Just a quick note for my future self, that Verne Harris’ notion of the “archival sliver” seems like a great sanity inducing antidote to the notion of total archives.

The archival record is best understood as a sliver of a sliver of a sliver of a window into process. It is a fragile thing, an enchanted thing, defined not by its connection to “reality”, but by its open-ended layerings of construction and reconstruction.

The Archival Sliver: Power, Memory and Archives in South Africa.