On Power and Possibility: When the Archive Smiles Back
Text by Mara-Johanna Kölmel
from Cat. Exh. Image and Power. Zooming into Zeppelin Photography, Zeppelin Museum Friedrichshafen, Friedrichshafen 2025
www.zeppelin-museum.de/en/exhibitions/image-and-power
An archive is more than just a repository; it is a promise and a threat: what is included remains; what is excluded disappears. Archives are spaces of selection, places of power. What we preserve and remember, and what we delete, determines how we tell the story of the past—and what futures we can imagine.
Image and Power approaches the Zeppelin Museum’s image archive as a place where history is not only preserved but actively shaped—through images that form realities, shape worldviews, and make political orders visible. Through a dialogue with contemporary art, the exhibition shows how, since the early twentieth century, photographs of the Zeppelin have been deliberately used to create reality and legitimize political orders—in the German Empire, in the Weimar Republic, and under National Socialism.
The effects of these image politics are still felt today. In our current age of algorithmically controlled attention, generated content, growing disinformation, and polarization, the archive is proving to be a highly relevant site of political action. Authoritarian movements around the world are attacking archives and cultural institutions in order to gain control over narratives—through the deletion of information, defamation, or political influence.[1] The archive is thus becoming a strategic battleground for political power struggles. The etymological origin of the word “archive” in the Greek arkheion—the official residence of the rulers—refers to this powerful function.[2]
Yet it is not only a place of control, but also of possibility (fig. 1). It harbors cracks, gaps, and potential. It smiles back—not out of friendliness, but in response. With what has been preserved. With what is missing. With what we have overlooked. This smile contains irony, knowledge, and sometimes resistance. Like Donna Haraway’s “gazing object,” the archive confronts us as a reflexive, active counterpart.[3]
Image and Power takes these tensions as an opportunity to open up the museum archive to new interpretations through contemporary art. Building on a research stay at the Zeppelin Archive, Aziza Kadyri, Christelle Oyiri, and the collective Ebb.global, together with Neïl Beloufa, developed new works. They understand the archive as a dynamic and resistant place of rewriting—as a space where dominant narratives are questioned, established orders are disrupted, and marginalized perspectives are given visibility.
Anarchic Archives: From Airship to Fable
Several women wearing bright robes sit in a circle. Together, they sew a large, almost immaterial-looking textile object: a fabric-like envelope rising slightly from their center. Their gestures are synchronized, almost ritualistic, as if they were jointly shaping something that exists only in their imagination. The envelope floats above their heads like a dream image—detached from gravity. From this scene a story arises, an animated picture reminiscent of a chat history. The title of Aziza Kadyri’s work, Lighter than the Words We Share, alludes to this dual lightness: that of the textile and that of memories which seem fleeting yet carry collective history (fig. 2).
The AI-animated scene is based on archive photographs from the museum dating back to the First World War. The photographs depict seamstresses at Ballonhüllen GmbH. These images encountered in her visit to the archive, reminded Aziza Kadyri of Uzbek textile workers. For Kadyri, the silent, collective labor of these women—both German and Uzbek—overlooked by history, forms a bridge into a speculative visual world which she crafts in dialogue with the Zeppelin archive. In this world, female collectivity and women’s invisible labor become visible.
The scene is part of an interactive, artificial intelligence (AI)-generated fable that unfolds across five tablets embedded in a sculptural installation. Each section forms a narrative microcosm, inspired by moments in Zeppelin history, reinterpreted with the help of AI and enriched by non-Western visual traditions, such as the collection of Persian fables Kalīlah and Dimnah.[4] Its animal stories’ themes of cunning, trust, and betrayal resonate in Kadyri’s structure. Her micro-stories revolve around technology, power, and forgotten existences, presenting the Zeppelin as an ambiguous symbol. She is particularly interested in perceptions outside of Europe, for example in Central Asia, where the Zeppelin was not associated with power, but with fantastical imaginations, such as a “dragon,” a “whale,” a “camel,” or a “castle in the sky.” These poetic attributions are also reflected in the sculptural setting, a three-part blue aluminum construction oscillating between object and meaning—mythical creature, abandoned work environment, airship skeleton, or floating shell? (fig. 3)
For Kadyri, the archive is not a closed repository, but rather a place full of gaps, tensions, and contradictions. By interweaving historical image material with mythical structures and poetic narration, the artist destabilizes dominant readings and creates space for other bodies, voices, and stories. AI becomes an accomplice to speculative historiography. In the sense of feminist worlding practices,[5] the archive thus becomes a projection surface for alternative realities—a place where not only stories but entire worlds are reimagined. In the spaces in between fiction, memory, and critique, alternative images of history emerge, a different archive: multidimensional, polyphonic, inviting. It is not only the what of history that counts, but also the how of its becoming—in the archive, in the selection of materials, in the marginalized voices, and in the ethical decisions inscribed in every narrative.
