What migration leaves unarchived: Everyday encounters and living archives

By Chiamaka Rita Akpuogwu | ISSUE 28

Photo by Pushpak Dsilva on Unsplash

It is the first of December, 2025. I am sitting in my kitchen in Germany with an acquaintance, baking brownies. An Icelandic song: happy, sad, and tender, fills the room. There is warmth, laughter, and the quiet choreography of shared space. I am suddenly disarmed by the simplicity of it all: the ordinariness, the care, the unremarkable fact of my being here, thousands of miles from home, making something sweet with someone who was once a stranger.

None of this will ever be formally recorded, yet it endures.

This moment leaves no trace in the archives that govern my presence in Germany. No file captures the music we shared, the childhood food memories we exchanged, or the ease with which differences were negotiated. What is archived instead are my visa, my residence permit, my biometric data: documents that render me recognisable to the state while obscuring the relational labour through which migrant life is enacted.

This article begins from that dissonance. Beneath the mundanity of an everyday encounter lies a vast archival architecture that underwrites migration governance: one that privileges authorised movement and bureaucratic compliance, while systematically jettisoning the everyday relations through which migrants are acknowledged as present, credible, and socially embedded beyond administrative categories. Against this backdrop, I argue for the necessity of what I call living archives: everyday encounters, practices, and relations through which migration is recognised, negotiated, and sustained beyond the state's archival gaze.

Rethinking and enacting the archive

To make this claim, the archive must be understood beyond its institutional form. As Moore et al.  and Mbembe argue, archives are not only state repositories but assemblages of knowledge produced through selection, classification, and omission. The archive determines what becomes legible, consequential, and historically actionable, and what does not. It is this selective logic, rather than the absence of migrant experience, that necessitates counter-archival thinking.

The living archive responds to this imperative by shifting from documenting migration as movement to also documenting migration as relation. Ordinary, everyday encounters between migrants and non-migrants function as living archives: ongoing, relational sites of recognition shaped through practice. Unlike the state archive, living archives are enacted and iterative, oriented toward individual engagement and voice. They contest institutional exclusion by preserving what formal systems overlook.

These encounters settle into memory, shaping how migrants understand themselves, their place, and their relations to others. Memory here is not retrospective but constitutive: made in the encounter and carried forward, guiding future acts of recognition, trust, and belonging.

I retain the term archive here not to rehabilitate its institutional logic, but to stretch it, naming forms of memory that endure without aspiring to stability, completeness, or official recognition. This usage signals both continuity with, and rupture from, dominant archival paradigms. It also raises a further question: if archives predominantly serve exclusion, is archiving itself the right mode of remembering? What alternatives exist when selection, ordering, and legibility shape what counts as knowledge?

What is needed, I suggest, is not simply an alternative archive, but a different mechanism of memory altogether. Living archives persist precisely because they are not rendered legible to power. They disrupt the notion that migration history is written primarily through border crossings, administrative files, and institutional encounters of enforcement and control. In this light, the kitchen becomes a site of knowledge production, where migration is archived not as a record, but as an encounter.

Counter-archival memory work

Living archives resonate with broader counter-archival practices that contest institutional silences through memory practices that emerge from below. As Bond et al. note, memory does not remain fixed but ‘travels, circulates, and migrates’, carried across borders through gestures and routines. Initiatives such as the Museum of British Colonialism carry this logic into the public sphere, curating counter-narratives that contest archival erasure and assert historical presence. Such practices show that living archives can acquire evidentiary force, not by mimicking institutional archives, but by redefining what counts as historical knowledge and authority. In Stoler's terms, they summon claims and spark imaginaries, generating forms of recognition and responsibility beyond formal documentation.

Recognition and belonging

Attending to living archives is, therefore, an ethical intervention. They refuse the archive's terms of relevance by shifting the gaze from institutional encounters and responsive legislation to the labour of making life liveable: learning unfamiliar social cues, navigating multilingual spaces, and building trust. These encounters determine whether one is welcomed, tolerated, or relegated to what Anzaldúa calls nepantla, the borderlands between categories. What is at stake is not only how migration is governed, but how migrant lives come to be recognised as lives that matter beyond administrative utility.

Uneven mobilities

Living archives also expose the unevenness of global mobility. While some migrants are able to move, settle, and form relationships across borders, often conditionally and precariously, many remain immobilised by restrictive visa regimes, economic barriers, or conflict. Ordinary encounters, such as sharing food or music, thus acquire political meaning: they reveal how human connection persists within systems designed to regulate and restrict movement. Attending to living archives widens the field of responsibility, prompting reflection on who gets to write migration history and according to which evidentiary standards.

Conclusion

Migration is not only governed through files, biometric systems, and deportation orders; it is also sustained through encounters that never enter institutional records. Living archives preserve the relational labour through which migrant life becomes recognisable to others, even as it remains invisible to the state. They highlight what migration governance systematically overlooks: the everyday work of recognition, care, and mutual orientation that allows life to take root across borders.

Seen from this perspective, the kitchen is no longer incidental to migration history. The shared act of baking, the exchange of memories, the music in the background, these are not anecdotes alongside migration, but moments in which migration is lived, negotiated, and remembered. They persist not because they are documented, but because they are carried forward in memory, practice, and relation.

Taking living archives seriously challenges the assumption that migration history is authored primarily through institutional encounters, movement, and documentation. It reframes migration knowledge as something made with others, through ordinary acts that resist classification yet shape belonging. Living archives expose the limits of archival governance and institutional recognition, insisting that responsibility does not begin or end with paperwork. Migration history, this article argues, is not only written through files and policies, but made, quietly, repeatedly, and collectively, in encounters that remain beyond the state's archival grasp.

Chiamaka Rita Akpuogwu

Chiamaka is a lawyer and PhD researcher based in Germany. Her work explores migration, mobility, and belonging, shaped by her own experience as a migrant. She has over a decade of experience in migration practice, research, and coordination across Africa and Europe, focusing on mobility rights, climate displacement, return and reintegration, and the archival documentation of migrant voices. She is currently a PhD researcher at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen and a Climate Mobility Fellow with the Global Centre for Climate Mobility.