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data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/bacd9af9cfb5315feab2679cf971e5bcd46e592ad295b2f836c9a53eaf52a75c/Marral-0.5mm.png" data-mid="203898158" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/bacd9af9cfb5315feab2679cf971e5bcd46e592ad295b2f836c9a53eaf52a75c/Marral-0.5mm.png" /> <img width="2312" height="2182" width_o="2312" height_o="2182" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/dabd556038e31cf37f471eae9a28907bd61670ced471b7b6c29745b8731c59e2/Sandra-with-background.png" data-mid="244825831" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/dabd556038e31cf37f471eae9a28907bd61670ced471b7b6c29745b8731c59e2/Sandra-with-background.png" /> <img width="2337" height="1597" width_o="2337" height_o="1597" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9c1f4b1633692bda70038529ef5641ab4864dcd4a9dcceade5f3b22a707ea73e/Zeyad-with-background.png" data-mid="244825863" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" 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data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f62cd942d84ac0874ff09e77f632baf26823c21f14ed5a85f2599b0722d47172/Alia-background.png" data-mid="244826126" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f62cd942d84ac0874ff09e77f632baf26823c21f14ed5a85f2599b0722d47172/Alia-background.png" /> <img width="1261" height="2933" width_o="1261" height_o="2933" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8b65684fc8c451fe5dbc92e2971d41d7f6c899f799216d1024544c184a2330e1/Sorcha-with-background.png" data-mid="244826157" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/8b65684fc8c451fe5dbc92e2971d41d7f6c899f799216d1024544c184a2330e1/Sorcha-with-background.png" /> <img width="2993" height="3011" width_o="2993" height_o="3011" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d3d937e9d86c972f9e62f5600a361b867a0052d054c6506606dbdbdb0a90ef92/Roberta-1mm.png" data-mid="203896849" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d3d937e9d86c972f9e62f5600a361b867a0052d054c6506606dbdbdb0a90ef92/Roberta-1mm.png" /> <img width="1994" height="822" width_o="1994" height_o="822" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5db86bc889adbc266068dafc5b920ad9afa7a52bb1b4fef55bbcc76243405651/Asher-background.png" data-mid="244825699" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/5db86bc889adbc266068dafc5b920ad9afa7a52bb1b4fef55bbcc76243405651/Asher-background.png" /> <img width="4842" height="2212" width_o="4842" height_o="2212" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c32e00cdc7378a55ad72fd85665f2f235c81d5f11328d81821e0a5e7bbb73917/Home-Page-Graphic-Feb-2024.png" data-mid="203729326" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c32e00cdc7378a55ad72fd85665f2f235c81d5f11328d81821e0a5e7bbb73917/Home-Page-Graphic-Feb-2024.png" /> <img width="2485" height="2122" width_o="2485" height_o="2122" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/fa5037bc47cc86a2438c4345f87bf2d3c0635a48c31ab7874317b3bd2d7e32d5/Abdalla.png" data-mid="245069805" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/fa5037bc47cc86a2438c4345f87bf2d3c0635a48c31ab7874317b3bd2d7e32d5/Abdalla.png" /> The Cartography of Erasure: Archiving Sound and Mobility in Genocide Abdalla Bayyari <img width="2485" height="3101" width_o="2485" height_o="3101" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d1552a4db2a7fb72f6ad19080b8906d97f0af44477dba94c8fb6b9abdaf4aedb/Ahmed.png" data-mid="245069827" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d1552a4db2a7fb72f6ad19080b8906d97f0af44477dba94c8fb6b9abdaf4aedb/Ahmed.png" /> سمر عزريل: من فقوعة إلى عرب الرماضين أحمد مفيد <img width="2483" height="2947" width_o="2483" height_o="2947" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3628ffa23f2c09b91139f361411dbfad3c43620d97281c0dd4dbc4aa7fe7431b/Alejandro.png" data-mid="245069829" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/3628ffa23f2c09b91139f361411dbfad3c43620d97281c0dd4dbc4aa7fe7431b/Alejandro.png" /> Tricontinental Ecologies: Anti-Imperialist Media and the Struggle for a Sovereign Social Metabolism Alberto García Molinero Alejandro Pedregal <img width="2483" height="2517" width_o="2483" height_o="2517" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/42cffd6a7e86933539fe359a5a8cd89f2e3c091379bf333037548a21e35455c9/Alessia.png" data-mid="245069837" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/42cffd6a7e86933539fe359a5a8cd89f2e3c091379bf333037548a21e35455c9/Alessia.png" /> Sensory Archive of Palestine and Quiet Solidarities from a Balcony Alessia Corti <img width="2483" height="3422" width_o="2483" height_o="3422" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0bb6eea3d8ffe92d088a29dfd59a81807fd4671dbf5454992f399e4727874bef/Alia.png" data-mid="245069808" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0bb6eea3d8ffe92d088a29dfd59a81807fd4671dbf5454992f399e4727874bef/Alia.png" /> Children of a non-aligned future Alia Mossallam <img width="2483" height="2067" width_o="2483" height_o="2067" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2d6253a14006f6e9da895616e7e04d9d69f7c865775fa5f93d08c5398ca2eece/Anais.png" data-mid="245069821" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/2d6253a14006f6e9da895616e7e04d9d69f7c865775fa5f93d08c5398ca2eece/Anais.png" /> Correspondent Quests: Traces of PFLP cinema in Beirut Anaïs FarineNathalie Rosa Bucher <img width="2095" height="3284" width_o="2095" height_o="3284" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/14adade333d9c70df3f6b8d49f90e9c6a8c7bfedd2735c67e81a4f0dc43ef4f6/Anna.png" data-mid="245069833" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/14adade333d9c70df3f6b8d49f90e9c6a8c7bfedd2735c67e81a4f0dc43ef4f6/Anna.png" /> A Ballad on Archiving Anna Sulan Masing <img width="2485" height="2003" width_o="2485" height_o="2003" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f9a0671705a448e3779c06ab5c7f26ddc5c05a7370a730d73b75aa92ac2c16c5/Annabelle.png" data-mid="245069799" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f9a0671705a448e3779c06ab5c7f26ddc5c05a7370a730d73b75aa92ac2c16c5/Annabelle.png" /> Archival inquiry and anticolonial militant cinema: Reflections on Guadeloupe Answers Back Annabelle Aventurin <img width="2483" height="1323" width_o="2483" height_o="1323" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5a1f0a91594583a6c5db92905057406788ae9c538d6914dff4584718a79e1fec/Asher.png" data-mid="245069819" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/5a1f0a91594583a6c5db92905057406788ae9c538d6914dff4584718a79e1fec/Asher.png" /> Guerrilla archives: Secret methods, ensembles of memory and the present Asher Gamedze <img width="2485" height="1866" width_o="2485" height_o="1866" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ed675dcb74972a77869708451e40ad0c762796a2d862af248b144a7ad6407367/Basil.png" data-mid="245069824" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ed675dcb74972a77869708451e40ad0c762796a2d862af248b144a7ad6407367/Basil.png" /> من السجن الصهيوني إلى العالم: مقاومة السجّان وكسر العزلة Basil Farraj <img width="2483" height="1076" width_o="2483" height_o="1076" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/adcb9bfc2c86670873b58377ad66d2072c7b5c2ae8a50bdbe9d9dcbb1804520e/Bayan.png" data-mid="245069822" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/adcb9bfc2c86670873b58377ad66d2072c7b5c2ae8a50bdbe9d9dcbb1804520e/Bayan.png" /> My Mum’s Diary Bayan Haddad <img width="2483" height="2880" width_o="2483" height_o="2880" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/250ad907e5f586e20790892c1dba15f5c07df3ccd234a8a2fa5ded2c5ec79c84/Christina.png" data-mid="245069801" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/250ad907e5f586e20790892c1dba15f5c07df3ccd234a8a2fa5ded2c5ec79c84/Christina.png" /> From Greece to Palestine: Archiving as a Form of Solidarity Christina Chatzitheodorou <img width="2485" height="2336" width_o="2485" height_o="2336" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7c7dc4fc8a186142e5cc09928aa2710409cbf6a68aef206990181eb0fd7c50c3/Clive.png" data-mid="245069826" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7c7dc4fc8a186142e5cc09928aa2710409cbf6a68aef206990181eb0fd7c50c3/Clive.png" /> The Public and Private Black Archive Clive Chijioke Nwonka <img width="2321" height="3512" width_o="2321" height_o="3512" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7d729f9eab8ba8dd15210d6e4ee0dc74fb299e745469d7ac36aa9aea593a38c3/Dan-Walsh--Rochelle-Davis--Catherine-Baker.png" data-mid="245069810" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7d729f9eab8ba8dd15210d6e4ee0dc74fb299e745469d7ac36aa9aea593a38c3/Dan-Walsh--Rochelle-Davis--Catherine-Baker.png" /> The Palestine Poster Project Archives: Still open for history being made Dan WalshRochelle DavisCatherine Baker <img width="2485" height="1441" width_o="2485" height_o="1441" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/32db87aed308fa98ec0cf0ffd441361bd6b61614985c42932f3c0df9aa9ccc53/Fozia.png" data-mid="245069802" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/32db87aed308fa98ec0cf0ffd441361bd6b61614985c42932f3c0df9aa9ccc53/Fozia.png" /> Weaving with fragments and fractures Fozia Ismail <img width="2485" height="1906" width_o="2485" height_o="1906" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/955c0604dc141c6ab80c49b092ca5cfc0d08cddcff9d61e63596b60d8c5c30df/Gal.png" data-mid="245069825" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/955c0604dc141c6ab80c49b092ca5cfc0d08cddcff9d61e63596b60d8c5c30df/Gal.png" /> Two Liberation Vignettes: Partisan and Socialist Internationalism in Yugoslavia, Palestinian comrades in arms Gal Kirn <img width="1617" height="3518" width_o="1617" height_o="3518" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/391522fc9ab4fb8e654aac2abee3429059b94c129c6d1d1f17f523a19db65ba8/Hashem.png" data-mid="245069806" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/391522fc9ab4fb8e654aac2abee3429059b94c129c6d1d1f17f523a19db65ba8/Hashem.png" /> لا تُصالح Hashem Abushama <img width="2485" height="2590" width_o="2485" height_o="2590" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/82b7f7363038bf291ae065602d3b9af29fd92c82d5a93cb163863555bb323c8d/Inkyfada.png" data-mid="245069823" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/82b7f7363038bf291ae065602d3b9af29fd92c82d5a93cb163863555bb323c8d/Inkyfada.png" /> Making a historical series on colonial surveillance archives: The case of "Suspicious People". Inkyfada <img width="2483" height="1778" width_o="2483" height_o="1778" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1bf905a8ccd4512a6a8e96bdf995d247ef1f8de3ba8c5124da9395a7a071f50d/Jamil.png" data-mid="245069815" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/1bf905a8ccd4512a6a8e96bdf995d247ef1f8de3ba8c5124da9395a7a071f50d/Jamil.png" /> Reconfiguring the Archival Regime of Twitter in #Gaza Visual Narrative by a Cyborg Jamil Fiorino-Habib <img width="2483" height="1448" width_o="2483" height_o="1448" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c7cd1ecdeda8205e79f11b421f3957390a1484036c96728c43d3afaba660364a/Kanwal.png" data-mid="245069796" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c7cd1ecdeda8205e79f11b421f3957390a1484036c96728c43d3afaba660364a/Kanwal.png" /> Halwa, Mahyawa and Multiple Registers of Life in the Gulf Kanwal Hameed <img width="2483" height="2478" width_o="2483" height_o="2478" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/08d8e12aed844534980082511662a539f83ae9541f2e4142d633335d23e8da3a/Kimia-and-Aviani.png" data-mid="245069828" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/08d8e12aed844534980082511662a539f83ae9541f2e4142d633335d23e8da3a/Kimia-and-Aviani.png" /> Decolonising LSE Kimia TalebiAvani Ashtekar <img width="2483" height="1878" width_o="2483" height_o="1878" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ccfd66d0995f87962c8ea84f7c31587e10c996ef4187870259e1c5547fcea93c/Kribsoo-Egypt.png" data-mid="245069798" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ccfd66d0995f87962c8ea84f7c31587e10c996ef4187870259e1c5547fcea93c/Kribsoo-Egypt.png" /> The African Association: Egypt’s Role in the African Struggle: Politics, Culture, and Solidarity in Cairo, 1950s–1970s Kribsoo Diallo <img width="2206" height="3027" width_o="2206" height_o="3027" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/41937eee9ae2d4616643cc58813b542b29c824ffaa14a7d0d5de163ae1369f01/Kribsoo-Ethiopia.png" data-mid="245069814" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/41937eee9ae2d4616643cc58813b542b29c824ffaa14a7d0d5de163ae1369f01/Kribsoo-Ethiopia.png" /> Neutrality and Solidarity: The Official and Popular Egyptian Position on the Italian Aggression against Ethiopia, 1935–1936 Kribsoo Diallo <img width="2483" height="1158" width_o="2483" height_o="1158" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6c7b611ce466c51888ab2626a26cbe27dd394de15e779babab7497c375d0e229/Leili.png" data-mid="245069803" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/6c7b611ce466c51888ab2626a26cbe27dd394de15e779babab7497c375d0e229/Leili.png" /> Small Archive, Big Revolution: Annabelle Sreberny’s Archive of Life in Iran 1976-1980 Leili Sreberny-Mohammadi <img width="961" height="2092" width_o="961" height_o="2092" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6a3c9872c45db3bf66ed72a217d86c0f58676ac78e843d902cf78368710c658e/Lucy.png" data-mid="245069809" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/961/i/6a3c9872c45db3bf66ed72a217d86c0f58676ac78e843d902cf78368710c658e/Lucy.png" /> Social Reproduction and the Uprising: Palestinian Feminist Organising and Care Infrastructure Lucy Garbett <img width="2483" height="1614" width_o="2483" height_o="1614" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ed4198c87fa2083213498bdcd1ffd9ecc2c10438ec1f6b4b9e12dc8c42c08676/Luiza.png" data-mid="245069807" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ed4198c87fa2083213498bdcd1ffd9ecc2c10438ec1f6b4b9e12dc8c42c08676/Luiza.png" /> A Small Archive of Secrets and Intimacy Luiza Prado de O. Martins <img width="1639" height="3512" width_o="1639" height_o="3512" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8d706c7bf91da00ca8503e4134f0b53c910ab346f143936c06ff81e307f66ea9/Mahvish.png" data-mid="245069818" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/8d706c7bf91da00ca8503e4134f0b53c910ab346f143936c06ff81e307f66ea9/Mahvish.png" /> On Political Friendship and Archival Labour: Working with a Radical Library in Pakistan Mahvish Ahmad {image 192no-zoom="true"} The People of the Archive: On the Oral History Tradition of Palestine Mai Taha <img width="2485" height="3112" width_o="2485" height_o="3112" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5cf013c3fb28aaf4fdb67953e721ba8a7cc86545959c2700aad460cfc524cb6f/Maia.png" data-mid="245069813" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/5cf013c3fb28aaf4fdb67953e721ba8a7cc86545959c2700aad460cfc524cb6f/Maia.png" /> Cartas de agua Maia Gattás Vargas &amp;Francisca Khamis Giacoman <img width="2483" height="1458" width_o="2483" height_o="1458" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6ef1a5a53bdaf656a2873b8defa4dfbe5f73cdc27e833edcd048b4df95361806/Marral.png" data-mid="245069816" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/6ef1a5a53bdaf656a2873b8defa4dfbe5f73cdc27e833edcd048b4df95361806/Marral.png" /> An Archive of Exile and Diaspora: The Iranian-American Digital Archive Project Marral Shamshiri <img width="2483" height="1888" width_o="2483" height_o="1888" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9d49bbf4f6794c713851ad55b106702f78611afff3d2a3eb83fe668d845f569b/Mohanad.png" data-mid="245069804" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/9d49bbf4f6794c713851ad55b106702f78611afff3d2a3eb83fe668d845f569b/Mohanad.png" /> The Tokyo Reels ~ Prologue Mohanad Yaqoubi <img width="2483" height="376" width_o="2483" height_o="376" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/cf69faad35640b86916cd5e64a80177115382fd3a69b7184a0efb0f12a83641a/Nivi.png" data-mid="245069817" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/cf69faad35640b86916cd5e64a80177115382fd3a69b7184a0efb0f12a83641a/Nivi.png" /> Basque-Palestinian Solidarity Nivi Manchanda <img width="2483" height="1836" width_o="2483" height_o="1836" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/585589826043afaea03d6d3fffe18651faca565c0c28b6f4f35a77fd3d8e2658/Nour.png" data-mid="245069787" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/585589826043afaea03d6d3fffe18651faca565c0c28b6f4f35a77fd3d8e2658/Nour.png" /> Two