Collective archives arise out of a necessity to document, preserve and mobilise histories, dreams, testimonies and practices that might otherwise be lost, or face active erasure. These archives are not simply collections of objects and ephemera, but the result of networks and relationships. Archival practices emerge in this context as continuous practices of communing, dreaming, collaboration and resistance, in service of collective memory.
The Archive is a Gathering Place considers the rich history and futures of archives that are collectively created in a digital age. Taking place on 24 and 25 May 2024, the programme invites audiences to a conversation about the archive as a place for gathering, collaboration, creativity and political practice. The events bring together artists, archivists and digital practitioners to discuss the futures of collectively owned archives and community generated content.
Friday 24 May: Tate Modern, Starr Auditorium, 10.30–17.00
This day will include panels and discussions with artists, archivists, community organisers and interdisciplinary researchers.
The symposium will take place 10.30–17.00 at Tate Modern in the Starr Auditorium.
10.30 Opening remarks
11.00 Panel 1: Access and Futurity
Janice Cheddie (Chair)
Rosemary Greenan
Anasuya Sengupta
Alia Al-Sabi
12.30 Lunch break
13.30 Panel 2: Holding Collections: Archiving as Dreamkeeping
Ellie Porter (Chair)
Eddie Bruce Jones and Tao Leigh-Goffe
Thai Jones
Christine Eyene
14.45 Panel 3: Responding to the Archive
Vasundhara Mathur (Chair)
Aleema Gray
Abeera Kamran
Mindy Seu
16:00 rukus!: A conversation between Topher Campbell and Ajamu X
Saturday 25 May: Tate Modern, Blavatnik Building Level 5, 11.00–17.00
This day will include performances, music, workshops, readings and discussions featuring community owned archives across London.
The festival will take place 11.00–17.00 at Tate Modern in Blavatnik Building Level 5.
All day: The June Givanni Panafrican Cinema Archive will present a selection from its holdings which both converge with, and critically intervene into Tate’s collections. The archive invites visitors to a gathering space of films, reading material and other memorabilia.
11.00–12.00 Workshop with Lamya Sadiq (MayDay Rooms) and Jordan Taylor (PageMasters): Pamphlet Making in the Digital Age
Join Lamya, Jordan and participants from the MayDay Rooms x PageMasters
Print Residency for a collective pamphlet-making session in reponse to the MayDay Rooms archive. Together, participants will consider questions around the materiality of pamphlets, or zines, as low cost & democratic models of spreading information and forging solidarities, as well as their function and impact in our increasingly digitised world.
12.10–12.55 Archives panel chaired by Althea Greenan (Women’s Art Library, Goldsmiths)
13.05–14.05 Readings and Music
Zena Agha and Kareem Samara
dove (Chris Kirubi) and Rhoda Boateng
Kaitlene Koranteng
14.05–15.05 Screening and talk by June Givanni Panafrican Cinema Archive
15.05–16.00 SITAAD (Leyla Degan and Naima Hassan): Letters to Giorgio and Mohamed: Entangled Biographies and Xirsi as a Counter-Archival Method
The performance presentation Letters to Giorgio and Mohamed weaves together historical sound recordings, archival traces, bureaucratic records and critical fabulations relating to the Somali-Italian partisan Giorgio Marincola and to the Somali ethnographic performer and linguist Mohamed Nur. Opening with cassette tapes recorded by SITAAD in Milan and Berlin, the performance is a sonic dialogue between Leyla Degan and Naima Hassan.
16.10–17.00 Rita Keegan and Lauren Craig: Preservation as Creation
The performance is a live digitisation of ephemera from the Rita Keegan Archive, reflecting on the labour, practice and methods of collective archiving and preservation.
Featured
Interventions and displays by June Givanni – PanAfrican Cinema Archive; Women’s Art Library, Goldsmiths; MayDay Rooms; Panchayat Collection; PageMasters; Making Histories Visible Archive, among others.
