When I first arrived at the UCT Libraries Special Collections in October 2025, coming from a background in curatorship, I didn’t know what to expect. The mental image I had of an archive was, I now realise, incredibly antiquated: that of a lone archivist tucked away in a forgotten, dusty backroom, surrounded by endless rows of filing cabinets, occasionally interrupted by an ardent researcher or a student racing against a midnight submission. What I found instead was a completely different space; bright, digitised, and conspicuously lacking the cabinet-lined corridors I had imagined. 

Screens replaced drawers; metadata existed where handwritten labels once might have been. At first, I felt out of place, as though I had stepped outside the limits of my training. But the deeper I immersed myself in archival practice, the more I began to recognise not difference, but an unexpected connection with curatorship.

The relationship between the curator and the object mirrors that between the archivist and material in various ways. Both roles are grounded in custodianship, a responsibility not only to preserve, but to interpret, contextualise, and find meaning. An archivist, like a curator, cultivates an intimate familiarity with collections to the point of recalling them with ease, finding connections across boxes and folders, and remembering details. 

This knowledge is built over time, through repeated encounters, engagement, and careful handling. In this sense, archival work is not merely administrative, but deeply intellectual and interpretive. The act of arranging, describing, and making accessible is itself a form of curation, one that shapes how material can be encountered, understood, and ultimately used. Maybe this is the reason that the relationship between archivists and curators is so interdependent. Curators rely on archivists not only to locate materials, but to contextualise them, reveal gaps, and unveil possibilities that are not immediately clear. Together, these lay the foundation for new narratives through informed interpretative exhibition practice. Rather than existing as parallel professions, the two are connected, each extending the range and depth of the other. 

Though five years have passed, the impact of the 2021 Jagger Library fire is palpable and continues to shape daily operations. From what I have been able to gather from stories of how the archive used to operate, the fire changed how it is presently navigated, how materials are handled, and how absence itself is understood. But even though it underscored the fragility of archival materials, thus exposing how easily histories can be disrupted or erased, it also facilitated a process of renewal. The recovery project has required a painstaking re-engagement with collections, forcing archivists to revisit, reassess, and, in some cases, rediscover materials that had long been overlooked or under-used.

In a way, the archive continues to live in relation to its ashes, defined as much by what was lost as by what remains. Gaps in the record are no longer simply gaps; they are points of critical reflection, drawing attention to the tenuousness of preservation and the inequalities in historical survival. For me, this has been one of the most significant shifts in perspective: to understand the archive not as a complete repository, but as a fractured collection, constantly in the process of being reconstituted. Fire or no fire. 

The most surprising thing for me to discover has been the vitality of the archive. Although my initial conceptualisation of the archive was that of a static space—repositories of what has already happened, removed from the present. Yet the archive is anything but still. It is an active, generative space, continually reshaped through use. It is a space for drawing on centuries-old materials to produce new knowledge and new ways of thinking, where curators engage archival traces to reframe heritage and artistic practice, bringing past narratives into conversation with contemporary discourse. In this sense, the archive is not a mausoleum of remembrance, but a site of ongoing production. 

To work in an archive, then, is not only about looking backwards, frozen in that dusty backroom. Furthermore, there is nothing solitary about it. With so many key players, there is a strong sense of collaboration, and even small tasks are appreciated—not only for helping a colleague or researcher, but for contributing to something bigger. It is to participate in a process of continual reinterpretation, where meaning is neither fixed nor final. 

The archive becomes a kind of drawing board—a space for conceptualisation, experimentation, and reimagining. It is here, in this intersection of preservation and possibility, that the curatorial element of archival practice becomes most visible.

So, what began, for me, as a seemingly major step outside my field has unexpectedly revealed itself as an expansion of it: a reminder that curatorship does not end at the gallery or exhibition space but extends into the very structures through which knowledge is preserved, organised, and brought into being.