Since 2005, a total of 1356 conversations have been stored in the audio archive of the MAB. The first audio recordings documented the gathering of 100 Polish intellectuals who spoke on the theme of “Invisible, Forgotten and Lost Knowledge” in the first year of the Kaczynski government as part of a “Blackmarket”. Ever since, the MAB’s projects, that usually take place over the course of one to three days, have been recorded in fourteen different countries. In addition to entries that were recorded during 27 Blackmarkets and licensed Blackmarkets between 2004 and 2020, the speech acts of another 16 projects have so far entered the archive. The archive offers the conversations in the 13 original languages of their live recording.

The main languages are German (809 conversations) and English (231 conversations), but there are also eleven other languages: Finnish (36), Russian (34), Polish (33), Hebrew (29), French (28), Latvian (28), Schwyzerdütsch (11), Portuguese (9), Italian (1), Hindi (1), Spanish (40).

The term archive is associated with both institution and concept, a concrete place of work and a method. Does a digitally accessible archive need a physical space at all? The MAB archive was created outside of institutional structures, supported only by short-term local alliances. Perhaps it is not so much the question of a concrete space that is important here, but the desire for a place of visible application, of belonging to a thematic field. A defined user interest that sets itself apart from the anonymity of the net. The wish was fulfilled in 2015 – the audio archive is connected to the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin.

The holdings are systematized by topics and persons according to the usual principle of pertinence in archiving. Each interview is announced with a short summary in German or English, so that it is possible to find out about its content even if one does not speak the language of the recording. A short CV of the expert, spatial location in the respective project (e.g. the table number) and critical comments of the archive administrators complete the administration. Commentary level: here the archivist allows himself to comment on the conversation from the background with impertinence, mockery or gushing. The comments of the archivists are neither censored nor edited.

The data stock of the MAB archive, i.e. the audio files of all recorded conversations (and video files, if applicable) can be stored with a cloud computing provider and made available for retrieval. They form the core inventory, which can be continuously updated via the backend of the archive website. A relational database is connected between this stock and the front end, which searches for its keywords from the short descriptions of the conversations as well as from the titles, topics and names of the people involved and enables individual search queries. It would be interesting to research an acoustic index system, a sound retrieval for the audio files – but this is not yet the case.

Over the years, 28 different people have written and worked in the archive. The style and attitude of the entries vary accordingly. The main archivist since 2015 was Cristina Navarro, Franz Hempel has occupied the position since 2021 and Lukas Grundmann does the audio editing.

Archivists:
Stefan Aue, Berlin; Nataša Petrešin Bachelez, Paris; Claudia Basrawi, Berlin; Sladja Blazan, Berlin; Romana Bund, Wien; Geoffrey Garrison, Berlin; Robert Hartmann, Berlin; Angela Heide, Wien; Franz Hempel, Leipzig; Carolin Hochleichter, Berlin; Hannah Hurtzig, Berlin; Pirkko Husemann, Bremen; Marian Kaiser, Berlin; Kira Kirsch, Wien; Alexander Klose, Berlin; Sarah Lewis, Los Angeles; Agra Lieģe, Riga; Anja Lindner, Berlin; Johanna Linsley, London; Cristina Lleras, Bogotá; Felipe Marinelli, Berlin; Alexander Martos, Wien; Astrid Matron, Berlin; Cristina Navarro, Berlin; Laurens Otto, Paris; Stefanie Peter, Nowosibirsk; Claus Philipp, Wien; Barbara Piwowarska, Warschau; Isabella Rjeille, Sao Paulo; Adriana Roque, Bogotá; Evi Scheller, Wien; Martina Scherler, Bern; Philipp Schmidt, Berlin; Daniela Schöler, Berlin; Nicolas Siepen, Berlin; Sophia Stepf, Berlin; Sandra Teitge, Washington; Sasa Vojin Vukadinovic, Berlin; Laura Weber, Berlin; Siegmar Zacharias, Berlin/Bukarest