Partners
‘The Archive is a Gathering Place’ forms part of Our Heritage, Our Stories: Linking and searching community-generated digital content to develop the people’s national collection, a Discovery Research Project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, as part of the Towards a National Collection programme. Our Heritage Our Stories is led by Lorna Hughes at the University of Glasgow in collaboration with the University of Manchester, The National Archives and the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC).
The symposium and festival are hosted by Tate Research and curated by Vasundhara Mathur with support from Tate Library and Archive.
Rosemary Grennan: Building the Archive as a Common Resource
Rosemary Grennan is a member of the MayDay Rooms collective – an archive dedicated to the history of social struggles, resistance campaigns and experimental culture. The main work of MayDay Rooms consists in connecting historical materials with contemporary political struggles through collaborative education and research, digitisation, and free distribution. She is interested in developing platforms and practices which aid different forms of collective engagement with historical material. She has recently been working on a collaborative online repository of political ephemera called leftover.rs. She is also the co-founder of AGIT, a residency space in Berlin focusing on social movement history and culture.
Anasuya Sengupta: Whose Heritage? Whose Knowledge?: our journey of liberatory memory work
Anasuya Sengupta is co-Director and co-founder of Whose Knowledge?, a global multilingual campaign to centre the knowledges of marginalised communities (the minoritised majority of the world) online. She has led initiatives across the global South, and internationally for over 25 years, to collectively create feminist presents and futures of love, justice and liberation. She is committed to unpacking issues of power, privilege and access, including her own as an anti-caste savarna woman. She is a co-founder and advisor to Numun Fund (the first feminist tech fund for and from the Global South), the former Chief Grantmaking Officer at the Wikimedia Foundation, and the former Regional Program Director at the Global Fund for Women. Anasuya is a 2017 Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow and received a 2018 Internet and Society award from the Oxford Internet Institute. She is on the Scholars’ Council for UCLA’s Center for Critical Internet Inquiry and the advisory committee for MIT’s Center for Research on Equitable and Open Scholarship (CREOS). Anasuya has an honorary doctorate from the University of London, and holds an MPhil in Development Studies from the University of Oxford, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar. She also has a BA in Economics (Honours) from Delhi University.
Alia Al-Sabi: Captive Archives in Palestine
Alia Al-Sabi will provide a brief glimpse of an archive of books and notebooks recording the textual practices and literary production of the Palestinian Prisoners’ Movement in the 1970s and 1980s. Al-Sabi is a writer and researcher based in Brooklyn, New York. She is currently a PhD Candidate in the Performance Studies department at NYU, where she is researching prison literatures in various archives in Palestine. Her research focus considers theories of movement and subversion within logics of surveillance and confinement through examining the textual practices produced within carceral structures.
Janice Cheddie: Chair
Janice Cheddie FRSA is a London-based writer, researcher and consultant. Janice was born in St Lucia, West Indies, and migrated to London as a child with her mother and older brother. She is a part of the ‘Children of Windrush’ generation, a collective generational experience that has been influential in shaping contemporary Britain. Between the mid-1990s and 2015 she was custodian of the Panchayat Collection, with the artist and curator Shaheen Merali, until its transfer to the Tate Library in 2015. Since 2015 Janice has been a member of ICOMOS-UK’s Intangible Cultural Heritage committee. Between 2020 and 2022 Janice was research consultant for London-based AFFORD, Return of the Icons initiative, funded by the Open Society Foundation. Return of the Icons seeks the restitution of looted African artefacts and human remains within UK museums and heritage institutions to their communities of origin.
Tao Leigh Goffe and Eddie Bruce-Jones: Mangrove as Caribbean Method in Two Acts
Tao Leigh Goffe (Cornell) and Eddie Bruce-Jones (SOAS) offer remarks situated at the intersection of environmental/ecological issues and epistemological questions in engaging with the archive. After introducing the conceptual terrain of their own research, Goffe and Bruce-Jones move into a discussion of their joint work; an interdisciplinary digital humanities project that uses the indentureship period as a window for exploring new methodological questions and approaches for historical analysis of colonialism and the contemporary theorisation of diaspora and global problems.