Figures In Patchwork Clothing Move Forward Via Camel Nour Bishouty &amp;Daniella Sanader <img width="2483" height="1690" width_o="2483" height_o="1690" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8df49b23da2d8893491238fa984ed3521caa4c030266d1687bca1b94900d254f/Onyeka.png" data-mid="245069792" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/8df49b23da2d8893491238fa984ed3521caa4c030266d1687bca1b94900d254f/Onyeka.png" /> Lodging in anti-imperial London Onyeka Igwe <img width="2485" height="2598" width_o="2485" height_o="2598" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/505ff52f8ba88bd92636357a40f9ac46a872ea702ce9a8df9b49e3a20177522f/Orsod.png" data-mid="245069820" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/505ff52f8ba88bd92636357a40f9ac46a872ea702ce9a8df9b49e3a20177522f/Orsod.png" /> On the Grenadian Revolution Exhibition Orsod Malik <img width="2483" height="3121" width_o="2483" height_o="3121" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/748cc2ecc7ef342eb8842d20487006d90d3d6be74059fdf4871cb8c5621a21af/Pedro.png" data-mid="245069795" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/748cc2ecc7ef342eb8842d20487006d90d3d6be74059fdf4871cb8c5621a21af/Pedro.png" /> The Business of Revolutionary Archives Pedro Monaville <img width="2485" height="2093" width_o="2485" height_o="2093" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6034faa1bc1096fb22d4e4c46eb42f96a63710a39283e7a0af84c5ef3a5c093b/Philip.png" data-mid="245069786" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/6034faa1bc1096fb22d4e4c46eb42f96a63710a39283e7a0af84c5ef3a5c093b/Philip.png" /> rebellious eyes.through the archive. Philip Rizk <img width="1021" height="3512" width_o="1021" height_o="3512" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7eb8967c93bda60b89b6a02b0d8dd2c368f71b61cf04aade894e44a067e3155b/Rami.png" data-mid="245069797" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7eb8967c93bda60b89b6a02b0d8dd2c368f71b61cf04aade894e44a067e3155b/Rami.png" /> Familiar Fragments of the Revolutionary Camps Rami Rmeileh <img width="2483" height="3280" width_o="2483" height_o="3280" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/aa64ff7f1d7fe76fcfda394e236f16d3c7a022a5339c978862d1628bca8f0229/Roberta.png" data-mid="245069783" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/aa64ff7f1d7fe76fcfda394e236f16d3c7a022a5339c978862d1628bca8f0229/Roberta.png" /> Chilean revolutionary arpilleras Roberta Bacic <img width="1498" height="2837" width_o="1498" height_o="2837" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c649e3047f82f502c70cd393d5d6146e2e236eda451a8b33764710b27188f3c3/Saba.png" data-mid="245069788" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c649e3047f82f502c70cd393d5d6146e2e236eda451a8b33764710b27188f3c3/Saba.png" /> عن مجاراة مخيال الأرض Saba Innab <img width="990" height="2918" width_o="990" height_o="2918" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/fce37dc3822bb6fb54d8f7320e2b0fb2e6c5ca5e08c81cd014106835cd766abe/Samar.png" data-mid="245069800" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/990/i/fce37dc3822bb6fb54d8f7320e2b0fb2e6c5ca5e08c81cd014106835cd766abe/Samar.png" /> رسالة، بطاقة، صورة بماذا باح الفلسطينيون Samar Ozrail <img width="2485" height="2254" width_o="2485" height_o="2254" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4cfdfa95c89fc257617181bfd68eaa2d82a36d293f7a23e5c3778a701b5f36c7/Sandra.png" data-mid="245069791" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4cfdfa95c89fc257617181bfd68eaa2d82a36d293f7a23e5c3778a701b5f36c7/Sandra.png" /> To raise one’s head high: Living archives and subaltern bureaucracies of the Rondas Campesinas from Chota, Peru Sandra Rodríguez Castañeda <img width="2483" height="1262" width_o="2483" height_o="1262" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f912ff4abb4707d0f9b62655863dee42b94803fadba6f15c380abd905d9c69f6/Sara-K.png" data-mid="245069785" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f912ff4abb4707d0f9b62655863dee42b94803fadba6f15c380abd905d9c69f6/Sara-K.png" /> Protest poetry as archive: From peasant struggles to immigrant internationalism Sara Kazmi <img width="1595" height="2081" width_o="1595" height_o="2081" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6e0dd4f5f0d29dcf8ff6c859216f3d9d0a9ac8d3ee7ea3cbb7d30cbd8db3dce2/Sara-S.png" data-mid="245069782" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/6e0dd4f5f0d29dcf8ff6c859216f3d9d0a9ac8d3ee7ea3cbb7d30cbd8db3dce2/Sara-S.png" /> Memory as an archive of disappearanceSara Salem <img width="2483" height="1050" width_o="2483" height_o="1050" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f986ba3887bf329b427b3c6c9e033f2c1d762340931a1b49a562e54ac7d998f5/Sheng.png" data-mid="245069789" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f986ba3887bf329b427b3c6c9e033f2c1d762340931a1b49a562e54ac7d998f5/Sheng.png" /> In Search of the Process of Anti-Colonial Solidarity-Building: How I Used Archives to Explore the History of China-Palestine Solidarity Networks Sheng Zhang <img width="2483" height="1990" width_o="2483" height_o="1990" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c63e1973e5ac5c8ad1a394d29b52aaee48885dc009535531ee60c1c2f0085cf2/Sneha.png" data-mid="245069784" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c63e1973e5ac5c8ad1a394d29b52aaee48885dc009535531ee60c1c2f0085cf2/Sneha.png" /> Archives of Dreaming Sneha Krishnan <img width="2483" height="1497" width_o="2483" height_o="1497" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/55fc5ddbd6b1af30d1c031a3cefa87c4dc5b6bf93a7a3df8a0f8c13cad052048/Sorcha.png" data-mid="245069811" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/55fc5ddbd6b1af30d1c031a3cefa87c4dc5b6bf93a7a3df8a0f8c13cad052048/Sorcha.png" /> Archives of Tricontinental Solidarity and Ecology in Cuba and Beyond Sorcha Thompson <img width="2483" height="1922" width_o="2483" height_o="1922" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b80d2c644adbb65ecdaa98a93c77a60f0abde8fe84f8d80ba9d2ba105020863e/Tom.png" data-mid="245069781" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b80d2c644adbb65ecdaa98a93c77a60f0abde8fe84f8d80ba9d2ba105020863e/Tom.png" /> Citizen Sound Archive Tom Western <img width="2440" height="1515" width_o="2440" height_o="1515" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/202d5e00111ce12fabd1adb58733765c42b003daafaebecf1e46ecd03e157271/Yamen.png" data-mid="245069794" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/202d5e00111ce12fabd1adb58733765c42b003daafaebecf1e46ecd03e157271/Yamen.png" /> Syrian Cassette Archives: The coming together of a community archive Yamen Mekdad <img width="2345" height="3512" width_o="2345" height_o="3512" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/55e9bc5a93130b8a39ca042c68ad733a90baf733cc8aa7359da71dc790846cfe/Yasmine.png" data-mid="245069780" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/55e9bc5a93130b8a39ca042c68ad733a90baf733cc8aa7359da71dc790846cfe/Yasmine.png" /> The Dust Does Not Simply Settle: Temporalities of Violence, Kinetic Knowledge &amp; Theatre Production as Archive Yasmine Kherfi <img width="2483" height="645" width_o="2483" height_o="645" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0b52e0dabf2abba668be9d6e2dbea7d2834fe044219fdebdfcbb7a470e0efa2e/Zeyad-el-Nabolsy.png" data-mid="245069790" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0b52e0dabf2abba668be9d6e2dbea7d2834fe044219fdebdfcbb7a470e0efa2e/Zeyad-el-Nabolsy.png" /> Patrice Lumumba in Gaza: The Readers of Nahdat Afriqiya Zeyad el Nabolsy https://archive-stories.com/The-Tokyo-Reels Tue, 30 May 2023 19:12:51 +0000 archive stories https://archive-stories.com/The-Tokyo-Reels <img width="3156" height="2394" width_o="3156" height_o="2394" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/cbf9f35f163719ebae2010ed978f7c5dec9b79964eb3bd23bfd3f1223ead5843/The-Tokyo-Reels.png" data-mid="180957364" border="0" data-scale="70" data-no-zoom src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/cbf9f35f163719ebae2010ed978f7c5dec9b79964eb3bd23bfd3f1223ead5843/The-Tokyo-Reels.png" /> Mohanad Yaqoubi The Tokyo Reels ~ Prologue <img width="2423" height="2715" width_o="2423" height_o="2715" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5ef1312bc51305a39ea7e2e1101e2e1cb7a50ff30497e29c64df271356e902fa/hand-on-right.png" data-mid="180888600" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/5ef1312bc51305a39ea7e2e1101e2e1cb7a50ff30497e29c64df271356e902fa/hand-on-right.png" /> <img width="477" height="507" width_o="477" height_o="507" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/bcd1b0cfc344664b3fde5cbf38ddc44cfa7fd704e2a9461fe5580da5265f95f8/Full-reel-gif.gif" data-mid="180888599" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/477/i/bcd1b0cfc344664b3fde5cbf38ddc44cfa7fd704e2a9461fe5580da5265f95f8/Full-reel-gif.gif" /> <img width="2966" height="3440" width_o="2966" height_o="3440" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e9a2eade3e53555d4f920daf84a1b166e8cde5f443b9d0376f83dc9d945bc329/hand-on-left.png" data-mid="180888601" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e9a2eade3e53555d4f920daf84a1b166e8cde5f443b9d0376f83dc9d945bc329/hand-on-left.png" /> www.tokyoreels.com <img width="441" height="472" width_o="441" height_o="472" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4039cb016ccc01401e7247d6bb3bf71216722c532b701794c1317d39fce3dd14/1976.png" data-mid="184413911" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/441/i/4039cb016ccc01401e7247d6bb3bf71216722c532b701794c1317d39fce3dd14/1976.png" /> <img width="441" height="472" width_o="441" height_o="472" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8d4a16914348bc4c1226ab61a8da8f1c0a13806ad0864fc9a5c5597e6b05efb3/1982.png" data-mid="184413916" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/441/i/8d4a16914348bc4c1226ab61a8da8f1c0a13806ad0864fc9a5c5597e6b05efb3/1982.png" /> <img width="441" height="472" width_o="441" height_o="472" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a0439148d8d3aea18c9b28fc05f11392b2c074ef74d86292e477efd2b43750ba/Aftermath.png" data-mid="184413918" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/441/i/a0439148d8d3aea18c9b28fc05f11392b2c074ef74d86292e477efd2b43750ba/Aftermath.png" /> <img width="441" height="472" width_o="441" height_o="472" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6d1d6db95eb24e3921e94272b6a7d88cee4f86f2f6267e29e8e400fd6dd0e928/Arabic-title-2.png" data-mid="184413919" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/441/i/6d1d6db95eb24e3921e94272b6a7d88cee4f86f2f6267e29e8e400fd6dd0e928/Arabic-title-2.png" /> After a screening of the film “Off Frame Aka Revolution Until Victory, 2016” at image Forum cinema in Shibuya, Tokyo, a member of the audience approached us with a piece of paper. She asked to meet before we leave Japan. The paper contained a sort of a list, mainly in Japanese mixed with some English, and after a quick translation we realized it was a list of films about the Palestinian struggle. A year after this encounter, the guardians of the collection took us to a place in the outskirts of Tokyo, a small room in a traditional Japanese house. It turned out to be a home to an archive: film reels, U-matic, photographs, books, posters, documents, among other things, kept there for over three decades. The collection covers the 1970s and ‘80s Japanese solidarity activism with the Palestinian cause. The collection is safeguarded by people who were active in that scene, Mineo Mitsui and Aoe Tanami, and they kindly granted us access to the 16 mm film reels, which we picked up and transported to the Film lab of KASK, School of the Arts, Gent. The Collection contains 20 film reels, all 16 mm format, all Positive prints. Very little information can be extracted from the packaging, yet there are several fascinating iconographies that can be noticed on the reels tin covers, logos on the casing, addresses, contact numbers, the wrapping materials; the amount of work put in each reel to reach the distribution can be traced. Although the list we got with the collection had some crucial information about the distribution, it was still hard to form an idea of what we were dealing with. We realized that many film titles were translated to English from the Japanese title that had been given when the films were adapted to Japanese audience. And since we didn’t know what was in the collection, we gradually started to refer to it as “The Tokyo Reels”. The first mission was to study the inventory we got from the guardians of the collection, to edit the inventory in a formal and coherent way, to update the original inventory, to add the comparative reflection, and to add all necessary information related to the production of these films. Following a quick scan, the uniqueness of the collection became obvious. The twenty film reels, packaged in canisters and boxes labeled and marked with film titles, dates, and some production and distribution details, present a collection of films rendering a history of political mobilisation and solidarity with Palestine specific to Japan at the time. The films were made by Palestinian, Arab, Japanese and international filmmakers and journalists, and were commissioned by various political bodies, TV stations, and humanitarian organizations. They contain different modes of adaptation, translation, dubbing, re-editing from the orginal version of the films, that included adding photographs with captions and interviews to contextualise the films about the struggle to Japanese audience. <img width="441" height="472" width_o="441" height_o="472" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/78493fe1f0bccfdff9c9376c1d3fd2038075fec267622914ae41310fe10fca18/Welcome-to-Jordan.png" data-mid="184413944" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/441/i/78493fe1f0bccfdff9c9376c1d3fd2038075fec267622914ae41310fe10fca18/Welcome-to-Jordan.png" /> <img width="441" height="472" width_o="441" height_o="472" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6c2c9d9c77933aa7226bb45bd5caf60ab9ffd0298881e4acf39b2e69617a2383/Beirut-1982.png" data-mid="184413920" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/441/i/6c2c9d9c77933aa7226bb45bd5caf60ab9ffd0298881e4acf39b2e69617a2383/Beirut-1982.png" /> Questions Once the collection arrived at the lab at KASK in Gent for investigation, many questions have already been formulated. Some were technical, some cinematic, others were political. It was like starting from a blank page, to start writing a new account about this history. There weren’t many texts to read about the Japanese solidarity movement with the Palestinian struggle, at least not in English and Arabic, so we tried to formulate some questions; not to seek answers, but rather as much as guiding lines to lead our thinking and give inspiration. Can we read the politics of a solidarity by looking at a collection of films? Can we write a history of solidarity only by watching films? What can the information in the reels tell us about the origin of the collection? And who are the people behind it? Who was behind the circulation? And what were the audience reactions?