Operative Archives: ONCE A WEAPON OF WAR, NOW WITH A SIDE ORDER OF CURRYWURST AND AI
While Aziza Kadyri explores the archive as a space of the forgotten and speculative, the collective Ebb.global, together with Neïl Beloufa, takes a media-critical look at the archive as an apparatus of endless reproduction. At an interactive terminal, visitors are invited to design their own postcards, which can be printed at the exhibition and can be mailed at the end of the visit. The basis for this is an AI trained with historical Zeppelin photographs from the museum archive. Using controls, visitors can create speculative visual worlds—from flying currywurst transporters to interstellar missiles and dystopian war machines. Thematic clusters such as “Disco,” “Future Past,” and “Currywurst” link historical iconography with pop culture and everyday aesthetics (fig. 4).
This blend of irony, pop references and absurd exaggeration can be understood as a variation on Jack Halberstam’s “silly archive”—a concept for archives that use seemingly banal, comical, or absurd materials to disrupt standardized knowledge systems and open up alternative forms of memory and knowledge.[6] Ebb.global and Beloufa’s “silly archive” thus becomes a critical tool—a playful detour that also questions the heroic historiography surrounding the Zeppelin.
The customizable postcards feature Dadaist greetings such as: “You’re a full-course contradiction—spicy, soft, and slightly aerodynamic” or “Glitter is eternal. Regret is optional.” This poetic and absurd language allows the archive to smile back subversively.
By turning visitors into image producers, the collective makes the propagandistic potential of AI-generated images just as tangible as the historically charged symbol of the Zeppelin. The work’s title, Auto Promo (Self-Promotion), underscores the collective’s ironic perpetuation and exposure of the Zeppelin’s function as a propaganda machine. Looking at the images thus becomes a look behind the images and at their archive.
The epistemological difference to the traditional archive could hardly be greater: while traditional archives rely on conscious collection, classification, and controlled access, AI systems such as that of Auto Promo operate on a probabilistic basis—with training data, situational “retrieval,” and scalability. Information is not stored to be remembered, but rather to be reactivated, combined, or deleted at the right moment—depending on factors such as attention, demand, or economic viability. Thus, the traditional concept of an archive as a place of memory and representation is replaced by an “operational archive”:[7] a technical structure that constantly re-sorts, filters, and exploits information.
Beloufa and Ebb.global’s project is positioned precisely within this field of tension: it uses AI not only for image production, but also to reveal its conditions, preconceptions, and ideological implications. The archive becomes a stage for ideological image repetition—and an invitation to see through these patterns, disrupt them, and recode them playfully. What remains of the archive when its purpose shifts from remembering to generating?
Affective Archives: Disaster Cinema, Power Trip, and Media Fantasy
Christelle Oyiri explores the Zeppelin Museum’s archive with a view to aviation disasters, focusing on material related to the Hindenburg explosion in 1937 and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The Hindenburg disaster is considered one of the first globally received media events, marking the beginning of an era in which images of disasters became mass entertainment. For Oyiri, these events represent emotionally and affectively charged visual worlds where reality and staging are indistinguishable. She asks how such images shape historiography and self-perception. The use of AI exacerbates this development: images are created without a real-life model—pure simulations that circulate in a “hyperreality.”[8]
Her installation features an airship hanging from the ceiling bearing the inscription: “The World Is Yours”—a reference to Brian De Palma’s film Scarface—in dialogue with a video installation. (fig. 5) In her film, archival material, staged sequences, and stylized imagery converge to form a kaleidoscopic narrative. A field of tension emerges between memory and projection, fact and speculation. In Scarface, the slogan stands for Tony Montana’s destructive ambition. Oyiri weaves this reference together with footage of the Hindenburg and references to Adolf Hitler and Elon Musk’s SpaceX aviation program to expose power fantasies, hubris, and imperial ambitions. Using AI, she transforms archival images of the Zeppelin into colorful, animated scenes—such as a group of passengers sipping cocktails on board the Hindenburg. The boundary between source and simulation, archival document and fiction becomes blurred. The result is a complex iconography of imperial dreams of flight, where progress and decline converge. At the same time, Oyiri deconstructs narratives of Western expansion in both material and media.
