In einem im März 2015 in Berlin aufgezeichneten Gespräch beschäftigen sich die Ko-Direktorin des Arsenal Berlin und die Medienwissenschaftlerin Barbara Büscher mit Aspekten des mehrjährigen Projekts „Living Archive“ und dessen Fortführung „Visionary Archive“, das im Mai 2015 abgeschlossen wurde. Aus den Erfahrungen konkreter und interdisziplinärer Archivarbeit ergeben sich neue Perspektiven auf die Institution des Archivs einerseits, auf die Gedächtniskultur im Sinne eines meist hegemonial definierten Kulturbegriffs andererseits.

Nature as a record  The aim of this study is to investigate how places in nature can fit into the description of a record and how nature itself can be seen as an archive. Many people have close relationships to places in nature and it's clear that immaterial cultural heritage is embedded in nature all around us.  In this essay we look at small examples like a tree or a stone with a special relationship to a person but also at nature as a whole. We ask the questions: can nature be seen as an archive? How can a widened archival concept include places in nature? And can this benefit a larger representation in the archives? We investigate how nature can be a subject as opposed to an object that cannot be taken out of its original environment. Therefore a tree or a stone should be archived in the context where it originated.  In previous research of living archives, researchers focus on how the archive can see to the needs of indigenous people around the world, as they investigate how cultural heritage embedded in the landscape can be preserved in archival terms. For this study we have done interviews with five people within the Sami indigenous community in Sweden, asking them about their personal relationship to a place in the natural environment and how this connection is related to personal and cultural history and heritage. The result of these interviews have been used to analyse how a place in nature can fit into an archival concept and how personal relationships to nature touches on values like identity, language, knowledge trading, cultural heritage places and history. The questions are raised through the lens of archival theory and phenomenology, as how archives can be seen as in constant change. The questions touches on many aspects in both archival science, cultural heritage, indigenous representation, climate changes and the colonial heritage of the archives.