The present article revisits what seems to be the difficulty of intermediary artistic venues in recounting their experiences, transmitting them and thereby contributing to the constitution of a culture of forebears, a difficulty largely due to the status of the document and the gesture of documentation within the field of contemporary creation. Based on an action-research carried out on the archives of the La Déviation collective (Marseille, France), the article explores the contributions of decolonial perspectives on the archive, in terms of the nature of archival work and the role of the archivist - notably through the work of Michelle Caswell - in facilitating communities' access to their own history and "resocializing the archive" (Samia Henni).