Introducing the Are.na Annual 2025

Today we’re publishing the Are.na Annual 2025, which you can find in the Are.na store. To give you an idea of what’s inside, we’re running the editor’s letter below.

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Dear Reader, 

In April, we put out a call for submissions for pieces that spoke to the theme of “document,” as in to record; to provide information or support; an official paper or digital file; a piece of evidence, a form of proof. As usual, we tried to choose a theme that’s both a noun and a verb. Like the figure-ground switching of Rubin’s Vase, or the total shifting of lenticular images, document might mean — tilted this way — a static piece of paper or, viewed from another direction, a dynamic process, a method of recording. As expected, the contributors to this Annual brought entirely new perspectives onto the theme, making it a many-sided thing. But interestingly, most of the pieces in the book can be grouped into two types of explorations: what a document is and what a document can do. 

Those describing what a document is attempted to find themselves within their chosen documents, moving inside-out as they put their findings into words. Sharon Neema dissects the draft, which she calls “pre-documents,” through analogous descriptions of the document as a living thing that breathes, grows, moves, and even eats. Megumi Tanaka’s contribution goes deep into the machinations that stabilize the digital world, taking a closer look at the hardware and cloud computation technologies that generated the very documents (Google Docs) used to create this Annual. But in his essay, “Surface Tension,” Reuben Son tells us where all these dives and dissections eventually lead: Son writes about falling through the surface of documents and giving into their embrace. These are the moments where “we find ourselves suggestively porous and permeable,” he writes. 

A document is often something we make and maintain, but those who find themselves deep within its marrow grow attuned to all the ways documents shape and sustain us; the noun becomes the verb. Those describing what a document can do found that they can limit and permit, as with the immigration papers of both Kalina Nedelcheva and Nika Simovich Fisher’s families. Documenting is a form of future-making, of passing down, as in Amelia K’s essay on her hometown, heritage, and hauntings. These things are somewhat expected of documents, though in these writers’ hands they’re told in spiraling and unconventional ways. Less expected of a document: to be “ecstatic,” in the words of James Langdon, to go beyond the scope of reasonability and display empathy toward its subject. James is talking about certain images as ecstatic documents, but Will Allstetter is talking specifically about Wikipedia images and their captions (Are.na heads will know) when he writes, “Affect, existing in a space before classification or separation, is a powerful empathetic tool.” 

It happens with documentation, this impulse to classify and separate — and tie things together neatly into two categories. But per Reuben’s permeability, many of the pieces in the book are about both what a document is and what it does, blurring our convenient distinction. Jonathan Gathaara Sölanke Fraser writes about dreaming as both document and documentation. Nathalia Dutra and Lu Heintz (who designed our incredible cover) write about the slippage and seepage of time and the mind, and of diaristic writing as an attempt to capture, slow down, and make sense. 

Those latter sentiments could also describe what we were doing while making this book, itself a document (about documents). We should end this letter before it gets too recursive, but not without mentioning this year’s community element to the Annual — and the people on Are.na who contributed their signatures to the back of the book. Consider it our version of a yearbook. 

enjoy,

Meg Miller and Michelle Santiago Cortes

Co-editors, Are.na Annual 2025

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Order the book here.