Balkhash Anarchive is an artist-led, community-based archive of the ecosystems, memories, and cultural life of the Lake Balkhash basin as a hydrosocial space. Conceived as a living knowledge platform, it brings together artistic research, oral histories, local knowledge, nomadic ancestral wisdom, and ecological understandings of the interconnections that shape hydro-communities. It also creates space for new texts, artistic collaborations, and public exchange. The anarchive is envisioned as an evolving space where memory, knowledge, and cultural and environmental practices can meet, circulate, and take new form, reconnecting communities across the basin. The project grows out of Artcom Platform’s long-term initiative Care for Balkhash, through which we have been building infrastructures of care for the ecosystems and communities of Lake Balkhash since 2020.

Lake Balkhash is one of the world’s largest lakes and a vital, sacred body of water in the arid steppe of Kazakhstan, within a wider basin shared with China through the Ili River. It holds an important cultural place in Central Asia, connecting nomadic and settled histories, oral traditions, local knowledge, and artistic imaginaries. It has also been shaped by the long aftermath of Soviet colonisation, industrialisation, militarisation, forced sedentarisation, and ecological disruption. Today, the lake and its basin face mounting pressure from climate change, industrial extraction, unequal water use, transboundary water tensions, poor environmental governance, and plans to build a nuclear power plant on its shore. Balkhash remains a living space of cultural memory, everyday care, and intergenerational knowledge, much of which is dispersed or excluded from formal archives and dominant cultural narratives. The relations that bind the basin together also often remain obscured, reflecting longer histories of colonial fragmentation that have separated memory, territory, and ecological interdependence.

Balkhash Anarchive responds to this context by creating a structure through which different forms of knowledge can be gathered, organised, co-created, and shared. It approaches archiving as a relational and collective process, bringing together hydromythologies, storytelling practices, embodied knowledge, oral and musical traditions, interviews with local knowledge holders, visual materials, soundscapes, community mapping and community-based work around the lake. Developed through community consultation, editorial work, translation, and a trilingual access model, the anarchive shapes these materials into thematic clusters grounded in the cultural and ecological realities of the basin. In doing so, it seeks to make possible a layered understanding of Balkhash while resisting technocratic and extractive frameworks. We imagine it as a decolonial knowledge commons that supports access, intergenerational transmission, and long-term public engagement.

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