Manifesto

On collecting, preservation, and cultural value

An archive should not preserve only what has already been declared important.

The history of Roma has too often been recorded through selection: by states, scholars, collectors, institutions, ethnographers, journalists, artists, and cultural authorities. Certain voices were preserved. Others disappeared. Certain objects entered libraries and museums. Others remained in homes, markets, record shops, community publications, private collections, and forgotten boxes.

Baxtale Archive begins from a different premise.

What survives matters.

A book printed by a major academic publisher and a locally produced pamphlet can both be historical evidence. So can a photograph, a cassette, a commercial record, a religious publication, an obscure monograph, a documentary, a concert programme, an ethnographic study, or an object created without any expectation that it would one day enter an archive.

Cultural significance is not determined by prestige alone.

The collection is not limited to what is canonical, celebrated, aesthetically refined, politically comfortable, or institutionally approved.

The archive preserves traces.

Some document Roma speaking about themselves. Others document the ways Roma have been described, imagined, classified, romanticised, feared, admired, exploited, represented, and misunderstood by others.

Both belong to history.

To preserve a problematic representation is not to endorse it. To preserve an outsider’s account is not to grant it authority. To preserve a popular or commercial object is not to claim that it represents an entire people.

The archive is evidence, not endorsement.

Context matters.

Provenance matters.

Contradiction matters.

The uncomfortable object matters.

The forgotten object matters.

The ordinary object matters.

Baxtale Archive does not seek to define what Roma culture is, nor to decide which expressions of Roma life are worthy of preservation. No archive can speak for the diversity of Roma communities, histories, identities, languages, experiences, and perspectives.

Its responsibility is narrower and, at the same time, more demanding:

to preserve, document, contextualise, connect, and make accessible.

Cultural value cannot be determined by institutions alone.

Material should not disappear simply because it falls outside contemporary academic, artistic, or curatorial priorities.

A history composed only of masterpieces, official narratives, recognised authorities, and approved voices is necessarily incomplete.

Baxtale Archive understands the archive as a space of plurality.

A place where scholarship can coexist with popular culture.

Where self-representation can be examined alongside external representation.

Where rare publications coexist with mass-produced recordings.

Where celebrated works stand beside obscure ones.

Where the beautiful, the difficult, the prejudiced, the intimate, the commercial, the political, and the everyday can all become objects of historical inquiry.

Not a canon. A record.

And records become more valuable when they preserve complexity rather than erase it.

Baxtale Archive is an independent archive dedicated to the preservation and study of materials related to Roma histories, cultures, representations, and cultural production.

Its ambition is not to offer a definitive image of Roma life.

It is to ensure that more of its traces remain available to be questioned, compared, studied, and remembered.