The central figure is a Black child who guides us through the film as a narrator—for example, as a television reporter who interviews passersby with curiosity and distance, revealing technical hubris and ironically subverting human fantasies of conquest.The child becomes a poetic counter-archive that subverts and recodes hegemonic narratives.
Oyiri approaches the archive with a critical eye, exposing the power structures and image politics that shape our ideas of history and truth. Her films are not primarily created through actual filming, but through editing. Archive images become raw material for a montage practice that shifts meanings. Through pop culture references, scripted scenes, and AI-generated reenactments, Oyiri destabilizes the archive from within. For her, every historical document is a product of strategic visibility. “All documents must be read as propaganda documents,” she says, quoting Marc Ferro—an attitude that shapes her work.[9]
For Oyiri, the archive becomes a place of media-mediated affects, fantasies, and desires—but also of violence and colonial control. Rather than viewing it as a repository of the past, she understands it as a fluid structure in which the past, present, and future are continuously reordered and linked, thus radically breaking with the idea of a universalist archive.
In this way, the three contemporary artistic positions in Image and Power develop different aesthetic models of the archive: Kadyri conceives of the archive as a poetic counter-narrative, Beloufa as a machine of ideological reproduction, and Oyiri as a stage for emotionally charged floods of images. Rather than continuing the archive, they question its functioning, blind spots, and potential for new memories. What unites these artists is their awareness that archives not only preserve reality but also create it—and that artistic practice can reveal these processes, making them tangible and renegotiable. As Aleida Assmann puts it: “Whoever decides what goes into the archive and what does not has a monopoly not only on the past, but also on the future.”[10]
1 For more on targeted data deletion and cultural policy interventions, see, for example: Ethan Singer, “Thousands of U.S. Government Web Pages Have Been Taken Down Since Friday,” in The New York Times, February 2, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/02/upshot/trump-government-websites-missing-pages.html; Peter Laudenbach and John Goetz, “Kultur – die neue Kampfzone,” Das Erste, January 14, 2024, https://www.daserste.de/information/wissen-kultur/ttt/sendung/ndr/chronik-afd-kultur100.html; Elena Malinova, “Politics of Memory and Nationalism,” in Nationalities Papers 49, no. 6 (November 2021): pp. 997–1007, https://doi.org/10.1017/nps.2020.87 (all sites accessedJune 28, 2025).
2 See Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago and London, 1996), p. 2.
3 See Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience (New York and London, 1997), pp. 23–25.
4 Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, Kalīlah and Dimnah: Fables of Virtue and Vice, ed. Michael Fishbein, trans. Michael Fishbein and James E. Montgomery (New York, 2022).
5 For more on the term “worlding,” see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York, 2003), pp. 72–75; Rolando Vázquez, Vistas of Modernity. Decolonial Aesthesis and the End of the Contemporary (Amsterdam, 2020), pp. 36–41; Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, 2016), pp. 11–14.
6 See Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham and London, 2011), esp. pp. 23–25.
7 See Wolfgang Ernst, “Das Archiv als symbolische Maschine. Zur Medienarchäologie der Archive,“ in: Sylvia Necker (ed.), Archivalische Ordnungen. Beiträge zur Theorie und Geschichte des Archivs (Cologne, 2011), pp. 93–108.
8 Cf. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor, 1994), pp. 12–14.
9 Cf. Marc Ferro, Le livre noir du colonialisme. XVIe – XXIe siècle: de l’extermination à la repentance (Paris, 2003).
10 Aleida Assmann in conversation with the Ö1 moderator Thomas Wolf in the program Dimensionen, January 28, 2008; quoted in wolfthomas, “Archivzitat: ‘Zitatenschleuder’ Aleida Assmann,” in Archivalia (January 29, 2008), https://archivalia.hypotheses.org/26070?utm_source=chatgpt.com (accessed [translated] June 28, 2025).
