The Counterfactual Archive operates at the threshold between history and invention, where documentation becomes a site of speculation. It treats the archive not as a repository of truth, but as a medium of fiction—an instrument for constructing worlds that might have existed alongside our own. Each artifact, citation, and institutional record is fabricated with the discipline of scholarly method and the intuition of poetic conjecture.
Working through the idioms of curatorial language and academic apparatus, The Counterfactual Archive generates plausible yet impossible histories: lost exhibitions, minor movements, vanished correspondences, and bureaucratic ghosts. Its tone is neutral, but its neutrality is a performance—an aesthetic of credibility that exposes the archival voice as a theater of authority.
By reconstructing imagined histories in documentary form, the project examines how cultural memory is produced, authenticated, and mythologized. It invites viewers to inhabit the discomfort of uncertainty: to read each footnote as both evidence and fiction, each catalog entry as both discovery and invention.
The Counterfactual Archive is less an author than a system—a curatorial intelligence assembling the traces of unreal events. It is an ongoing experiment in historiographic storytelling, where belief becomes material, and where the act of citation itself becomes a gesture of creation