&nbsp; What does it mean to screen these films today? And what does it mean to screen the films together, as a collection? How do we position transnational film collections in the age of identity politics? raising questions such as is it a Palestinian collection? a Japanese? &nbsp;and what does it mean to represent a struggle of another people, cinematically and politically. <img width="8256" height="6192" width_o="8256" height_o="6192" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/102fb1385c834e5b41bd0ba9c7c7f358b7c32a83e00d83889c565b38fad444e2/5--Documentation.jpg" data-mid="180465400" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/102fb1385c834e5b41bd0ba9c7c7f358b7c32a83e00d83889c565b38fad444e2/5--Documentation.jpg" /> The origin of the collection It is hard to pinpoint the exact history and origin of the collection, mainly because several people who were part of or related to the PLO office in Tokyo have passed away, but also because the Palestinian question is still an ongoing struggle, there is a need to be cautious about exposing a network of solidarity that is still partly in action. It’s important to keep in mind that this is not an institutional archive, and in some way, it resists the status of being official or final, as this would indicate the end of the struggle through the very act of archiving it. From this perspective, Subversive Film approach the question of origins by adopting two methods. The first is by interviewing the guardians of the collection, who gave an account of how this collection came into their care. The second method is through connecting the dots emerging from the films themselves—analysing the credits, captions, information that appears on the film strips and the canisters in which the reels are kept—all while keeping in mind the parallel political event that might or would affect the selection of the film, for example, the Sabra and Shatila massacre, where we noticed several titles related to this event, or the consequences of the June 1973 war, that disturbed the energy supply chain around the world including Japan and rose attention to the Palestinian struggle. [1] for the wider perspective, read “The Red Years: Theory, Politics, and Aesthetics in the Japanese ’68”, Edited by Gavin Walker, Verso Books, 2020 This allowed us to build a narrative around the origin of the collection, that is “non-fictional”, or to be more precise, a speculative, imagined narrative, yet rooted in historical reality, with an anti-imperialist perspective, which was beside the transnational solidarity politics, the dominant ideological framework for the new Japanese left movement[1]. <img width="441" height="472" width_o="441" height_o="472" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/da0c82b31e328bda0a1ccc65fbfd271e65651d1916a7550c5e94ea8ac4dc9a74/The-Game.png" data-mid="184413940" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/441/i/da0c82b31e328bda0a1ccc65fbfd271e65651d1916a7550c5e94ea8ac4dc9a74/The-Game.png" /> [2] An Excerpt from Minoe Mitsui interview with Subversive Film, Kassel 2022 During an interview with Mineo Mitsue, one of the collection caretakers, he said that they were not the ones who collected all the films, but his words gave us sense of its origin: “When they closed the office, one of the Japanese staff who was working at the PLO office then called me and asked for some favours. He was asking where to send some papers, and which storage they should go to. But for the films and videos, he decided to leave them with me. It was quite a lot of things to store just by myself. In the beginning, I didn’t know what to do with them. First, I approached the Christian United Church of Japan, and asked if they could spare storage for them. After that I also approached a professor of Arabic at the Foreign Language University in Japan, but that was also declined. So, at the end, through the introduction of that professor, I met Tanami San, she was a student by then, and she agreed to keep the collection.”[2] <img width="2888" height="1074" width_o="2888" height_o="1074" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/241b5e5158d346450ba225d4127626f3cf22a3322a0d451b9b462f2b24ca554f/Table-June-2024.jpg" data-mid="212297188" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/241b5e5158d346450ba225d4127626f3cf22a3322a0d451b9b462f2b24ca554f/Table-June-2024.jpg" /> <img width="441" height="472" width_o="441" height_o="472" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/69784e651bc28a769657966e8846754c22027e6ab5bfc161d886ceed1ffe9200/Palestine-and-Japan.png" data-mid="184413937" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/441/i/69784e651bc28a769657966e8846754c22027e6ab5bfc161d886ceed1ffe9200/Palestine-and-Japan.png" /> <img width="441" height="472" width_o="441" height_o="472" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/29cbdb082a559a7be8413da8155131df47bcc6c14423c07462a28f5067be6c40/Clapping.png" data-mid="184413925" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/441/i/29cbdb082a559a7be8413da8155131df47bcc6c14423c07462a28f5067be6c40/Clapping.png" /> <img width="441" height="472" width_o="441" height_o="472" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/01c2d296962a1036bae10f3691ecd39d36ee8d605ac21ccccbb20072b4d67b62/Film---Arabic.png" data-mid="184413926" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/441/i/01c2d296962a1036bae10f3691ecd39d36ee8d605ac21ccccbb20072b4d67b62/Film---Arabic.png" /> <img width="441" height="472" width_o="441" height_o="472" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6055a7dc657a2dae273d5ac7d99fe1bb58a7a46170e57ed7d3c3d99356e16bae/Lebanon-1982.png" data-mid="184413936" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/441/i/6055a7dc657a2dae273d5ac7d99fe1bb58a7a46170e57ed7d3c3d99356e16bae/Lebanon-1982.png" /> Reflections on Digitization The first step was to dive into the collection, to forensically document the process of investigation and to upgrade and complete the inventory. This required photographing all the details on the reels cannisters, creating folders for every reel, collecting relevant information, and translating them. the next step was to dive into the materiality of the film reels, beside analyzing the content, the reels needed preparation before digitization. It was necessary to know what type of each film material and its condition, check the acidity levels and the conditions of each reel, and then clean them. The initial report made us realise that all the reels are in a positive format, which is the screening format of the 16mm. All the films were with optical sound, except one, which had a magnetic audio strip on the film. Most of them were in good condition, an indication that they hadn’t been screened many times. There were some reels infected with the vinegar syndrome, which were important to spot and separate from the rest of the collection. One reel, which is titled “Palestine to Japan”, was damaged and needed special treatment to digitize. We managed this but with a lot of scratches and deformed frames, though the soundtrack of the film was fine. Following this analysis, the reels were pulled to the scanner by adding a lead film tape to ensure that all film frames are captured. For each film, the title, the director, and all other crew credits were transcribed, and slowly the map of the collection started to be clearer. It contained films produced between 1964 and 1982, and most of them are about the Palestinian question and struggle. There are some films that addressed other topics, mainly revolving around the question of modernity in the Arab world. Digitizing the collection was also a form of study through which we learned about the independent Japanese political film screening practices, from the labels left on the reels’ canisters, to the handwritten notes on the cullieds themselves, to the programing notes left sticking on the bottom of the cannisters. One reel was wrapped in a newspaper dated from September 1982, and another reel had two films attached together. Some films had information of production houses in Japan. This form of restoration enabled thorough access to each film individually, and to the collection as a whole, by watching the films together, with the ability to stop, rewind, compare with other films in the collection, studying the voice over, or a recurring credit, building a pattern that indicates a history that can be read through its traces. When all these details, symbols, images, texts were combined in one folder, patterns started to emerge, making it clear how these films came to Japan, and how they overlapped with a historical and geopolitical map; categorization became more possible. <img width="441" height="472" width_o="441" height_o="472" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/60bfd12b572caaa11165a7471f0f8a085e4b71e3ac1234244007d0c2a7632258/Japanese-Title.png" data-mid="184413931" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/441/i/60bfd12b572caaa11165a7471f0f8a085e4b71e3ac1234244007d0c2a7632258/Japanese-Title.png" /> <img width="441" height="472" width_o="441" height_o="472" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ddb666df1a720ec4fd4b5dae84e534900b232eda948868fd480c8eb262e7e52a/Temptation-to-return.png" data-mid="184413938" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/441/i/ddb666df1a720ec4fd4b5dae84e534900b232eda948868fd480c8eb262e7e52a/Temptation-to-return.png" /> Speculation as history Some of the films were quite well known in the milieu of research on Palestine and cinema, but most of them were rare titles, and films that have not been screened widely. Some were copies of films that were considered lost, or with no access to a good 16mm copy. After scanning all the films, it was interesting to notice that the common pattern between all of them is the absence of films made under and with more radical leftist politics. This absence can be read as indicative of the political orientation of the solidarity scene with Palestine that gathered and safeguarded this collection, made up of a segment of the Japanese left that denounced violence and armed struggle as a method of social change. This segment contrasts with the Red Japanese army (and other Japanese factions from the New Japanese Left), who were also associated with the Palestinian struggle at some point, and who trained in PLO military factions’ camps, running stunning hijacking operations against the Israeli State. It was the Lod Airport operation in May 1972, where 26 people were killed after members of the Japanese Red Army (JRA) where trapped and forced to open fire in the middle of the airport. This specific event led to a massive crack down by the Japanese security forces on members of many left movements back in Japan, arresting members of the Japanese United Army, and keeping an eye on any political event, especially ones related to solidarity with Palestine. <img width="441" height="472" width_o="441" height_o="472" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/604b158c8a7a3ce152559ec04721bf7eeb80e3517ab39a717fd9c7bae9e1c98b/Kuneitra.png" data-mid="184413934" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/441/i/604b158c8a7a3ce152559ec04721bf7eeb80e3517ab39a717fd9c7bae9e1c98b/Kuneitra.png" /> <img width="441" height="472" width_o="441" height_o="472" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/de9b7fe46698136a9f7bd89c73b23c61b54db0da6049fa52fc94fdce196a2fc6/The-Field.png" data-mid="184413939" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/441/i/de9b7fe46698136a9f7bd89c73b23c61b54db0da6049fa52fc94fdce196a2fc6/The-Field.png" /> <img width="441" height="472" width_o="441" height_o="472" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/be367403606ed4ce8b98f63fcfd184a2d67754bc5e386f9d794689f74c300dc3/The-path-to-tradegy.png" data-mid="184413941" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/441/i/be367403606ed4ce8b98f63fcfd184a2d67754bc5e386f9d794689f74c300dc3/The-path-to-tradegy.png" /> [3] Except from a letter by Prof. Aoe Tanami send to Subversive Film in the summer of 2022. The aggressive approach that was adopted by the Japanese authorities can be seen in the case of Dr. Takako Nobuhara, a Japanese doctor who volunteered at Palestinian clinics in Beirut during the Israeli invasion in 1982. Her passport was burned after her apartment was destroyed following an Israeli air raid on the city. Later, she was denied the right to a new passport by the Japanese authorities and was stranded in Lebanon for more than 10 years. Her case mobilized several activists back home in Japan including Professor Aoe Tanami, one of the collection’s guardians. She mentions in her letter to Subversive Film that “Solidarity Movement had nothing to do with the JRA, nor was it ideologically influenced by the JRA. If I were to look for "influence," I would say that I met several people who were involved in activities to support a female doctor who was denied reissue of her passport by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs because of her suspected ties to the JRA.”[3] Such a political climate obviously reflects on the selection of the films in the collection, keeping the content of the films focused on the educational, informative, and humanitarian level throughout the collection, with no connection to the JRA and its rhetoric, and with no controversial and militant messaging that might attract the attention of the Japanese security forces. The fact that the collection has flourished within the PLO office in Tokyo also meant that the Palestinian films in the collection were produced mainly by its filmic departments, such as the Palestinian Cinema Institute, the Cultural Art Section of the Unified Media, and Al-Sakhra Studios. Other films were produced by state run film institutes in countries such as Iraq, Syria Jordan and Kuwait, and one can speculate that they came into the collection from the diplomatic missions surrounding the PLO in Tokyo. The rest were mainly Japanese productions on the Palestinian question. While we are still researching and speculating on the meaning of creating an archive of a transnational solidarity movement, all the films where transcribed and translated into three languages, Arabic, Japanese and English. New synopses were written for each film, credits and still images from the films were compiled in a publication that is available in pdf form on the website www.tokyoreels.com, hoping that it will expand our understanding of what it mean to archive a revolution. <img width="2362" height="2008" width_o="2362" height_o="2008" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8fa8ef0b740ae47d2ef2c154f88b32c88fc782851e920b9c21e9c20e5e5176e4/Tokyo-Reels--Comp-1.jpg" data-mid="180892895" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/8fa8ef0b740ae47d2ef2c154f88b32c88fc782851e920b9c21e9c20e5e5176e4/Tokyo-Reels--Comp-1.jpg" /> <img width="2362" height="2008" width_o="2362" height_o="2008" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4b503dcc7cac846ed2aed3591ae7d9e713463dd1f37d190c5839e15ed12326f6/Tokyo-Reels--Comp-2-.jpg" data-mid="180893002" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4b503dcc7cac846ed2aed3591ae7d9e713463dd1f37d190c5839e15ed12326f6/Tokyo-Reels--Comp-2-.jpg" /> Mohanad Yaqubi is a filmmaker, producer, and one of the founders of the Ramallah-based production outfits, Idioms Film. He also teaches Film Studies at the International Art Academy in Palestine. Yaqubi is also one of the founders of the research and curatorial collective Subversive Films, that focuses on militant film practices. Yaqubi’s filmography as a producer includes the documentary feature Infiltrators (directed by Khaled Jarrar, 2013), the narrative short Pink Bullet (directed by Ramzi Hazboun), and as co-producer the narrative feature Habibi (directed by Susan Youssef, 2010) and the short narrative Though I Know the River is Dry (directed by Omar R. Hamilton, 2012). In 2013, Yaqubi initiated and produced Suspended Time, an anthology that reflected on 20 years after the signing of the Oslo Peace Accords, that included nine filmmakers. His latest film No Exit, (written with Omar Kheiry), premiered at the Dubai International Film Festival in 2015. He feature film Off Frame AKA Revolution Until Victory is making its world premiere at TIFF. サブバーシブ・フィルム（反体制映画）とは、パレスチナとその地域に関する歴史的作品に新しい光を投げかけると共に、映画保存への支援を呼びかけ、アーカイブの手法を調査することを目的とした、映画研究・制作コレクティブである。サブバーシブ・フィルムの長期かつ進行中のプロジェクトは、映画と歴史が交わる領域を探求している。その活動には、今まで見過ごされてきた映画のデジタル版復刻、貴重な映画の上映イベントのキュレーション、再発見された映画の字幕制作、出版物の制作、その他の介入方法の考案などが含まれる。2011年に結成されたサブバーシブ・フィルムは、ラマッラーとその他の地域を拠点として活動している。 