Thai Jones: Beyond Wonder: Teaching with Anger and Outrage in the Archives
Thai Jones is the Curator for History at Columbia University's archive. He teaches critical research and the history of radicalism, and is the author of several books, including More Powerful Than Dynamite: Radicals, Plutocrats, Progressives, and New York’s Year of Anarchy (2014) and A Radical Line: From the Labor Movement to the Weather Underground, One Family’s Century of Conscience (2004). He served as historical consultant and co-writer on the award-winning podcast Mother Country Radicals (2022). His writing has appeared in a variety of national US publications, including The New Yorker, the Washington Post, the New York Times, The Nation and the Occupied Wall Street Journal.
Christine Eyene: The George Hallett Research Collection
Christine Eyene will discuss the formation of an independent research collection bringing together works by South African photographer George Hallett (1942–2020) focusing on South African exile and Black communities in Britain and beyond in the 1970s and 1980s. She will address issues around the preservation of archives marginalised by mainstream institutions and how these reflect the state of art histories and practices neglected by dominant narratives. Eyene will also share how her 10-year collaboration with artist and Professor of Contemporary Art Lubaina Himid CBE RA, in the framework of Making Histories Visible, enabled her to care for, research, and disseminate Hallett’s work and contribution to South African, British, and Diasporic art histories. Eyene is an art historian, critic and curator. She is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Art at Liverpool John Moores University and Research Curator at Tate Liverpool.
Ellie Porter: Chair
Ellie Porter was previously Head of Programme at Art360 Foundation, which supported over 50 artists and estates in the creation of archives and legacy strategies. From 2017 - 2023 she ran a public programme of curatorial residences in artists’ archives, collaborative research initiatives and professional development opportunities for archivists. Ellie co-produced documentary films on artists’ legacies with filmmakers, as well as toolkits and a mobile app for archiving with project partners including; the International Curators Forum, The National Archives, the Showroom, Hauser & Wirth Institute, Flat Time House and the Women’s Art Library. Art360 closed in 2023 due to ever-growing pressures on public funding. Recollect, an ACE-funded programme developed with Mark Waugh and Art360 co-founder, Gilane Tawadros, awarded over £100,000 to artists and estates in 2023, and continues to be delivered by DACS. Ellie now works independently with artists’ archives and organisations including Whitechapel Gallery and Art Fund.
Aleema Gray: Liberating the Archive
Aleema Gray is a Jamaican-born curator, researcher and public historian based in London. She was awarded the Yesu Persaud Scholarship for her PhD entitled Bun Babylon: A Community-engaged History of Rastafari in Britain. Aleema’s work focuses on documenting Black history in Britain through the perspective of lived experiences. Her practice is driven by a concern for more historically contingent ways of understanding the present, especially in relation to notions of belonging, memory, and contested heritage. She is the Lead Curator for Beyond the Bassline: 500 years of Black British Music at the British Library and the founder of House of Dread, an anti-disciplinary heritage studio.
Abeera Kamran: Urdu Newspapers: The Archive is Still in Print
Urdu’s print culture is remarkable in that design strategies dating from 19th century Urdu manuscripts and lithographs remain widely in use across city shop fronts, posters, and books. This is most notably seen in the way contemporary Urdu newspapers are designed, using the same layout schemes as the ones used in lithographed Urdu periodicals and newspapers. These modes of designing not only remain relevant to the modern Urdu reader, but also desirable. The continued importance of traditional and historical ways of arranging text belies Urdu's fraught relationship with typesetting technologies. Urdu newspapers handwritten and lithographed as late as 1981 to maintain the calligraphic aesthetics readers had come to expect. In this talk Abeera Kamran will discuss how the design of contemporary Urdu newspapers keeps archival modes of reading and seeing alive and vibrant for the Urdu reader, and how inadequate digital technologies threaten this sophisticated design tradition.
Abeera Kamran is a designer, web developer and researcher. She works between Birmingham, UK and Karachi, Pakistan. She is an AHRC funded PhD student at the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication, at the University of Reading. Her research investigates the design and technological challenges associated with publishing Urdu in responsive web environments. She is also a lecturer in Design at the University of Reading.
