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Decolonizing my Library (10 of 15)
Disruptive Formats: Unleashing the Power of Non-Traditional Media
Promoting Diverse Formats and Media
This post is part of a series that reviews decolonialism in libraries, archives and other similar spaces, from the perspective of the Global South and the margins, and how colonialism affects collections, staffing, services, activities, policies, and results. Check all the posts in this section's index.
Introduction
The way we define and transmit knowledge and memory has long been dictated by dominant structures — first through written text, then through digital media.
Libraries, archives, and academic institutions have historically privileged these formats, reinforcing a narrow view of what constitutes valid knowledge. Yet, outside of these institutions, societies have preserved and shared wisdom through radically different, often marginalized, means. Oral traditions, murals, graffiti, textiles, body paintings, pottery, and even landscapes themselves hold knowledge as rich and complex as any printed book or digital database.
This post explores the power of these formats — those that challenge the established paradigms of knowledge transmission and reclaim spaces for marginalized voices. Unlike so-called "alternative" media like graphic novels or podcasts, which have already been integrated into mainstream library discourse, these truly disruptive formats remain largely ignored, dismissed, or tokenized. Yet, they represent some of the most enduring, subversive, and community-driven forms of knowledge preservation and storytelling.
The Persistence of Oral Tradition
Long before written language, human societies developed complex oral traditions to pass down history, laws, cosmologies, and identities. Oral storytelling is not just a means of preserving the past; it is a living, evolving practice that fosters collective memory and identity. For many Indigenous communities, the spoken word is not secondary to written text — it is the primary mode of knowledge transmission. Yet, libraries and archives struggle to accommodate oral knowledge beyond transcriptions, reducing dynamic, performative traditions to static words on a page.
To embrace oral traditions as legitimate knowledge, institutions must rethink their role. Recording and archiving oral narratives is not enough — these traditions must be kept alive through performance, community engagement, and respect for the relational ways in which knowledge is transmitted. The voice, the act of storytelling, the context in which it is shared — all of these elements matter just as much as the content itself.
Graffiti, Murals, and the Politics of Public Knowledge
Walls speak. From the murals of Diego Rivera to the resistance graffiti of occupied Palestine, public art has long served as an act of counter-memory, defying official histories and reclaiming spaces of oppression. Unlike books stored in climate-controlled rooms, graffiti and murals exist in public, accessible to all, subject to the elements, erasure, and renewal. They challenge the notion that knowledge belongs to institutions and instead assert that it belongs to the people.
Libraries and archives often treat these visual expressions as ephemera — valuable only when preserved in photographs or scholarly analysis. But to honor these forms as true disruptive knowledge, institutions must move beyond documentation and actively engage with the communities that produce them. Supporting local artists, recognizing street art as historical testimony, and creating spaces where public visual storytelling can thrive are all ways to break the cycle of institutional erasure.
Weaving Knowledge: Baskets, Textiles, and Pottery as Living Archives
In many cultures, weaving is more than craft — it is a form of knowledge encoding. Patterns, materials, and techniques carry histories, spiritual beliefs, and social structures. A woven basket can be a map of ancestral territories; a textile, a lineage of generations; a piece of pottery, a narrative of migration and adaptation. Yet, in the dominant knowledge paradigm, these objects are relegated to museum displays, their stories severed from the hands that created them.
To recognize these formats as knowledge systems, we must reject the idea that they are simply artifacts to be collected. Instead, libraries and cultural institutions should support living traditions, collaborating with artisans, hosting weaving and pottery workshops, and treating these practices as ongoing acts of storytelling rather than relics of the past. Only then can these formats disrupt the colonial archive and assert their rightful place in the world of knowledge.
The Body as a Library: Tattoos, Scarification, and Embodied Memory
For many cultures, the body itself is an archive. Tattoos, scarification, and other forms of body modification serve as records of identity, belonging, and resistance. Polynesian tatau, Amazonian facial markings, and Berber tattoos are not simply decorative — they are historical texts inscribed on flesh. These traditions defy Western notions of documentation by embedding knowledge directly onto the human body, rather than externalizing it onto paper or screens.
Yet, mainstream libraries and archives ignore or even stigmatize these embodied histories, failing to acknowledge the intellectual traditions they represent. To embrace this form of knowledge, institutions must shift their focus from preservation to participation — recognizing tattoo artists and body practitioners as knowledge keepers, hosting exhibitions that explore these traditions, and challenging the written word's monopoly on legitimacy.
The Land as a Knowledge System
Perhaps the most radical disruption to dominant knowledge structures comes from recognizing that the land itself is an archive. Indigenous, ancestral, and rural epistemes often treat landscapes as living texts, where rivers, mountains, and forests hold stories, histories, and lessons encoded over generations. This challenges the idea that knowledge is something to be contained within books or digital databases. Instead, it insists that knowledge is spatial, dynamic, and deeply tied to the physical world.
Libraries and archives, built on the logic of categorization and containment, struggle with this idea. But true engagement with disruptive knowledge means breaking down walls —literally and figuratively— to embrace the land as a primary source. Decolonizing knowledge means moving beyond shelves and servers to listen to the earth itself and to those who have read its stories for millennia.
Conclusion
If libraries and archives are to truly decolonize, they must go beyond merely adding "diverse" formats to their collections. Graphic novels and digital media, while valuable, no longer represent a fundamental disruption to the dominant paradigm. The real disruption lies in the formats that challenge the very nature of how knowledge is recognized and valued: oral traditions, murals, graffiti, weaving, pottery, tattoos, and the land itself.
These formats are not just alternatives to written text — they are acts of defiance against epistemic erasure. They remind us that knowledge is not owned by institutions but lived, shared, and embodied by communities. To embrace these disruptive formats is to reject the idea that knowledge must be contained, categorized, and controlled. It is to recognize that the most powerful knowledge cannot always be found on a page — but rather in the stories we tell, the marks we inscribe, the landscapes we honor, and the bodies we carry through the world.
About this post
Text: Edgardo Civallero.
Publication date: 11.03.2025.
Picture: "Africa’s living libraries, safeguarding centuries of oral tradition". In Radar Africa [Link].