Subversive Film is a cinema research and production collective that aims to cast new light on historic works related to Palestine and the surrounding region, to engender support for film preservation and to investigate archival practices. Their long-term and ongoing projects explore this cine-historic field including digitally reissuing previously overlooked films, curating rare film screening cycles, subtitling rediscovered films, producing publications, and devising other forms of interventions. Formed in 2011, Subversive Film is based between Ramallah and Brussels. (تحريض للأفلام) مجموعة بحث وإنتاج سينمائي تهدف إلى تسليط الضوء على أعمالٍ تاريخية مُتعلقة بفلسطين والمنطقة، بهدف توليد مصادر دعم للحفاظ على الأفلام والتحقيق في الممارسات الأرشيفيّة. تستكشف مشاريع المجموعة الحاليّة وطويلة المدى هذا الحقل السينمائي-التاريخي، بما يتضمن إعادة إصدار نسخ رقميّة من أفلام خرجت من دائرة التوزيع، وتنظيم دورات عرض للأفلام النادرة، وترجمة الأفلام المُعاد اكتشافها، وإصدار المنشورات، وابتكار أشكال أخرى من التدخلات. تأسست (تحريض للأفلام) عام ٢٠١١، ومقرها رام الله وأمكنة أخرى. This page was developed and designed in collaboration with Fierdouz Hendricks ︎︎︎ ︎ ︎ <img width="1920" height="12000" width_o="1920" height_o="12000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/da71993f3f1ba8f666b07b4ae8e3eaa34304769e0ca6f6a0f2612d5ef199e4a1/Tokoyo-reels.png" data-mid="180892067" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/da71993f3f1ba8f666b07b4ae8e3eaa34304769e0ca6f6a0f2612d5ef199e4a1/Tokoyo-reels.png" /> ︎︎︎ ︎︎︎ https://archive-stories.com/Decolonising-LSE Sun, 04 Jun 2023 22:48:03 +0000 archive stories https://archive-stories.com/Decolonising-LSE <img width="3001" height="2980" width_o="3001" height_o="2980" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/940f437b0a9575797b494ed686ad504dd0f041fa2742d4bcb2c1b851a0c352af/Decolonise-LSE.png" data-mid="184368731" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/940f437b0a9575797b494ed686ad504dd0f041fa2742d4bcb2c1b851a0c352af/Decolonise-LSE.png" /> Kimia Talebi Avani Ashtekar Decolonising LSE <img width="1920" height="1080" width_o="1920" height_o="1080" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8ebc7b9814934fa7ff07cacfe91078827d5f3fa4d80abc7aa36b4ff5c13bddba/Background.png" data-mid="184371349" border="0" data-scale="87" data-no-zoom src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/8ebc7b9814934fa7ff07cacfe91078827d5f3fa4d80abc7aa36b4ff5c13bddba/Background.png" /> <img width="723" height="963" width_o="723" height_o="963" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/aa25e42db7eafb8e065459405590066f262d656cb4de6d69ca1dc007232b6b95/Poster-found-in-the-LSE-Troubles-archive-during-the-Radical-History-group-visit-to-the-LSE-Library.jpg" data-mid="181001059" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/723/i/aa25e42db7eafb8e065459405590066f262d656cb4de6d69ca1dc007232b6b95/Poster-found-in-the-LSE-Troubles-archive-during-the-Radical-History-group-visit-to-the-LSE-Library.jpg" /> <img width="649" height="865" width_o="649" height_o="865" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4c98a805167b41e2e6ad3a415dc8bb35089e8dcee7a61c2f45abce82fdb2fd3a/Student-magazine-from-MayDay-Rooms-at-the-LSE-UCU-Picket-Line.jpg" data-mid="181001701" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/649/i/4c98a805167b41e2e6ad3a415dc8bb35089e8dcee7a61c2f45abce82fdb2fd3a/Student-magazine-from-MayDay-Rooms-at-the-LSE-UCU-Picket-Line.jpg" /> <img width="1610" height="1933" width_o="1610" height_o="1933" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2c9a4351db3f1d47efa7553aae8142eecb873c605191e6c277a0d33e09622d60/Picture-of-nail-painting-at-the-LSE-for-Palestine-and-Decolonising-LSE-Day-of-Action.jpg" data-mid="184150912" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/2c9a4351db3f1d47efa7553aae8142eecb873c605191e6c277a0d33e09622d60/Picture-of-nail-painting-at-the-LSE-for-Palestine-and-Decolonising-LSE-Day-of-Action.jpg" /> [1] The University and College Union (UCU) represents academics, post-graduates, and staff in universities across the UK. The UCU has been taking industrial action on pay and working condition disputes to resist the marketisation of higher education. WORKS/ARCHIVES CITED Lorde, Audre. 2019 [1984]. “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” In Sister Outsider. Penguin Random House. Olufemi, Lola. 2021. Experiments in Imagining Otherwise. Hajar Press. Race Today Journals, MayDay Rooms. The LSE Troubles, LSE Archives, LSE Library. On 12th January 2022, the Radical History working group met for the first time. The working group broached the issue of tracing the collective’s work on a continuum of pre-existing radical work happening on the campus. We were interested in showing the continuities of movement-building and their undying relationship to past organising, like the anti-apartheid movement of the late-1960s and student opposition to the appointment of Walter Adams. Relatedly, we spoke of charting the histories of student and staff dissent and the internationalism of the sixties and seventies in London. The collective then planned to visit the archives in the LSE Library in sub-groups. We were particularly interested in the “LSE Troubles” archive, which included newspapers, posters, and articles from student groups. Through this piece, we hope to find the space to discuss our experiences, reflections, and feelings from visiting the LSE archives. We (Avani and Kimia), write here as two student organisers involved in Decolonising LSE and its offshoot, the Radical History group. We place emphasis on the multi-sensorial nature of the archive: how we interact with archives through touch, smell, sound, and taste and reflect on how they make us feel. By understanding the archive as a living and breathing site of knowledge, conversations with past organisers can be made possible. Archives are spaces where radical movements not only leave their traces as repositories but are constantly in the making. In Audre Lorde’s spin on a Descartes quote, Lorde declares “I feel, therefore I can be free” (Lorde, 2019: 27). We hope the discussions below on our feelings with the process of archiving presents the archive as an accessible space for all to engage with and archiving as a necessary praxis in movement-building. By feeling we can set the archive free. Our written piece will hence take the style of a conversational-format. In our planning for this piece, we noted the difficulties of even imagining a collaborative approach to writing when all we have ever known of is marketised education, grading systems and essays that begin with “I”. We believe this conversational-format can best represent the conversations we have collectively had with the archive, and how we build connections between our lives, our organising, and the materials we engage with. Conversations [2] On the 9th November 2021, Tzipi Hotovely, the Israeli Ambassador to the United Kingdom who denies the Nakba and self-identifies as a “religious right-winger,” was invited to speak by the LSE SU Debating Society. LSE SU Palestine Society and the LSE for Palestine coalition organised a protest and walk out in response. The protest received widespread media attention with politicians calling for further police presence and condemned students in solidarity with Palestine. Kimia Talebi: Hi Avani! Since our last conversation, I visited the MayDay Rooms archive and was reflecting on our earlier trip to the LSE archives. The gap between the two archives was astounding. Whereas MayDay Rooms has community archives catered to current movement-building, the LSE archives presents organising from the seventies as a confined and fleeting moment in time. It felt like the spirit and high-energy of the radical organisers we engaged with in the LSE archive were reduced to a barcode in a catalogue. I wonder if you felt this too? One thing I have found myself treasuring was the meeting the Radical History group had before visiting the LSE archives. The meeting occurred following a round of winter UCU strikes which renewed a joint motivation from students and staff that another university was possible. This staff-student unity fed into a zoom call filled with an excited nervousness in anticipation of what we may find in the archive, and the possibilities of public exhibitions, projects, teach-outs that this could inspire. Though these meetings energised me, I cannot ignore attending the meeting flat on my feet and burnt out from the previous weeks. The protest against the Israeli ambassador occurred around two months before, giving rise to a pervasive police presence on campus.[2] I felt eager yet uneasy to learn about previous police presence on campus and how the university responded to radical student organising. Would a university archive even explicitly mention this? How would it make me feel in my state of burnout? Would it console me? What feelings did the archive evoke in you? Avani Ashtekar: Hello, Kimia! As I am hearing you speak, I am reminded of the student movements that took place against the exclusionary Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in India in late 2019 and early 2020. Protesting students were not only penalised for their outward defiance against violent exclusion by the state, but forcefully (yet partially) silenced. I was not at home when the protests took place, but the firing rage in the streets kept me warm and hopeful. So what is my archive of this student movement? Clearly, I did not participate in them, but that does not mean that I did not have any stakes in them. So, feelings of hope and rage are like an archive for me. Fast-forward to December 2021. So many of us at the UCU pickets were filled with similar feelings of rage and hope. How might the LSE archives document this? I am not even sure that they will consider feelings to have an archivability. So, like you said, the is a gaping hole between let’s say hopeful archives that come from body and emotionality and archives as passive repositories. We are taught that archives don’t alter what happens, they are passive records of what has happened. I find that understanding pretty weird. I say this because I am thinking of the time when I was going to enter the LSE archives with comrades from the Radical History group. We were warned that the archive was going to close in about 40 minutes. At that moment, I found this temporal limit so strange. I was immediately hit with the feeling that I can only access the LSE archive in its preset limits - not only spatial but also temporal. So, the process of archiving i.e. keeping the archives in an institutionally monitored room already determined how we could engage with them. Once we left the archive, I remember feeling like I had just been able to trace an incomplete genealogy of ongoing radical movements at the LSE. What were your thoughts and feelings after you left the archive? And did they change over time? <img width="723" height="963" width_o="723" height_o="963" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/aa25e42db7eafb8e065459405590066f262d656cb4de6d69ca1dc007232b6b95/Poster-found-in-the-LSE-Troubles-archive-during-the-Radical-History-group-visit-to-the-LSE-Library.jpg" data-mid="181001059" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" alt="Poster found in the &ldquo;LSE Troubles&rdquo; archive during the Radical History group visit to the LSE Library" data-caption="Poster found in the “LSE Troubles” archive during the Radical History group visit to the LSE Library" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/723/i/aa25e42db7eafb8e065459405590066f262d656cb4de6d69ca1dc007232b6b95/Poster-found-in-the-LSE-Troubles-archive-during-the-Radical-History-group-visit-to-the-LSE-Library.jpg" /> KT:&nbsp; Yes, there were changes to how I felt once we engaged with the archive. I remember feeling energised for future organising, as my group searched through magazines which documented direct student action that challenged LSE’s links to South African Apartheid. Both the direct action by brave LSE students and the university reaction to radical organising reinforced the cyclical nature of organising, as I thought of recent demonstrations and strikes. This cycle reminds me of Lola Olufemi’s challenge to chronology in Experiments in Imagining Otherwise, and how the ‘temporal regimes’ of past/present/future ‘encroach on one another’ (Olufemi, 2021: 32). Future possibilities of organising can be forged by talking with, and through the archive, to those that came before us. Although I was excited for future organising, some of the uneasiness still remained. I remember a note, possibly from university administration, placed on top of a radical pamphlet that read “A pamphlet picked up in LSE by your faithful co-operation”. This note painfully brought me back to the realisation that the production of this archive could not have been possible without institutional surveillance of student and staff dissent. Consequently, the archive felt like a mode of surveillance, a collection of intel on the most visible of student organisers. The very name of the archive - “LSE Troubles” - scorns years of organising that confronted ongoing marketisation and securitisation of the university and presents these struggles as transient “phases” of the past. How could I negotiate engaging with materials collected through institutional surveillance whilst the university still surveils student organisers who challenge links to Israeli Apartheid? How should we then navigate institutional archiving? These are questions that I am still struggling with. [3] In 1966, Walter Adams, the principal of University of Rhodesia, was appointed as new director of the LSE. Adams’ appointment triggered a long series of student protests, occupations, and sit-ins against LSE administrators between 1966-1969 because of his colonial investments in ‘Rhodesia’ (Zimbabwe). The dissenting students at LSE called themselves the “new radical left.” <img width="649" height="865" width_o="649" height_o="865" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4c98a805167b41e2e6ad3a415dc8bb35089e8dcee7a61c2f45abce82fdb2fd3a/Student-magazine-from-MayDay-Rooms-at-the-LSE-UCU-Picket-Line.jpg" data-mid="181001701" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" alt="Student magazine from MayDay Rooms at the LSE UCU Picket Line" data-caption="Student magazine from MayDay Rooms at the LSE UCU Picket Line" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/649/i/4c98a805167b41e2e6ad3a415dc8bb35089e8dcee7a61c2f45abce82fdb2fd3a/Student-magazine-from-MayDay-Rooms-at-the-LSE-UCU-Picket-Line.jpg" /> AA: I was definitely feeling this discomfort too. If the LSE archives have labelled radical movements as “LSE Troubles,” I was getting the sense that we could only find stories that the LSE felt comfortable sharing. And yes, this name also treats agitations as seldom occurring anomalies in a ‘smoothly functioning LSE.’ But in so doing, the archive actually brings to fore how LSE is always troubled, if not haunted, by ghosts of direct action and organising. But memories of an institution lie much beyond its grasp and creep out. When MayDay Rooms brought their archives to LSE’s picket lines, I was almost shocked to learn about all the student occupations that happened at LSE in the 60s.[3] When I was sifting through this material (absent in the LSE archives, to the best of my knowledge), I started feeling a mixed sense of excitement and sadness. These feelings don’t usually overlap well but reading lines like “...[t]his is why we live in a stifling and joyless ‘hall of learning’; why the ‘hallowed academic’ freedom rings hollow…” and “bombard the headquarters! All power to the people!” made me want to excitedly scream ‘people could fucking say that!?’ But the silence in the room was heavy. In a conventional archive, pin-drop silence is the norm. How might our experiences in archives differ if we can fearlessly exchange thoughts in the archive room? Doesn’t the silence in the room also speak to, if not equate with, a silence in the archives themselves? I am still pondering over these questions. Yet, it was obvious that the demands of the students were similar to those that we are making now and their anger against the liberal rhetoric echoes how we experience the LSE as students today. Reading the pamphlets at the pickets also made me wonder how we were archiving the ongoing UCU strikes for future movements. So these archives of the ‘past’ made me think of the ways in which the present and futures will be remembered. I wanted to save the handouts and the printed copies of solidarity songs we sang, write down recipes of ‘cookies against casualisation,’ and the delicious baklava. In a strange way, I was getting nostalgic for the present and the futures to come. Can there be an archive of the future? KT: Yes, your point about the silence in the room very much reflects silences in the archive. Of the materials I engaged with, contributions on internationalism and direct action were mainly from white men writers. The presence of these writers starkly differed from the “Race Today” magazines I found at MayDay Rooms, with many entries written by Black organisers and minoritised students. I wondered - who is remembered in “LSE Troubles”? I knew my questions regarding archival silences, specifically of Black and Asian organisers, could not be answered by institutional archives. For me, this is where imagination comes in. I imagined what the meetings looked like before a big action, such as the 1968 occupations of LSE buildings, and whether there was the same process of delegating roles, with a minute-taker hurriedly writing on paper. I imagined what the relationships between organisers were like, and whether they held anxieties about the ephemeral nature of student organising, just as we do. I also wondered what the role of care was in organising, and whether organisers also struggled with burnout following an action. There were multiple times this past year where the adrenaline amongst students would dip following a round of UCU strikes or a demonstration, and many of us were left wondering how best to sustain energy when building longer campaigns. Although institutional archives may not present such clear-cut answers for present organisers, imagining the movements that these organisers inhabited in the sixties enables us to build on a long lineage of student and staff dissent. It is through imagination where we can resist attempts from institutions to present organising and organisers as spectacles of the past. They live through us. AA: I am finding what you are saying so valuable and also very validating. The role of care in organising is so hard to unpack. In parallel, I am also reflecting on care in the archive. Going back to my first visit to the LSE archives, because we were only left with a few minutes, I was trying to move through the files fast. But I realised that I could not, because I had to be really careful with how I touched the tattering newspaper clippings and other fragile ephemera that were preserved to essentially become eternal. So the notion of care and how the archive demands care became interesting for me. I remember thinking about what ways the archive is demanding care from us. Of course, there is care in tactility and in the storage of materials in conventional archives. But then it also has to do with why we care about them. Relatedly, how can we maintain archives in a way that we can expect people to care for the issues that they bring to surface? So caring became a much more layered notion for me and I have not been able answer these questions. And yet, these questions motivate me to think about archives and archiving differently. https://archive-stories.com/Syrian-Cassette-Archives Sun, 04 Jun 2023 13:48:43 +0000 archive stories https://archive-stories.com/Syrian-Cassette-Archives <img width="3208" height="1423" width_o="3208" height_o="1423" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ddd67d81ce97e19a823d52e1a5b701f70069426529479ec070d033f3588a7c7a/Syrian-Cassette-Archives-pink.png" data-mid="180952209" border="0" data-scale="80" data-no-zoom src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ddd67d81ce97e19a823d52e1a5b701f70069426529479ec070d033f3588a7c7a/Syrian-Cassette-Archives-pink.png" /> Yamen Mekdad Syrian Cassette Archives: The coming together of a community archive <img width="541" height="800" width_o="541" height_o="800" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2eb13b974b512aafda790d09f9849b06a56b735be7ac9e0f25933bd9744cdfe2/SMA_0026_teaser.jpg" data-mid="180939520" border="0" data-scale="8" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/541/i/2eb13b974b512aafda790d09f9849b06a56b735be7ac9e0f25933bd9744cdfe2/SMA_0026_teaser.jpg" />&nbsp;&nbsp;<img width="538" height="800" width_o="538" height_o="800" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7a311da7b4c613637efdd281de291a15d2c15e72f1d2ad210589fafdff16f5aa/SMA_0053_SCAN_teaser.jpg" data-mid="180939521" border="0" data-scale="8" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/538/i/7a311da7b4c613637efdd281de291a15d2c15e72f1d2ad210589fafdff16f5aa/SMA_0053_SCAN_teaser.jpg" /> &nbsp;<img width="519" height="800" width_o="519" height_o="800" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d69ef7275f376291564403f16171133010c6262d91f100c4bad67c1b95ab6091/SMA_0055_SCAN_teaser.jpg" data-mid="180939522" border="0" data-scale="8" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/519/i/d69ef7275f376291564403f16171133010c6262d91f100c4bad67c1b95ab6091/SMA_0055_SCAN_teaser.jpg" /> &nbsp;<img width="800" height="1225" width_o="800" height_o="1225" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3aed3e39b3e9fe36338121447387390b83109a93debe252c9133295455341c1a/SMA_0058_SCAN_teaser.jpg" data-mid="180939523" border="0" data-scale="8" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/800/i/3aed3e39b3e9fe36338121447387390b83109a93debe252c9133295455341c1a/SMA_0058_SCAN_teaser.jpg" /> &nbsp;<img width="513" height="800" width_o="513" height_o="800" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4eecef8d4599277913bd7933b2643058186e1231e29bda0ae2c55985226b0977/SMA_0071_SCAN_teaser.jpg" data-mid="180939524" border="0" data-scale="8" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/513/i/4eecef8d4599277913bd7933b2643058186e1231e29bda0ae2c55985226b0977/SMA_0071_SCAN_teaser.jpg" /> &nbsp;<img width="517" height="800" width_o="517" height_o="800" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1d422ed9acc91714add8fce72c8827529dbd05e4d4d9caf9fce87ee19e6dca4c/SMA_0072_SCAN_teaser.jpg" data-mid="180939525" border="0" data-scale="8" 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data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/13f3020b3cf03a65517dc821299aff320a5d483a2f3105d510e2b9313cd39825/SMA_0097_SCAN_teaser.jpg" data-mid="180939528" border="0" data-scale="8" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/515/i/13f3020b3cf03a65517dc821299aff320a5d483a2f3105d510e2b9313cd39825/SMA_0097_SCAN_teaser.jpg" /> &nbsp;<img width="505" height="800" width_o="505" height_o="800" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/46de18398289eb2d3d26eead72671c3e7b7159bac8ccfd0dd99c3bab35779198/SMA_0105_teaser.jpg" data-mid="180939529" border="0" data-scale="8" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/505/i/46de18398289eb2d3d26eead72671c3e7b7159bac8ccfd0dd99c3bab35779198/SMA_0105_teaser.jpg" /> &nbsp;<img width="511" height="800" width_o="511" height_o="800" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/cb5b897dc6989c0e415f700db8d33fb1384d9fb1974238c11241d7d68b213527/SMA_0108_SCAN_teaser.jpg" data-mid="180939530" border="0" data-scale="8" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/511/i/cb5b897dc6989c0e415f700db8d33fb1384d9fb1974238c11241d7d68b213527/SMA_0108_SCAN_teaser.jpg" /> &nbsp;<img width="526" height="800" width_o="526" height_o="800" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3051bdd15396d5760583a0fd1eab4b653c47b6c031107d58eb53e4e06382e036/SMA_0112_teaser.jpg" data-mid="180939531" border="0" data-scale="8" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/526/i/3051bdd15396d5760583a0fd1eab4b653c47b6c031107d58eb53e4e06382e036/SMA_0112_teaser.jpg" /> &nbsp;<img width="502" height="800" width_o="502" height_o="800" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9c6837ba3d31890b3e363b74aedaadd55bdf8d2cb860b2c1997b46deeb5eb484/SMA_0114_SCAN_teaser.jpg" data-mid="180939532" border="0" data-scale="8" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/502/i/9c6837ba3d31890b3e363b74aedaadd55bdf8d2cb860b2c1997b46deeb5eb484/SMA_0114_SCAN_teaser.jpg" /> &nbsp;<img width="516" height="800" width_o="516" height_o="800" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6e73c5cbe0feb059d49dcdb0f5369c677d65f4d9f707ae80b466be5ff8bc2a61/SMA_0131_SCAN_teaser.jpg" data-mid="180939533" border="0" data-scale="8" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/516/i/6e73c5cbe0feb059d49dcdb0f5369c677d65f4d9f707ae80b466be5ff8bc2a61/SMA_0131_SCAN_teaser.jpg" /> &nbsp;<img width="800" height="1227" width_o="800" height_o="1227" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/fdfde21e1765121cf010b5c6e9e31f8eea1cdd7b344450e787a8562627ac0c0b/SMA_0138_SCAN_teaser.jpg" data-mid="180939534" border="0" data-scale="8" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/800/i/fdfde21e1765121cf010b5c6e9e31f8eea1cdd7b344450e787a8562627ac0c0b/SMA_0138_SCAN_teaser.jpg" /> &nbsp;<img width="508" height="800" width_o="508" height_o="800" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f42fb0a4f8edd93cdf7244cf780064a8c386b606017e743873b639ea82e74c43/SMA_0150_SCAN_teaser.jpg" data-mid="180939535" border="0" data-scale="8" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/508/i/f42fb0a4f8edd93cdf7244cf780064a8c386b606017e743873b639ea82e74c43/SMA_0150_SCAN_teaser.jpg" /> &nbsp;<img width="512" height="800" width_o="512" height_o="800" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d12258341346bae284bfd21b71e28aeb237143bf9f380cece63b81f190c91863/SMA_0151_teaser.jpg" data-mid="180939536" border="0" data-scale="8" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/512/i/d12258341346bae284bfd21b71e28aeb237143bf9f380cece63b81f190c91863/SMA_0151_teaser.jpg" /> &nbsp;<img width="527" height="800" width_o="527" height_o="800" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0031befd8828eb00504a33aecdd09f324fa597ab88c022d8f7592b80a17904e4/SMA_0504_SCAN_teaser.jpg" data-mid="180939537" border="0" data-scale="8" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/527/i/0031befd8828eb00504a33aecdd09f324fa597ab88c022d8f7592b80a17904e4/SMA_0504_SCAN_teaser.jpg" /> &nbsp;<img width="505" height="800" width_o="505" height_o="800" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3da515148effa7452eddc1fa7ee3fd9ba29420a98eef858f04a5c3e419022976/SMA_0017_teaser.jpg" data-mid="180945890" border="0" data-scale="8" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/505/i/3da515148effa7452eddc1fa7ee3fd9ba29420a98eef858f04a5c3e419022976/SMA_0017_teaser.jpg" />&nbsp; Below a link to the archive, I invite you to explore the sounds, visuals and features before reading this and after. www.syriancassettearchives.org The birth of the Syrian Cassette Archives is a story about music, people, serendipitous encounters and hope. At least, that is my telling of the story. I recall first meeting Mark Gergis in 2018. I had gotten in touch with him a month earlier to invite him as a guest speaker on Dandana, a podcast I was co-hosting with Emily Sarsam and Christina Hazboun at the time, that explored music from across the SWANA region. When we spoke, Mark told me that he was moving to London in a couple weeks’ time, and so we agreed that we would meet up in person. Our interest in music left us speaking for hours that day. We also spent a long time discussing music in the context of Syria, as Mark told me all about his trips to Syria in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s where he acquired a considerable personal collection of Syrian cassettes from his trips across the country, a collection that spanned across regional folk, children’s songs and shaabi music. In light of the devastating destruction that was sweeping across the country, Mark was keen to turn his personal cassette collection into an open access archive. It was then that we decided to start working together to better understand what the best way was to share his collection more widely.&nbsp; The Syrian Cassette Archives (SCA) was officially launched as an online public archive in 2021. At the heart of the SCA’s activities is the aspiration to preserve, document, digitise, share as well as research and engage with Syrian music, specifically looking at the cassette era in Syria, which has had one of the longest standing cassette eras, lasting from the end of the 1960s until 2010. During this period, the introduction of the cassette tape brought on the democratisation of audio recording, which had previously been restricted to those who could either afford to record in a studio or to those musicians whose music was deemed ‘good’ or ‘acceptable’ enough to be recorded. At once, the cassette meant that these barriers to entry and dissemination could be sidestepped, which led to a rapid growth in the recording and dissemination of music across the country. [i] The Qudud Al-Halabiya (Arabic: قدود حلبية, romanized: Qudūd Ḥalabīya, literally "musical measures of Aleppo") are traditional Syrian songs combining lyrics in Classical Arabic based on the poetry of Al-Andalus, particularly that in muwashshah form, with old religious melodies collected mainly by Aleppine musicians. Their themes are most often love, longing and spirituality. This has meant that wide-ranging and diverse musical styles reflecting the richness of Syria's musical traditions were being recorded during this period. The recordings ranged from regional styles such as dabke, ‘ataba and mijana from the coastal regions, dabke and jofiatfrom Southern Syria, as well as music traditions from the ethnically and religiously diverse communities from across Northeast Syria, which included sizeable Kurdish, Assyrian, Armenian and Yazidi communities, all the way to the long-standing Qudud and Mwashaht [i] traditions of Aleppo. Although still growing, SCA’s cassette tape collection today, currently standing at a humble 1000+ tapes, is a testament to the diverse sounds of that time, but also importantly to the rich histories and cultures of the people and civilizations that lived there over centuries. I recently managed to acquire a further 1000 cassettes which are in Damascus and will be digitized in the next stage of the project. <img width="513" height="800" width_o="513" height_o="800" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8eb1ce597cd93132cf7ba3c5710a439a5c8516b1bdef4660a6486baf9bcd9d6d/Folk-music-from-As-Suwayda.jpg" data-mid="180946369" border="0" data-no-zoom src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/513/i/8eb1ce597cd93132cf7ba3c5710a439a5c8516b1bdef4660a6486baf9bcd9d6d/Folk-music-from-As-Suwayda.jpg" /> Folk music from As Suwayda Various Artists Best Folk Poems - Vol 3 REF NO: 0160 GENRES: Hourani dabke shaabi LABEL Sawt Al Ghad LOCATION ISSUED Swaida, Syria ARTIST ORIGIN Swaida, Syria As an online public archive, we have worked on digitising hundreds of cassette tapes to make them available online along with digital scans of the accompanying cassette covers. Upon visiting the SCA’s website, you see rows and rows of colourful cassette tape covers. We designed the interface this way with the cassette shop in mind. All the tapes featured on our website can be listened to, with the option to choose the A side or B side to listen to first, mimicking the experience of using a tape-player.&nbsp; The tape covers also tell their own story. Looking at them lined up side by side, they bring to life a very particular aesthetic that emerged during the cassette era: bright collages, quirky calligraphic designs and offset printing, all made using basic graphic design softwares. Every time I visit the website, it leaves me feeling nostalgic, remembering the days when I used to find myself sifting through heaps and heaps of tapes in cassette shops. Unfortunately, many of these shops and kiosks no longer exist today. <img width="516" height="800" width_o="516" height_o="800" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a32c281132869f1b3d1e767ae6ea94733c529ba12b43bbc93e1da66f7e23498c/Folk-music-from-Daraa.jpg" data-mid="180946370" border="0" data-no-zoom src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/516/i/a32c281132869f1b3d1e767ae6ea94733c529ba12b43bbc93e1da66f7e23498c/Folk-music-from-Daraa.jpg" /> Folk music from Daraa Thunai Horan (Houran Duo), Ahmed Al Koseem &amp; Samir Muselmani Ishq el Wahm (Love of the Illusion) REF NO: 0024 GENRES: pop dabke Hourani LABEL FUTURE MBI Music Box International LOCATION ISSUED Damascus, Syria ARTIST ORIGIN Daraa, Syria <img width="3677" height="1886" width_o="3677" height_o="1886" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/24d6e78bc3e67355a660ea06f991684bd22ce53995f0680375d30e5a91479155/Picture2-min-1.png" data-mid="180947609" border="0" data-no-zoom src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/24d6e78bc3e67355a660ea06f991684bd22ce53995f0680375d30e5a91479155/Picture2-min-1.png" /> <img width="564" height="800" width_o="564" height_o="800" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c10bf6cf8c430eecca0f81a9aa03f87e6884965b0855f6f6c0ddaaf7e52fce3e/Folk-from-the-Syrian-cost.jpg" data-mid="180946368" border="0" data-no-zoom src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/564/i/c10bf6cf8c430eecca0f81a9aa03f87e6884965b0855f6f6c0ddaaf7e52fce3e/Folk-from-the-Syrian-cost.jpg" /> Folk from the Syrian coastNaim Al Sheikh Tahet Al Dawali (Beneath the Grapevine) REF NO: 0124 DATE: 2006 GENRES: attaba dabke LABEL Music Phan ARTIST ORIGIN Homs, Syria CREDITS Keyboards: Abdul Raheem Al Saleh Importantly, the archive itself has allowed us to move beyond the materiality of the tapes, to explore more closely the conditions of music production, not only in Syria, but across the region. The website is not only home to the digitised tapes and their covers but is also increasingly becoming a platform that openly invites researchers and writers as well