Mindy Seu: The Cyberfeminism Index
Mindy Seu is a designer and technologist based in New York City and Los Angeles. Her expanded practice involves archival projects, techno-critical writing, performative lectures, design commissions, and close collaborations. Her latest writing surveys feminist economies, historical precursors of the metaverse, and the materiality of the internet. Mindy’s ongoing Cyberfeminism Index, which gathers three decades of online activism and net art, was commissioned by Rhizome, presented at the New Museum, and awarded the Graham Foundation Grant. She has lectured internationally at cultural institutions (Barbican Centre, New Museum), academic institutions (Columbia University, Central Saint Martins), and mainstream platforms (Pornhub, SSENSE, Google), and been a resident at MacDowell, Sitterwerk Foundation, Pioneer Works, and Internet Archive. Her design commissions and consultation include projects for the Serpentine Gallery, Canadian Centre for Architecture, and MIT Media Lab. Her work has been featured in Frieze, Vanity Fair, Dazed, Gagosian Quarterly, Brooklyn Rail, i-D, and more. Mindy holds an MDes from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and a BA in Design Media Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles. As an educator, Mindy was formerly an Assistant Professor at Rutgers Mason Gross School of the Arts and Critic at Yale School of Art. She is currently an Associate Professor at University of California, Los Angeles in the Department of Design Media Arts.
rukus!: A conversation between Topher Campbell and Ajamu X
Ajamu X is an artist, scholar, archive curator and radical sex activist. His fine art photography explores same-sex desire and the Black male body. He is the co-founder of rukus! Federation and the rukus! Black Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer + Archive.
Topher Campbell is a filmmaker, artist and writer who has created a range of works in broadcasting, film, theatre, television and performance. His works focus on issues of sexuality, masculinity and the city, particularly in relation to race, human rights and climate change. He is the co-founder of rukus! Federation and the rukus! Black Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer + Archive.
Lamya Sadiq and Jordan Taylor: Pamphlet Making in the Digital Age
Join Lamya, Jordan and participants from the MayDay Rooms x PageMasters Print Residency for a collective pamphlet-making session. We will use the beak fold binding method to create a pamphlet on a political struggle that is important to you. It can be instructive, expressive, a place for your ideas or emotions – whether that be joy, anxiety, or rage. We will consider questions around the materiality of pamphlets, or zines, as low cost & democratic models of spreading information and forging solidarities, as well as their function and impact in our increasingly digitised world. While social media can be effective in raising awareness and accelerate the sharing of information, it can also reinforce the diffusion of communities, keeping us tethered to our devices and unused to direct political action. We hope this workshop can be a space to consider the contradictions and intersections of these forms.
Lamya Sadiq is the Public Outreach Coordinator at MayDay Rooms Archive. MayDay Rooms is an archive, resource space and safe haven for social movements, experimental and marginal cultures and their histories. Our building in the centre of London contains an archive of historical material linked to social struggles, resistance campaigns, experimental culture, and the expression of marginalised and oppressed groups.
Jordan Taylor is an anti-disciplinary artist working across print, thread and fashion. Their work teeters from intimate hand embroideries, to playful twists on digitally embroidered garments, and riotous crochet assemblages. In 2017 they co-founded PageMasters, a sustainable, affordable, experimental print and design studio. In 2022 they expanded to found ThreadMaidens, working with artists to create bespoke digital embroideries. They regularly run workshops and events with partners including Royal Academy of Arts, Science Museum Group, South London Gallery and most recently curating the PageMasters Print Residency in partnership with MayDay Rooms.
Althea Greenan: Community Archives Roundtable
Althea Greenan works in Special Collections and Archives at Goldsmiths, University of London curating the Women’s Art Library (WAL) collection. She programmes artistic research through supporting artists, students and academics working with the wide range of materials and archives in the WAL. This work is the subject of a film by Holly Antrum commissioned by the Art360 Foundation titled Yes to the Work!: The Women’s Art Library https://www.art360foundation.org.uk/media.
