About

Archive Stories is a website about how to work with creative and non-traditional archives. We wanted to create a space for conversations about archiving beyond institutional archives, to think through the possibilities that open up when we imagine the archive as expansive and as encompassing everything around us. We designed this website with Frederick Kannemeyer, to reflect the idea of archiving as a creative practice. It is open access so that it is accessible beyond academic spaces, and designed in a way that allows you to make your way through without a set path. This website includes a collection of 23 archive stories, and we will add more each year. The website as a whole rejects the notion of a complete archive, instead seeing archiving as an incomplete and always-expanding practice. The aim is not to give an alternative definition of what an archive is or alternative archival practices that can be directly emulated, but rather to propose other ways of thinking with and working with archives that still leave space for many other approaches.

We imagine this website as a starting point for anyone interested in exploring more creative and non-traditional archives. The focus of these archive stories is not on the archives themselves but rather on archiving as a creative practice. What does it mean to work with creative archives like music, food, or film? How does someone begin working with archives like these? How might we come across unexpected archives when we expand what ‘archive’ means? We invited people who already do this work to take us on their journey with archiving. Alongside the website, we organise workshops where we invite archivists who do this type of work to speak to us about how they archive and what this means for the way we define archives and archiving.

We believe these archive stories are increasingly important in light of the difficulties around institutional archives. National state archives, though important, raise a whole host of concerns. In some places, such as Palestine, they have been and continue to be destroyed as part of violent political processes. In other places, people are denied access to them because of authoritarianism and repression, or because they have not been taken care of. Colonial archives, another source of history for much of the world, equally raise concerns. They represent colonial power, and are thus organised in ways that replicate that power; we see this in the way they are organsised and curated, as well as in the history of how the archival objects were collected to begin with. Though we can read institutional archives against the grain, we believe that there are a whole array of other archives that have much to tell us about history.

We have an expansive notion of the meaning of an archive, hoping to disrupt traditional disciplinary boundaries in the academy and start conversations with activists, film makers, and musicians. Archive Stories also involved students submitting their own reflections on encountering archives, and one included on this website explores the history of LSE student activism. In this sense, students relate to the history of LSE differently, recalling the traces of activism as they walk through today’s campus. These encounters with the archive were also apparent in the pilot workshop organized this year with May Day Roomsand Conflict Textiles. Students were able to make sense of different archiving practices, and to approach the archive as a process rather than a depository of documents.. Students had the tactile and visual memory of encountering archives that traveled to campus from different parts of the world.

Archive Stories features not only different kinds of archives, but also different types of archivists. Oral history, for example, makes it possible for narrators to act as archivists in their own right. Through memory and story-telling, the narrators document political, social, and cultural subtleties that together tell a different side of history. The act of remembering is therefore not about ‘preserving’ an existing archive but by crafting a new one altogether that becomes constantly shaped and reshaped by the present. Musicians recovering old sound recordings from the early 20th century tell a different story on the history of music that takes seriously those who were left on the margins of this history, and with every performance something new is both formed and recovered. Filmmakers read a new politics of solidarity through encountering, and recrafting film archives from the past. These kinds of archives open up new possibilities of engaging with the past without getting ‘stuck’ there. What would it mean, for example, to archive absence today? Approaching archiving as a practice, rather than a finished product, makes it possible to keep telling all the different stories of absence and disappearance from the past and the present. It makes it possible to think about all the bodies that acted, resisted, traveled, disappeared, and incarcerated.

We hope you enjoy exploring the archive stories gathered here, and we hope you encounter archives and archiving differently through this website. Please get in touch if you want to submit an archive story or participate in the project.

Sara Salem and Mai Taha

Team

Sara Salem

Sara Salem is an Associate Professor in Sociology at the London School of Economics. Her research interests include postcolonial studies, Marxist theory, and global histories of anticolonialism. Her recently published book with Cambridge University Press is entitled Anticolonial Afterlives in Egypt: The Politics of Hegemony (2020). A selection of published journal articles include: on Angela Davis in Egypt in the journal Signs; on Frantz Fanon and Egypt’s postcolonial state in Interventions: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies; onGramsci and anticolonialism in the postcolony inTheory, Culture and Society; and on Nasserism in Egypt through the lens of haunting in Middle East Critique. She is currently thinking and writing about ghosts and anticolonial archives.

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Mai Taha

Mai Taha is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). She has written on law, colonialism, labour movements, class and gender relations, and social reproduction in the Middle East. A selection of her publications include: Human Rights and Communist Internationalism: On Inji Aflatoun and the Surrealists (2023); The Comic and the Absurd: On Colonial Law in Revolutionary Palestine (2022); and Law, Class Struggle and Nervous Breakdowns (2021). Using film, literature, and oral history narratives, Mai is currently working on questions relating to labour, the home, and revolutionary subjectivity.

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Frederick Kannemeyer

Frederick Kannemeyer is a South African-trained architect. He is interested in exploring and subverting ideas around digital space, queerness, and the politics and technicalities of online knowledge systems. Currently, he is working collaboratively with a globally-situated variety of architectural institutions, collectives and individuals on various research, curatorial and archival projects. The focus of these projects ranges from digital space-making and exhibitions to architectures of decoloniality, abolitionism, map-making and archive-building (and breaking). While he is often employed as a web designer on these projects, his expertise is cross-disciplinary. He works between different media including collage, photography, painting and coding, often breaking the rules of his chosen medium and celebrating the glitches.

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