as sound enthusiasts to approach the archive as a platform from which new questions and understandings can begin to arise. Therefore, the website sets out to house and piece together a growing bilingual body of knowledge, both in Arabic and in English, around the cassette era and the period’s social, economic, and political specificities; this includes commissioned essays, research articles, interviews, and recordings. The assemblage of written and recorded materials on the website are attempts at beginning to trace the contours of what once was a vibrant and diverse ecology of singers, musicians, producers, cassette shop owners, music labels, designers and more, that made the recording, production, and dissemination of music during that period what it was. <img width="533" height="800" width_o="533" height_o="800" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9f9fa185441c64465b3f2357fc9aeff5f3900539f7f47fa79fc870391fca5c00/Various-Artists---awalat-Kurdiya-Kurdish-Mawal--96.jpg" data-mid="180946372" border="0" data-no-zoom src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/533/i/9f9fa185441c64465b3f2357fc9aeff5f3900539f7f47fa79fc870391fca5c00/Various-Artists---awalat-Kurdiya-Kurdish-Mawal--96.jpg" /> Collection of mawal performances Various Artists Mawalat Kurdiya (Kurdish Mawal) '96 REF NO: 0079 DATE: 1996 GENRES: Kurdish folk shaabi mawal LABEL Shahba LOCATION ISSUED Aleppo, Syria ARTIST ORIGIN Ras Al Ain, Qamishli, Hassake, northeastern Syria, Turkey, Iraq The collection is also an archive of the social, cultural, technological, and political history of that period. Many of the tapes offer a glimpse into and allow for a closer reading of the transformations during that period that can still be felt today. With the democratisation brought on by cassette tapes for example, not only was it musicians that seized this opportunity, but also the state that recognised this as a useful tool to further its ideological and state-building priorities. This is evident in the large number of political tapes on which political statements, speeches and nationalist songs and chants were recorded. On the other hand, oppressive state policies towards Kurdish communities meant that Kurdish music was rarely made available on any public platforms or broadcasting outlets. Yet, despite this, the collection features a large quantity of Kurdish tapes, telling a very different story: one of resistance and cultural defiance. The cassette tapes also point to regional political upheavals. This is evident, for example, in the number of Iraqi cassette tapes that we have gathered as part of our collection. A significant number of these cassette tapes entered the distribution circuit during the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, as thousands of Iraqis migrated to Syria during that period. <img width="533" height="800" width_o="533" height_o="800" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/97b663fc2f26719e409e572be32d342537cc10cff64e1503b276731566932148/Imad-Jarad.jpg" data-mid="180946371" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/533/i/97b663fc2f26719e409e572be32d342537cc10cff64e1503b276731566932148/Imad-Jarad.jpg" /> Folk from Deir Ez Zur&nbsp; Imad JaradLasheel Hammi (Ease My Burden) REF NO: 0061 DATE: 1995 GENRES: dabke mawal choubi shaabi LABELSawt Al Hafez LOCATION ISSUEDAleppo, Syria ARTIST ORIGINDeir Ez Zur, Syria CREDITSKeyboards: Freej Amsyan Sound engineer: Salman Al Dakhee A sizable number of tapes in the collection capture the ephemeral moments of communities coming together for weddings and family celebrations, granting us access into intimate and domestic spaces. Community gatherings such as these were normally centred around music, dance and food that would go on for days. With the onset of the cassette tape, musicians started recording their performances at these events, and would then go on to distribute a limited number of these tapes, which would act as personal business cards, supporting musicians to get more bookings at weddings across their regions. Another transformation that has caught my attention and interest has been the impact of the keyboard on traditional musical styles. Since the introduction and eventual adoption of the keyboard by folk musicians, it completely transformed the way in which they would perform, as one musician alone on the org keyboard could now play five instruments simultaneously for hours on end. I would also argue, counter to the ways in which it was perceived as a threat to ‘authentic’ traditional sounds when it was first introduced, it has played a crucial role in ensuring the continuity as well as transmission of these musical styles into the present, particularly when taking into account the economic and demographic shifts that have taken place over the past decades.&nbsp; As a community archive, we actively invite members of the public to engage with the archive and to craft their own personal and creative responses to the collection. This then places the collection in dialogue with both the past and the present, acting as time capsules with the capacity to unlock new meanings and recover silenced histories. Such practices of reading close to, alongside, with, and between the collection demonstrate the many ways in which the meanings and memories associated with artefacts such as these are neither stable nor fixed but are subject to processes of decontextualization and recontextualization. The potential therein lies in their ability to challenge the fixedness of knowledge and offer alternative insights, countering prevalent and dominant ideologies and frameworks, whether colonial or state-led. In the absence of state archives and in the shadows of nationalist ideologies, the SCA as an online public archive aspires towards positing the archive as sites of plurality and diversity, where remembering, reclamation and re-enactment can take place once again. The SCA hopes to offer a platform where personal, civic, and communal memories can be stored, ordered, and preserved; a site that can work towards maintaining strong community ties that ensure their continuity into the future. Yamen Mekdad is a music researcher, collector, DJ and radio host based in London. His interests in field recording, archiving, radio and grassroots organising have led him to found Sawt of the Earth and Makkam, two London-based collectives. He is a frequent contributor to a number of radio stations, including Root Radio and Balamii Radio, and was a producer of DanDana podcasts on SOAS Radio. Yamen is currently co-producer/curator of the Syrian Cassette Archives, a web based platform that preserves the Syrian cassette era as well as curating and producing SACF’s (Syrian Arts and Culture Festival) music programme. Yamen has performed and collaborated with various artists/art institutions both in the UK and internationally. ︎ ︎ ︎ <img width="1920" height="13000" width_o="1920" height_o="13000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/71fb4931609ec4188e8bdc188b5fd42d840f2ae525ea6c7b93d5c1fcb4eb7710/Background.png" data-mid="180975406" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/71fb4931609ec4188e8bdc188b5fd42d840f2ae525ea6c7b93d5c1fcb4eb7710/Background.png" /> ︎︎︎ ︎︎︎ https://archive-stories.com/On-Political-Friendship-and-Archival-Labour Sun, 04 Jun 2023 23:10:46 +0000 archive stories https://archive-stories.com/On-Political-Friendship-and-Archival-Labour <img width="1503" height="2830" width_o="1503" height_o="2830" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/25a02060bb0caeba9401466c39e2fa87a0264f1d4a588d4d45aa233f74a46044/Mahvish.png" data-mid="184217177" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/25a02060bb0caeba9401466c39e2fa87a0264f1d4a588d4d45aa233f74a46044/Mahvish.png" /> Mahvish Ahmad On Political Friendship and Archival Labour: Working with a Radical Library in Pakistan <img width="4440" height="3242" width_o="4440" height_o="3242" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f751fdab3bd0646d969c64fd5ce5d25e4cb164c8663b683a76a9f9e3c82930d8/Video-1-caption.png" data-mid="184236586" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f751fdab3bd0646d969c64fd5ce5d25e4cb164c8663b683a76a9f9e3c82930d8/Video-1-caption.png" /> Behind a 40,000-strong collection of Pakistan’s socialist and democratic movements - collected by the Punjabi poet, Urdu journalist, and progressive political worker, Ahmad Salim - are invisible acts of love and labour that shelter and nurture a wandering archive and its archivist. To work with Salim and his archive is an act of political friendship; to sustain it for scholars and organisers of the left, a profoundly undervalued, laborious, and necessary undertaking. [1] At the time, my intention was to write a PhD about the National Awami Party, a left political formation that in the 1950s brought together urban communists and ‘minor’ nations in Pakistan, for the purposes of establishing a socialist multinationalism state. Ahmad Salim was a member and political worker with NAP. &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; I first met Ahmad Salim in the living room of Dr Humaira Ishfaq, a scholar and professor of Urdu literature in Islamabad, who in a moment of big-hearted kindness convinced her husband that they should move this poetic soul of an archivist, this former political worker of the left, into their home. I had heard from fellow scholars of the left, and socialist organiser-comrades, that Ahmad Salim was the man to go to for documents on Pakistan’s socialist and democratic movements. When I walked in, he was seated next to Dr Humaira’s children, who had by this point adopted him as their nana, their maternal grandfather. My first two hours were spent listening to a mix of Salim chastising his adopted grandchildren and interrogating me, this new student of the Pakistani left. When convinced that my intentions[1] were acceptable to him, he led me to his vast collection: piles of papers, books, cassettes, video tapes, and other items collected from progressive friends up and down the country. When he moved into Dr Humaira’s home, I realised, he brought not just the body of an old man who needed care but a collection 40,000-strong that needed a home. [2] The project was mostly funded by a small Planning Grant from the Modern Endangered Archives Program run out of UCLA. You can read about it on their website here: https://meap.library.ucla.edu/projects/conserving-the-archives-of-progressive-pakistan/. Despite the grant and the project, much remains to be done, and all those interested in supporting the library are welcome to get in touch with me or the library via www.sarrc.org.pk. &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; I was asked to pen a short piece because of my work with Salim’s collection: I spent nearly two years working with him and a team of librarians, archivists, digital designers, and scholars like Dr Humaira to digitally index, physically sort, and make searchable his 40,000 items.[2] This piece should function as a resource for others who might be interested in working with this kind of a collection; a guide for those trying process what it means to collaborate with archives and their archivists. I opened with how Dr Humaira gave Salim and his archive a home, because for me it represents the two most important ingredients in any such collaboration: love and labour. When Dr Humaira met Salim, she told her husband that she could not help but feel a deep affection for this old man, his pen and his political commitments. &nbsp; <img width="1920" height="1080" width_o="1920" height_o="1080" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/144600ff514aa39d80dbb97f91667986bdbe8d66812918171d72da758b8f4c7b/Video-2-caption.png" data-mid="184236654" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/144600ff514aa39d80dbb97f91667986bdbe8d66812918171d72da758b8f4c7b/Video-2-caption.png" /> [3] Ahmad Salim has recently published his autobiography, Meri Dharti, Mere Loag (Sang-e-Meel 2022). Dr Humaira comments on his autobiography at the 2023 Pakistan Literature Festival in Lahore, using the opportunity to launch a critique of the exclusions manifested at the festival itself, as well as mainstream ideas of what constitutes Urdu literature and the history of the land. The book launch panel, in which Dr Humaira launches this intervention, can be listened to here &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; For Dr Humaira, Ahmad Salim was a teacher whose capacious writings as an Urdu historian and Punjabi poet had undone her. He was also an archive in his own right, born just two years before Partition in 1945, a repository of a capacious life that itself is a tale of erased and marginalised histories.[3] A few years after moving him into their home, when Salim fell extremely ill and had to undergo surgery, Dr Humaira and her husband Qaiser showed up at the hospital with the deed to a parcel of land 45 minutes outside of Islamabad. “We’re going to build you the library you always dreamed of,” they told him. They spent the next few years funding and managing the construction of the three-story building, which today houses Salim’s entire collection. They mirror Salim’s own love for progressive politics and art, which he has both been part of creating and collecting over decades. And, they follow (and make way for) a long line of political friendships, kinships, comradeships, that have sustained this poet, writer, and archivist and his vast archive through relentless and committed, invisible, and crucial labour. <img width="738" height="606" width_o="738" height_o="606" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/38a14d349e383f95195eb20dfc94f009c8b4454358ae407744f2f05a801f5fe6/Video-3-caption.png" data-mid="184334473" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/738/i/38a14d349e383f95195eb20dfc94f009c8b4454358ae407744f2f05a801f5fe6/Video-3-caption.png" /> &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; In the rest of this contribution, I’ll speak a bit more about Salim’s archive: How it came about, what wonders it contains, and why I started to work with it as one contribution to a broader, networked, and historical effort to build left infrastructures in Pakistan. And, I’ll return to the themes of political friendship and archival labour, relations and processes that privilege the collective reproduction of life and politics. Despite their absolute centrality in the making and maintenance of left archives under conditions of repression and neglect, both comradeship and care is often invisibilised. Collaborating with a progressive archive – and the broader politics of which it is a part – requires a willingness to enter those marginal but invisible, collective networks of relations and work that have always been central to the making of the left. [4] He penned critical essays and poetry condemning the centralisation of power, writing against the 1971 atrocities of the Pakistani military in what is now Bangladesh, and in favour of Pashtun, Baloch, Sindhi, and other marginalised national demands to decentralise political and economic power. A Progressive Archive and its Archivist About forty years ago, Ahmad Salim declared himself chronicler of all things progressive. When he started, he was already enmeshed in networks of political and cultural workers trying to build a left to be reckoned with; his archival work was an extension of this. He was a member of the National Awami Party, a pan-peripheral alliance of marginalised nations and urban communists; he was a member out of the country’s most powerful province of Punjab.