Additional roles include co-curating the Animating Archives website https://sites.gold.ac.uk/animatingarchives/ and sitting on the Advisory Board of Feminist Art Making Histories, an oral history, digital humanities project, funded by the Irish Research Council and the AHRC.
Zena Agha and Kareem Samara: Reading and Oud performance:
Zena Agha is a Palestinian-Iraqi writer, poet and multi-disciplinary artist from London. She is the author of Objects from April and May (2022), which was a finalist for the Alice James Book Award, the Omnidawn First/Second Book Prize and the Philip Levine Poetry Prize. She has received fellowships from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and the Millay Colony for the Arts. Zena’s short film, ‘The Place that is Ours‘, co-directed with Dorothy Allen-Pickard, premiered on Nowness in November 2021 and was selected for the Clermont-Ferrand Film Festival in 2022 among several other international festivals. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Policy, The Nation, The Independent, Foreign Affairs, The Margins, NPR and El País.
Kareem Samara is a multi-instrumentalist, improviser, composer and organiser. His particular area of interest is in diasporic identity and de-colonial possibilities of sound and music.
Chris Kirubi and Rhoda Boateng: Dust Lattice (‘Fire, Laughter, Emerald, Rain’)
A thesaurus, proceedings backwards from unlike to like through the degradation of materials in the archive. A sweaty condensation in elemental exchange. This collaborative reading will combine text, audio and touch to speculate and dread.
dove / Chris Kirubi is a poet-artist based in London.
Rhoda Adum Boateng is a London based poet and archive worker, playing with errant forms of memory and sense.
Kaitlene Koranteng: Are you listening? A Reflection on Orality in the Archive
Kaitlene Koranteng is an archivist, engagement producer and poet with an interest in exploring and marginalised histories and access to archives. She was project Archivist for Transforming the National Collection Project UAL Decolonising the Arts Institute (2022 – 23). Since 2022, Koranteng works with Iniva, an arts organisation committed to disseminating radical and emergent contemporary art practice from Global Majority, African, Asian and Caribbean perspectives. Koranteng is part of a group archivists and librarians working with Library of Africa and the African Diaspora, coordinating member of the Young Historian Project and editorial board of History Matters journal, an accessible, free journal sharing histories of African and Caribbean People in Britain.
SITAAD Collective: Letters to Giorgio and Mohamed: Entangled Biographies and Xirsi as a Counter-Archival Method
SITAAD is a platform and artistic-collaboration initiated by archivists Leyla Degan and Naima Hassan in 2022. Deriving their name from a type of devotional gathering organised by Somali women, sitaad as practice represents the sum that (de)occupies their artistic habitation of colonial sites, museums, and archives. SITAAD’s border-thinking is situated in the geographies of Soomaaliya Talyaani, Ingiriiska iyo Faransiiska (former Italian, British, and French Somaliland). Engaging the shadows cast by colonialism, they experiment with analogue formats, artistic methods, feminist epistemologies and Xirsi, a clandestine Somali practice of protection. They have organised and participated in residencies, exhibition presentations, public programmes and fellowships in international settings. Currently, they are 2023-24 Hub Residencies Fellows, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota, in association with Soomaal House of Art. SITAAD resides in Italy and Germany.
Rita Keegan and Lauren Craig
Rita Keegan works across print, photography, film, sound, textiles and installation. Her work considers the representation of Black communities historically and acts of self-fashioning in relation to the experience of Black women, often through self-portraiture. In 1984 Rita co-founded Community CopyArt, a resource centre set up to facilitate activist workshops and produce print materials, and in 1985, she established the Women Artists of Colour Index, to catalogue, document and remember the work of Black women artists. Rita’s contributions to archival practice were explored by X Marks the Spot in the 2015 publication Human Endeavour: a creative finding aid for the Women of Colour Index. In 2020 Rita’s archive was presented at South London Gallery, followed by a solo exhibition of her work curated by the Rita Keegan Archive Project. This show was accompanied by Mirror Reflecting Darkly, a new essay collection and archival sourcebook edited by Ego Ahaiwe-Sowinski, Matthew Harle and Rita Keegan. Until April 8th 2024, Rita’s work is showing Women In Revolt! Tate Britain, curated by Linsey Young. She is supported in the studio by Lauren Craig, Gina Nembhard, and Naomi Pearce.
