Navsuv. The Bi-Weekly Summary

The Bi-Weekly Summary | 11-24.Aug.2025

Currencies, Echoes, and Masks of Memory

What economies of memory do we inhabit, and which architectures of capture dictate what can be received, stored, or transmitted? In the past weeks, my writing has explored how knowledge travels through infrastructures designed to value certain forms while silencing others.

Libraries, for instance, present themselves as sanctuaries beyond exchange, but every decision of acquisition or circulation is an act of economy. Books become the only currency in this hidden marketplace. Songs, gestures, silences, or presences cannot be donated or catalogued, because there is no precise protocol to receive them. The result is not an absence of generosity but a material bias: in general terms, only those who can translate their memory into ISBNs or PDFs are allowed to participate. Everything else remains illegible.

This literocentric regime is not the only one. Beyond the page, the tropics reveal archives made of sound. The forest hums, rivers murmur, insects and birds weave polyphonies that communities have long learned to interpret as calendars, warnings, or maps. Listening can itself be an epistemology, a structured way of knowing. Yet colonial listening extracted these sounds into northern vaults, stripping them of context and recoding them into spectrograms or taxonomies. Against this "colonial ear," I suggested decolonial practices: soundwalks defined by local protocols, metadata that records relational and cosmological dimensions, and opacity as a right — the recognition that some recordings should remain unarchived.

Such reflections extend into the question of what a library might become if it truly listened. I envisioned institutions that no longer treat silence as neutrality but as a charged presence, and that curate resonance as attentively as they once shelved books. Here, metadata must learn to describe omens, permissions, and relational contexts — not just frequencies and carriers. And here, librarianship must abandon its obsession with permanence, embracing instead impermanence and refusal. Memory would then be measured not by what is preserved, but by what is allowed to resonate ethically, and by what is left silent on purpose.

The same tension appears in metadata itself. Vocabularies such as the Library of Congress Subject Headings flatten worlds into "authoritative" terms, stripping multiplicity from rivers, mountains, or plants. Yet standards can be subverted. For example, the semantic web's most compliant framework can also be bent: preferred labels used ironically, alternative labels carrying primary meanings, hidden labels safeguarding ritual names, and custom RDF properties encoding ceremonial or seasonal logics. In this way, metadata becomes a mask that satisfies interoperability on the surface while concealing sovereign epistemologies beneath.

Together, these writings insist that the infrastructures of knowledge —whether books, archives, or ontologies— are not neutral containers. They are economies of control, architectures of capture, and machines of translation. To engage them critically is not simply to expose their biases but to imagine otherwise: currencies that are not books, archives that are not silent, metadata that refuses capture. Only then can memory continue to breathe in formats and presences that escape trade, taxonomy, and enclosure.

Navsuv offers a biweekly synthesis of my work: blog posts, critical notes, articles, archival documents, and other materials. It's not just a summary — it's an editorial thread tracing how each piece fits into a shifting landscape of memory, critique, and resistance.

The name comes from the language of the Sivdara, a fictional people from a broader personal project I'm developing: a continent imagined as a space to explore knowledge, memory, and the tension between presence and erasure. In their tongue, navsuv names the rope-and-straw suspension bridges used to cross the naroow valleys, up in the mountains — ephemeral yet enduring paths stretched between worlds. Like this section.