migration altogether. For Qasmiyeh, the archive of displacement does not reside in state repositories but in the everyday practices and creative acts of those who live its realities. Displaced people are not passive data points; they are active authors of their own histories.

Participant-generated photographs, particularly when used as prompts for storytelling, function not merely as visual artefacts but as catalysts for narration and meaning-making. They invite people to frame their experiences on their own terms, surfacing emotional and sensory dimensions that official archives routinely flatten. In this sense, images become a tool of knowledge production and the archive becomes a site of knowledge production itself.

caption: Paper Walls

Ivan’s* experience of seeking asylum in Ireland illustrates this vividly. He describes how gathering documentation overtakes his everyday life, restructuring time, memory, and identity around bureaucratic demands. His photograph Paper Walls depicts documents scattered across his home. Here, personal history is fragmented into evidence, and lived experience is transformed into an administrative task.

He writes:

Applying for asylum in Ireland. This image reflects the overwhelming reality of seeking asylum.

Paperwork dominates every corner, each sheet demanding proof of truths already spoken. Life becomes an endless repetition of forms, evidence, and questions—every detail scrutinised, every memory dissected.

The process is not just administrative; it takes control of your daily life, overshadowing the ordinary. What should be a path to safety becomes a landscape of bureaucracy, where human stories are fragmented into documents and scattered across the floor.

Yet Ivan also uses photography to “see back at the state”, borrowing James C. Scott’s phrase. This act of counter-documentation, or “archiving back” turns the institutional gaze inside out. The building that ordinarily observes, categorises, and judges becomes the object of scrutiny. The photograph records not only a physical space, but the affective architecture of waiting, silence, and exclusion.

caption: No reply.

Ivan describes the following captured in his image.

The office stands open, but everything around it says “closed”. Barriers at the door, fences on the pavement, silence in my inbox. I learned that walls are not only built from concrete. Some are made of unanswered emails, automatic replies, and days without responses. The building looks close enough to touch, yet remains unreachable. Just like the answers I was waiting for.

Why visual counter-archives matter

Personal archives such as those created by Srk and Ivan function as intimate forms of witnessing that directly contest homogenised and stereotypical representations of refugees. Dominant political and media narratives in the West often frame forced displacement through reductive lenses of security threat, victimhood, or economic burden, stripping people of complexity and agency. In contrast, personal archives foreground the voices, memories, and agency of the individuals themselves, allowing them to represent their stories on their own terms. Personal archives act as both a witness to lived realities and a counter-narrative to the reductive depictions that often circulate in public consciousness.

Srk writes of his image: 

Wrapped in my roots, standing tall where the earth meets the sky. Proud of where I come from, at peace with where I stand.

Institutional archives such as those that hold refugee determination documentation often speak for the displaced and stateless, recording “authoritative accounts” of lives that are far richer and more complex than these accounts suggest. The personal archives created by Srk and Ivan are more than just documentation, they are acts of reclamation and refusal. They challenge not only what is archived but who has the authority to archive, shifting knowledge production from state institutions to the communities most affected by their decisions. In a world where official records can be used to erase as easily as to recognise, these personal archives become vital acts of living – proof of not just presence but of personhood on one's own terms.

*All names in this article are pseudonyms chosen by each participant. The photographs used here are courtesy of Ivan and Srk and are used with permission.

Dervla Potter 

Dervla is a PhD Researcher in the School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies at Dublin City University. Her research focus is the lived experiences of statelessness and displacement in Ireland through photography. She holds an MA in Refugee Integration from DCU and her wider research interests include forced displacement, migration policy and practice,  and artistic research practices particularly in the Irish context.