Lauren Craig (she/her/hers) is a social-media shy, internet- curious cultural futurist based in London. Her practice intentionally moves slowly between curation, performance, installation, art writing, moving images and auto-para-ethno-therapeutic photography. Through collaborative live engagement, systems re-thinking and social archival histories, Lauren elevates lived experience as a tool for reframing past and present underexposed narratives. She conceived the conceptual modality S:E:P:A:L:S and is a member of the eponymous constellation which, through live events and publications, explores how we can create ‘ethical cultural memory’ within curating, institutional decision-making, commissioning and (un)learning. Lauren founded and directed six creative organisations that engaged with ethical, social, environmental, cultural production, and reproductive justice.
The June Givanni PanAfrican Cinema Archive (JGPACA)
The JGPACA holds a unique collection of artefacts and archival material that has its core the interest of Pan-African cinema and its relationship to Black British cinema and culture. Our events and projects reveal histories and ideas in African and African diasporic film, bringing together the work of filmmakers, artists and writers around a wide range of themes, debates and interests.
Imruh Bakari is a filmmaker and writer. Born in St Kitts and Nevis, he has lived in the UK and East Africa since the 1960s. From 1999–2004 he was Festival Director of the Zanzibar International Film Festival (ZIFF), and a member of the Advisory Council of the Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers (FEPACI) from 2012–15. His films include Blue Notes and Exiled Voices (1991) and The Mark of the Hand – Aubrey Williams (1986). His published works include journal articles, book chapters, African Experiences of Cinema (eds. Imruh Bakari and Mbye Cham 1996) and poetry collections including The Madman in this House. He is a director of the June Givanni PanAfrican Cinema Archive. He currently lectures in Film Studies and Screenwriting at the University of Winchester, and is a collaborator with Numbi Arts on the Somali UK Museum project.
Phoebe Beckett Chingono is a British-Zimbabwean anthropology scholar and cultural producer. Her practice transverses archival research, ethnographic methods, choreography and performance. Her professional work focuses on supporting ethical and sustainable practices within the Community Sector, with grassroots social justice organisations, including Grenfell-based communities and within arts and academia. She is currently involved in art and archival projects with the June Givanni PanAfrican Cinema Archive (JGPACA), PUNOS, Association of Black Anthropologists (ABA) and duo collective ‘Care-orists’, and is developing participatory, site-based choreographic practices with Siobhan Davies Studios and Chisenhale Artist Community. A recent graduate of The University of Chicago MA in Social Sciences, she specialises in theories of value, semiotics, and history of science/ideas, particularly within imperial ‘margins’ in the Caribbean region and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Damilola Lemomu is an artist-filmmaker, researcher and film programmer. Working predominantly with video, her work often explores intersecting ideas between identity, migration and place. Selected screenings and exhibitions include: motherEarth International, Casa De La Cultura & Metropolitan Arts Centre (2023); Pram Town Revisited, Gibberd Gallery (2022); Changing Landscapes, Kupfer Project Space (2022); Promised Land, Flatpack Film Festival (2022); and BFI Film Academy SCENE (2020). She is the Archive Coordinator at the June Givanni PanAfrican Cinema Archive (JGPACA) and is a film programmer at Otherfield, a biennial non-fiction film festival held in East Sussex.
benjin Pollock is an academic researcher, musician, artist, curator and educator. He received his formal graduate and postgraduate training at the School of Oriental African Studies in London – specialising in African History, Music and Film Culture. After a number of years working as a researcher, musician and creative workshop facilitator, he completed a PhD in Sociology at the University of Kent in 2020. Alongside academic research, benjin has toured extensively with a number of experimental music ensembles over the last 15 years and his solo work has been featured on BBC Radio 6, BBC Radio 3, and at the TATE and Serpentine Galleries. In 2022 he was appointed as principal musician at the Globe Theatre. In November 2023 benjin joined JGPACA in order to help ensure the archival collection remains open and accessible for generations to come.