Archive Inferno is an itinerant study school dedicated to rethinking the archive as a living, unstable system. Founded and led by artist and writer Joshua Leon, the school reads, thinks, discusses, and imagines through texts that question how histories, institutions, and affects are stored, transmitted, and undone.
Each season unfolds as an eight-week curriculum centred on a small number of key readings and collective discussion.
Readings move across philosophy, poetics, and political thought, tracing how the archive is entangled with law, desire, exhaustion, and repair. Participants read slowly, think collectively, and develop new modes of writing and attention that blur the boundaries between study and artistic work.
Through conversation and short writing exercises, the group investigates how institutions remember and forget, how affect circulates through administrative systems, and how imagination might intervene in those circuits.
Each season produces its own constellation of thought. Previous sessions have examined the archive as fever, tremor, and restlessness; upcoming cycles turn toward questions of administration, translation, and collective psychic life.
Archive Inferno welcomes participants from diverse disciplines who wish to think critically and poetically within the conditions of contemporary crisis.