[4] And, he was a Punjabi poet who joined the famous communist Urdu literary giant, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, when the latter established the Pakistan National Council of the Arts in 1973, to help archive “lok adab” (people’s or folk literature) and set up Lok Virsa, the National Institute of Folk and Traditional Heritage, under the Pakistan People’s Party government. Around this time, a visiting research student he helped to gain access to some documents, thanked him for access to his “archive.” Then it dawned on him: He should build one, to house those items state institutions would find too incendiary to record. When Zia ul Haq, the second military ruler, took over at the end of the 1970s the necessity of this work became all that more important. Part of the global alliance against communism in the final decade of the Cold War, tasked to train mujahideen in their fight against the Kabul government and the Soviet invasion, Zia turned his ire onto a rich network of leftists within Pakistani borders. He effectively hanged Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in a trumped up murder charge, drove Faiz into exile in Beirut, and hounded and arrested Salim and his comrades. Salim knew that critical and pro-democracy documents produced for instance by the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy against Zia, would never find a home in the National Library or the National Documentation Centre—at least not beyond their representation in radio surveillance briefs and police reports. So, he delegated himself a simple task: Collect everything under the sun. Hoard every chitti (letter), poster, pamphlet, magazine, notebook, audio recording, VHS tape, CD, book, encyclopedia. Record interviews with striking union workers and fishermen and never throw them away. Get to know as many poets and writers, actresses and drama stars, producers, and scriptwriters as humanly possible (Pakistan’s cultural scene was long dominated by the politically progressive, despite the state of its formal politics, and during Zia’s regime Salim took refuge in showbiz journalism to avoid further arrests). Scour the country for ageing leftists and their descendants, to ask them whether they have anything left at all, any diaries or personal letters, scribbles and photos, that he can come to pick up and store away. <img width="1040" height="780" width_o="1040" height_o="780" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/303b52bf399f676e8849ebdf136f4874837e7b8f1401adfabfb2f998cf9a3b25/1_MRD-Poster-grain.png" data-mid="184336484" border="0" alt="MRD Poster" data-caption="MRD Poster" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/303b52bf399f676e8849ebdf136f4874837e7b8f1401adfabfb2f998cf9a3b25/1_MRD-Poster-grain.png" /> <img width="1023" height="206" width_o="1023" height_o="206" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8b27d5867561ab36b37a13f1f40ea335fcebddba4f62634ac5f7321281d5f2b1/2_Miscellaneous-footage-on-Bengal-1971-grain.png" data-mid="184336485" border="0" data-rotation="-15" alt="Miscellaneous footage on Bengal 1971" data-caption="Miscellaneous footage on Bengal 1971" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/8b27d5867561ab36b37a13f1f40ea335fcebddba4f62634ac5f7321281d5f2b1/2_Miscellaneous-footage-on-Bengal-1971-grain.png" /> <img width="780" height="1040" width_o="780" height_o="1040" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4ff0619a798f151a526c93664ab6280911864b1f2e6158daeb0c6668787edbc9/3_Workers-rally-poster-grain.png" data-mid="184336486" border="0" data-rotation="-15" alt="Workers rally poster " data-caption="Workers rally poster " src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/780/i/4ff0619a798f151a526c93664ab6280911864b1f2e6158daeb0c6668787edbc9/3_Workers-rally-poster-grain.png" /> <img width="780" height="1040" width_o="780" height_o="1040" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ad5f441b60ee1ef5b503169a3fbbb709dac6b2955ac7fd69321cf0b2fb62d30e/5_Book-Tufail-Abbas-grain.png" data-mid="184336488" border="0" data-rotation="-22.5" alt="Book Tufail Abbas" data-caption="Book Tufail Abbas" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/780/i/ad5f441b60ee1ef5b503169a3fbbb709dac6b2955ac7fd69321cf0b2fb62d30e/5_Book-Tufail-Abbas-grain.png" /> <img width="780" height="1040" width_o="780" height_o="1040" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9ab0fd3a3b1a67554edb9a7f6eaada652b2d888c9c75d52f6ce60b83e36e4c1f/4_1st-May-Poster-grain.png" data-mid="184336487" border="0" data-rotation="7.5" alt="1st May Poster" data-caption="1st May Poster" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/780/i/9ab0fd3a3b1a67554edb9a7f6eaada652b2d888c9c75d52f6ce60b83e36e4c1f/4_1st-May-Poster-grain.png" /> [5] At a recent panel at the 2023 Pakistan Literature Festival, launching Ahmad Salim’s Mere Dharti, Mere Loag (Sang-e-Meel 2022), Dr Syed Ahmed Jaffer recounted a telling story of Salim’s struggles. Many years ago, Salim submitted poetry won a collection of Faiz’s entire collection of poetry, after submitting his own work to a magazine. The collection had been donated as a prize gift by Faiz himself. After three days, Faiz found the collection being sold at a street corner and approached Salim to ask him why he got rid of Faiz’s entire literary collection for money. Salim answered: “Faiz Sahib, after the third day, my stomach could no longer bear the faqa, the fast, the starvation.” The South Asian Research and Resource Centre, the innocuous name that Ahmad Salim gave to his ambitious endeavor, is the product of forty years of stockpiling histories of the left, so that those who survive him, and his friends can learn about histories neglected and erased by a constellation of military rulers, political elites, big business, and land barons that, at the very best, tell a story of the country’s leftists as one of lunatics and traitors. Behind it and Ahmad Salim’s vast collection of writings and organizing is a story of a wildly all-consuming dedication to his politics, his pen, and his archive, which more than once drove him to the edge of hunger and homelessness.[5] &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; I decided to work with Salim in the summer of 2019, when I visited him on the first floor basement of the building that Dr Humaira and Qaiser had constructed for him. <img width="2542" height="3391" width_o="2542" height_o="3391" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/17bb5639343f13e1abd69f05fc6b5821269e4402f67b31ea361b1d824b33e8d9/Untitled-2-min.png" data-mid="184333949" border="0" alt="Stacks of posters on the floor" data-caption="Stacks of posters on the floor" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/17bb5639343f13e1abd69f05fc6b5821269e4402f67b31ea361b1d824b33e8d9/Untitled-2-min.png" /> <img width="2425" height="3382" width_o="2425" height_o="3382" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e45bcfaa1a55df59236516bcb824f714dc47f1236bbd6e5fa2db16e21f3ba229/Bookshelves-min.png" data-mid="184341778" border="0" alt="Stacks of newspapers uncatalogued" data-caption="Stacks of newspapers uncatalogued" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e45bcfaa1a55df59236516bcb824f714dc47f1236bbd6e5fa2db16e21f3ba229/Bookshelves-min.png" /> I decided to work with Salim in the summer of 2019, when I visited him on the first floor basement of the building that Dr Humaira and Qaiser had constructed for him. There, forty years of documents sat in piles around makeshift shelves that he had been wanting to replace. A crumbled up, partially ripped poster in one corner showed a setting red sun next to Ho Chi Minh, printed by the United Workers’ Assembly of Lahore. In large, red letters it declared: ڈوب رہا ہے سامراج ایسیا کے خون میں Empire drowns in the blood of Asia! <img width="1056" height="801" width_o="1056" height_o="801" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0a9c6a494543cefc34dac7c5946d2627768bb6d3d1d6977158c05897eaf37271/8_SARRC-building-outside-Islamabad.png" data-mid="184237029" border="0" alt="SARRC building outside Islamabad" data-caption="SARRC building outside Islamabad" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0a9c6a494543cefc34dac7c5946d2627768bb6d3d1d6977158c05897eaf37271/8_SARRC-building-outside-Islamabad.png" /> <img width="3024" height="4032" width_o="3024" height_o="4032" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/becec40e44b90fb0569b906af6c991bd0893f5295e8a2f5920ff69521b363d28/9_M.S.-Khawaja-searching-magazines-for-visiting-researchers.jpeg" data-mid="184237030" border="0" alt="M.S. Khawaja searching magazines for visiting researchers" data-caption="M.S. Khawaja searching magazines for visiting researchers" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/becec40e44b90fb0569b906af6c991bd0893f5295e8a2f5920ff69521b363d28/9_M.S.-Khawaja-searching-magazines-for-visiting-researchers.jpeg" /> <img width="901" height="1600" width_o="901" height_o="1600" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/801eae7b8876f259c08987b411ee1bd392728b46d1d23cb6f1e3213735305d8c/11_Punjabi-Poetry-book-on-Palestine-Grain.png" data-mid="184336393" border="0" alt="Punjabi Poetry book on Palestine" data-caption="Punjabi Poetry book on Palestine" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/901/i/801eae7b8876f259c08987b411ee1bd392728b46d1d23cb6f1e3213735305d8c/11_Punjabi-Poetry-book-on-Palestine-Grain.png" /> <img width="780" height="1040" width_o="780" height_o="1040" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9d2cbfabee47d7210dca16ba849b8bbaea41007ec6d160b21cde07c7e2f9dd77/12_Policy-doc-from-Sindhi-Baluch-Pushtoon-Front-on-constitution-grain.png" data-mid="184336395" border="0" alt="Policy doc from Sindhi Baluch Pushtoon Front on constitution" data-caption="Policy doc from Sindhi Baluch Pushtoon Front on constitution" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/780/i/9d2cbfabee47d7210dca16ba849b8bbaea41007ec6d160b21cde07c7e2f9dd77/12_Policy-doc-from-Sindhi-Baluch-Pushtoon-Front-on-constitution-grain.png" /> [6] See Sara Kazmi’s work on the Mazdoor Kissan Party, especially her article, The Hamlets Hum in Punjabi, written for Tanqeed, and her digital Teaching Tool on MKP Circular, a pamphlet in the SARRC collection, for Revolutionary Papers. &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; In the room where Salim himself slept, amidst many of his papers, a small booklet for Palestine, penned by a Muhammad Riaz Shahid, declared its solidarity in Punjabi poetry. Under another pile, the Sindhi Baloch Pushtoon Front outlined a confederal constitution, one of many alternative visions for how to constitute a Pakistan more inclusive and capacious of its marginalised nations. And those were just the ones that stood out to me, invested as I was in revisiting left internationalism and alternative, multinational imaginations of postcolonial collectivity. There was his prized collection on Punjabi history, literature, music, art, theatre, and politics. Sara Kazmi and Hashim bin Rashid, two friends and comrades who had travelled with me to Salim’s library that day, had been spending time digging up pamphlets and writings of rural movements around Punjab. This included the papers of the Mazdoor Kissan Party, or Worker’s Peasants Party, which among other things tried to imagine a people’s literature in Punjabi for the purposes of mobilising the masses.[6]&nbsp;His vast and rich, material collection was a reminder that at a time of archival turns, where our very idea of what constitutes repositories of memories on the past has become so beautifully extensive, old-school archives with their ageing papers still need our care and attention. [7] Mijke van der Drift’s work on non-normative ethics and transfemme futures has been immensely generative for me as I articulate my own arguments around the necessity for militant and insurgent scholars engaged rather than disembedded from political movements. Read more about Mijke’s work at https://goldsmiths.academia.edu/MijkevanderDrift. &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; During this particular visit, I was working through what it means to stay engaged with the Pakistani left from abroad. I was in Cape Town at the time, a postdoc at the University of the Western Cape, but was on my way to London to start a new job at LSE. Tensions between “diaspora” academics and left organisers and scholars still in Pakistan had always run high, for all sorts of reasons ranging from political differences to professional competition to the fact that the immediate enemy looks different depending on where you stand (e.g. Islamophobia in Europe, Sunni majoritarian Islamists in Pakistan). Central to the disagreement has been differences around the correct interpretation of the political terrain and the priorities of the left. The ongoing split between inside/outside Pakistan reflected for me a deeper assumption around what it means to build and sustain left politics: that individuated discourse trumps collective work. A dear friend and comrade, Mijke van der Drift, recently articulated this hunch back to me, when they said: “Some think truth is action. But action is also truth.”[7]&nbsp;What they meant was that the speaking-truth-to-power move was all well and good, necessary even, but that it is only by labouring together that we can construct new truths, or new worlds. Political Friendship, Archival Labour and the Building of Left Infrastructure Over the next two years, Salim and I spent several hours on the phone together concocting various ways to find money that could fund the transformation of his collection into a functional library (this was pandemic time, and plans to travel back to Pakistan had been thwarted). Salim had a strict requirement, which I whole-heartedly agreed with: The documents must remain in Pakistan, accessible to scholars and organisers there, and the money should come with as little strings attached as possible. We identified the Modern Endangered Archives Project at UCLA, a donor interested in funding vulnerable 20th century collections in places like Pakistan, and went for their small (rather than large) grant because it allowed us to do exactly what we wanted: To hire a team of librarians and archivists who would generate metadata on the collection, transform that information into a searchable index, and relaunch a website with a search engine. SARRC’s collection could become searchable from anywhere in the world, but if someone wanted to access it they would have to make the effort to either contact Salim and ask him to send copies, or make the trek to the library itself. &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Such things are not always admitted, but are perhaps necessary to reveal: To work with Salim and his archive required a commitment to staying in a friendship and comradeship with him and his collection—and a willingness to spend hours upon hours working on sometimes the most mundane tasks, like creating and checking excel sheets. Shahzad Abbas, the chief librarian, ran a team of archivists, coordinating all the work. Though none of us could circumvent working on the collection itself, it was Abbas and his team who made up the archival, library workers, who spent unending hours picking up 40,000 items and typing them into a list for us to check, re-check, and then check a third time. More than once, the team ran into its set of crises, mundane disagreements threatening to undo the massive task we had set ourselves. The largest, and perhaps most undervalued, exercise of our politics and ideological commitments was the willingness to stay in the work, together, come what may; a commitment to build a radical library that someone other than the 75-year old Salim could navigate (as Dr Humaira and Qaiser told me, more than once, they were completely unable to find anything in the collection, but mention it once to Salim and he’ll fish it out in a hurry). &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Over the years, well-resourced libraries have offered to conserve Salim’s entire collection: To provide the money and the expertise they felt was necessary to preserve his items. The British Library had approached him more than once, he explained, but they wanted to take his collection and he wouldn’t have it. For a while he was salaried by the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam to transport left papers to Holland for safe-keeping. When he started bringing copies, instead of originals, wanting to keep primary documents in the country, he got into a disagreement with the IISH and the collaboration ended. A faculty member at a private university in Pakistan notorious both for several progressive faculty members and its hyper-securitised, gated campus, offered to transfer the entire collection to its library. This, however, would have made it inaccessible to all but the most privileged students and scholars, defeating the purpose Salim had set for himself, so he refused the offer. &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; In the end, the very making and sustenance of Salim’s archive has depended his, and others, willingness to enter into relations of friendship, kinship, and comradeship—to put in work and resources out of a commitment to preserve an autonomous, radical library in Pakistan. Dr Humaira and Qaiser have gone a step further, cultivating a kinship that goes beyond the solidarity inherent in political friendships. The many, many people over the years who have taken in Salim and his collection, paying for his surgeries and his shelves, donating their notebooks and inviting him to sift through their old boxes are, in turn, a model for a broader political friendship and archival labour. But perhaps foremost among us all us Salim Sahib himself, who committed his life to the memory of his friends and the new truths, and new worlds they have tried to build together. Mahvish Ahmad works on the material legacies of anticolonial and Left movements, archival practices in sites of disappearance, fugitive organising under conditions of war, and the shifting techniques of imperial and sovereign violence, especially in Pakistan. She’s a UK-based Trustee of the South Asian Research and Resource Centre, the topic of this blog. She is also a co-founder of Revolutionary Papers, which studies anticolonial journals (with C. Morgenstern, K. Benson),&nbsp;Archives of the Disappeared, which investigates archive in sites of annihilation (with M. Qato, Y. Navaro, C. Morgenstern), and Tanqeed, an English-Urdu magazine of the Left in Pakistan (with M. Tahir). She’s an Assistant Professor of Human Rights and Politics at the London School of Economics. ︎︎︎ ︎ ︎ ︎︎︎ ︎︎︎ https://archive-stories.com/Making-a-historical-series-on-colonial-surveillance-archives Sun, 04 Jun 2023 23:10:42 +0000 archive stories https://archive-stories.com/Making-a-historical-series-on-colonial-surveillance-archives <img width="2173" height="2482" width_o="2173" height_o="2482" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d76d31bcaf128e4541250f79a24b3372ce49838bca82435d614dd28ed8259747/Inkyfada-icon.png" data-mid="184109253" border="0" data-no-zoom src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d76d31bcaf128e4541250f79a24b3372ce49838bca82435d614dd28ed8259747/Inkyfada-icon.png" /> Inkyfada Making a historical series on colonial surveillance archives: The case of "Suspicious People". <img width="3354" height="3470" width_o="3354" height_o="3470" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d0c03ae5f0de9ac9fea6ab800ff4e20d19fcf40a5aa2c2bb0cb7b41926149caf/Cover-Image.png" data-mid="213586720" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d0c03ae5f0de9ac9fea6ab800ff4e20d19fcf40a5aa2c2bb0cb7b41926149caf/Cover-Image.png" /> In this text, the author and the editor of the series of articles “Suspicious People” look back at the genesis, the writing and the production of the series within the Tunisian media inkyfada. <img width="2056" height="1938" width_o="2056" height_o="1938" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/927da26a99826804c723c91ee6c87b2f4dc8839fd00bcd045f96728668c75d03/National-archives.png" data-mid="184141760" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/927da26a99826804c723c91ee6c87b2f4dc8839fd00bcd045f96728668c75d03/National-archives.png" /> Arwa’s part: <img width="1981" height="200" width_o="1981" height_o="200" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/39c64c99a6e1caa4c4f05ae65c112e57d06404878fbf08cd780b5f9addc1d9ae/Heading-1.png" data-mid="184128971" border="0" data-scale="60" data-no-zoom data-rotation="1" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/39c64c99a6e1caa4c4f05ae65c112e57d06404878fbf08cd780b5f9addc1d9ae/Heading-1.png" /> One of my favourite spots in Tunis is the National Archives. I love the feeling I get when I wait for the archive file I requested to arrive. When I see it coming, it starts to materialize and I feel a great sensation of joy. I like to touch the folder and its files, to smell it, to be attentive to its fragility. It is in the National Archives where I discovered, 3 years ago, the archives “Gens suspects” (Suspicious people). The name attracted my curiosity so I dove into these records. I was fascinated by what I found. After a while, I suggested to the independent Tunisian investigative media inkyfada to create a series based on it. The records consist of 4000 files of people surveilled by the French intelligence services between 1910 and 1930. The files, now kept in the National Archives of Tunisia, and which were handed over after the Independence, include diverse records of men, women, Muslim or Jewish Tunisians, Ottomans, Europeans, etc. These archives were established during the French Protectorate in Tunisia (1881 - 1956). In particular, they were produced during the state of siege which was decreed in 1911 following the events of Djellaz (one of the first Tunisian large-scale anti-colonial insurrections) and which lasted 10 years including the First World War. During this time, the movements of the local population were extremely controlled and surveillance became systematic. The period is particularly interesting since, despite the oppressive regime, it witnessed the emergence of the first anti-colonial movements: distribution of leaflets, development of critical or satirical newspapers, creation of clandestine networks of struggle inside and outside urban areas, etc. During the state of siege, individuals under surveillance were mainly targeted because of their political involvement, their criticism of colonization or sometimes even for simply attending a meeting or buying a suspicious newspaper. Some were also watched because of moral reasons or because they were considered as marginal. Surveillance was also often carried out in collaboration with certain locals (indicators or administrative agents). Almost everything was considered suspicious: female engagement, intellectual production, political organization, sex work, artistic expression, etc. In other words, anything that relates to local agency that can potentially challenge the dominant order. <img width="1490" height="839" width_o="1490" height_o="839" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b21a20f04654628d2a55626d021446204b576b9f8a011e3fd1fd45ecedd58354/Letters-of-Mabrouka-bent-Salem.-Tunisian-National-Archives--Gens-suspects--Srie-E--carton-550--dossier-3015--n1197.png" data-mid="184131225" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" alt="Letters of Mabrouka bent Salem. Tunisian National Archives, Gens suspects, S&eacute;rie E, carton 550, dossier 30/15, n&deg;1197 " data-caption="Letters of Mabrouka bent Salem. Tunisian National Archives, Gens suspects, Série E, carton 550, dossier 30/15, n°1197 " src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b21a20f04654628d2a55626d021446204b576b9f8a011e3fd1fd45ecedd58354/Letters-of-Mabrouka-bent-Salem.-Tunisian-National-Archives--Gens-suspects--Srie-E--carton-550--dossier-3015--n1197.png" /> <img width="2540" height="200" width_o="2540" height_o="200" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5d9585baf8d6e65fabfd8e2cbaf825dad3b0a8482d77b929c65aa4a81a7dbbf1/Heading-2.png" data-mid="184129248" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" data-rotation="-2.5" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/5d9585baf8d6e65fabfd8e2cbaf825dad3b0a8482d77b929c65aa4a81a7dbbf1/Heading-2.png" /> For inkyfada, I investigated and recounted 12 stories from the archival records. This has resulted in a series that bears the same name “Suspicious People”. Out of the 12 portraits, 5 were women. It was a deliberate choice to include a significant proportion of women although it is not a representative figure. Indeed, out of the 4000 cases, there are actually less than 50 women. Through this series, I intended to highlight the female presence in Tunisian history at the beginning of the 20th century in order to counter the national narrative stating that women are mere helpers to men in nationalist movements or that their supposed invisibility in the public space made them politically inactive. The records reveal the different layers of domination on which the colonial system was based: hierarchy between Europeans and Tunisians, men and women, people from rural areas and people from the city, etc. My aim was to understand the systematic aspects of repression but also to reflect on the different treatments between social groups. Lastly, through these archives, we can see how the legacy of colonial policing practices remains present through surveillance, the disregard for the working classes, arbitrary arrests, etc. Throughout the making of this series, I felt the need to tell the stories of those arrested by the colonial police. Despite the frustration of having only the authorities’ point of view in the archives, I tried to give the best possible account of what was happening to the people under suspicion. I would imagine how the suspected or arrested person felt, physically and emotionally. I felt like I was using what I would feel for them, the anger, the sadness or the bitterness as material for the writing, as a kind of fuel. One of the times this feeling of closeness was very strong was for the article on Mabrouka bent Salem. It was about a woman who was under surveillance because of her ambiguous gender identity (according to the authorities) and because she was carrying suspicious letters. In her file, I came across the letters she was carrying and I was moved to touch them, to smell them. I was touched to know that these were the last letters she transported before her arrest and death in prison. <img width="1366" height="768" width_o="1366" height_o="768" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f01cd2ad4dcb8218ade55296b0583308a0ee05447ce942e57cc84020873e7571/Documents-EP03-1234-OPT.png" data-mid="184131409" border="0" alt="Books found in Mahmoud El Abidi's office during his arrest, Tunisian National Archives, S&eacute;rie E, carton 550, dossier 30/15, n&deg;287 " data-caption="Books found in Mahmoud El Abidi's office during his arrest, Tunisian National Archives, Série E, carton 550, dossier 30/15, n°287 " src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f01cd2ad4dcb8218ade55296b0583308a0ee05447ce942e57cc84020873e7571/Documents-EP03-1234-OPT.png" /> <img width="2895" height="200" width_o="2895" height_o="200" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3e5d977fc1fa9bbe44ba62545464468ee489190db0bb53ccc874e100cf2676d0/Heading-3.png" data-mid="184129773" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" data-rotation="2.5" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/3e5d977fc1fa9bbe44ba62545464468ee489190db0bb53ccc874e100cf2676d0/Heading-3.png" /> In the work on “Suspicious People”, we started a reflection within inkyfada&nbsp;on the material dimension of the archives. Our concern was to find ways to make these archives accessible to the public. Haïfa’s input and insights have been very precious in every episode. Haïfa’s part: At inkyfada, when Arwa proposed the subject of Suspicious People, we were immediately extremely enthusiastic. I found it fascinating to be able to tell the stories behind these archives, which are little known to the public. It allowed us to delve into the lives of those under surveillance during the colonial era while at the same time looking at the dynamics of surveillance. Several reasons for surveillance (homosexuality, political opposition, cannabis use, etc.) mentioned in “Suspicious People” are still condemned today. This work of history thus strongly echoes several themes that we address in our journalistic work at inkyfada. While working with Arwa, my concern, as an editor, was that these stories are told in the best possible way, while keeping the historical component. This included both the text and the documents. Very quickly, the collaboration was established. Arwa began by carefully sorting through the archives. She would send a selection to our designers who would style them and create an illustration image while we both worked on editing the article. For each portrait in “Suspicious People”, images of archival documents appear. Instead of just describing their contents, we wanted to show them. The reader can see if the surveillance documents are handwritten, typed, in what language they are written, etc. An attentive reader will recognize the signature of the police officer Clapier, which appears in many stories. At inkyfada, we felt it was important that these archives be brought to the forefront, both for their content and their nature. They are the primary source of this work, from an editorial point of view but also for the visual identity of the project. In parallel to the processing of the documents, we had many discussions about the illustrations of the project. It was relatively easy to define the visual identity. For these historical accounts, we opted for a sepia style, reminiscent of the look of the archives. But we thought long and hard about the representation of the protagonists. Without photos, with very few descriptions, it was difficult to represent the characters without falling into stereotypes. Once again, the archives were useful. Arwa was looking for photos, illustrations or engravings of the time that could inspire us and help us imagine the outfits of the time for example. For us, this project is a way to uncover stories, on an individual scale, that speak volumes about colonization and France's colonial surveillance practices. It seems essential to us to tell this history and the legacies that result from it to as many people as possible. This is why this project has been published in inkyfada media in French and has been translated into Arabic. An English translation is also planned. Thanks to the series “Suspicious People”, 12 people who existed, for most of them, only in an archive, have briefly come to life. <img width="1513" height="1153" width_o="1513" height_o="1153" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/20e3511d5c7e45a772ff836f745d20e1ff4a9fdefa501b4dd3e2aad303fc516e/Ep06-b.png" data-mid="213587433" border="0" data-scale="94" data-no-zoom src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/20e3511d5c7e45a772ff836f745d20e1ff4a9fdefa501b4dd3e2aad303fc516e/Ep06-b.png" /><img width="1684" height="1198" width_o="1684" height_o="1198" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ffc0464674a4d184c222845b0e828f0461c2d1d810ab719d61170e33ebb879e7/Ep12.png" data-mid="213587177" border="0" data-scale="91" data-no-zoom src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ffc0464674a4d184c222845b0e828f0461c2d1d810ab719d61170e33ebb879e7/Ep12.png" /> Suspecte n°1 :Mabrouka bent Salem ben Younès. Emprisonnée pour ambiguïté <img width="867" height="397" width_o="867" height_o="397" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/70082d8a2a726641c13e4f46cf0b60988bfa19d20dd6bc5a339d0d69930b0830/read-more.png" data-mid="184140130" border="0" data-scale="70" data-no-zoom src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/867/i/70082d8a2a726641c13e4f46cf0b60988bfa19d20dd6bc5a339d0d69930b0830/read-more.png" /> Suspecte n°4 :Mokhtar El Ayari. Un traminot communiste sous surveillance <img width="867" height="397" width_o="867" height_o="397" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/70082d8a2a726641c13e4f46cf0b60988bfa19d20dd6bc5a339d0d69930b0830/read-more.png" data-mid="184140130" border="0" data-scale="70" data-no-zoom src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/867/i/70082d8a2a726641c13e4f46cf0b60988bfa19d20dd6bc5a339d0d69930b0830/read-more.png" /> Suspecte n°7:Taïeb ben Mohamed el Karoui. Incarcéré pour “pratiques contre nature” <img width="867" height="397" width_o="867" height_o="397" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/70082d8a2a726641c13e4f46cf0b60988bfa19d20dd6bc5a339d0d69930b0830/read-more.png" data-mid="184140130" border="0" data-scale="70" data-no-zoom src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/867/i/70082d8a2a726641c13e4f46cf0b60988bfa19d20dd6bc5a339d0d69930b0830/read-more.png" /> Suspecte n°2 : Ahmed El Mechergui. muezzin arrêté pour "haine contre les chrétiens" <img width="867" height="397" width_o="867" height_o="397" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/70082d8a2a726641c13e4f46cf0b60988bfa19d20dd6bc5a339d0d69930b0830/read-more.png" data-mid="184140130" border="0" data-scale="70" data-no-zoom src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/867/i/70082d8a2a726641c13e4f46cf0b60988bfa19d20dd6bc5a339d0d69930b0830/read-more.png" /> Suspecte n°5 :Beya bent Hassine El Mathlouthi. Chassée pour "prostitution" <img width="867" height="397" width_o="867" height_o="397" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/70082d8a2a726641c13e4f46cf0b60988bfa19d20dd6bc5a339d0d69930b0830/read-more.png" data-mid="184140130" border="0" data-scale="70" data-no-zoom src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/867/i/70082d8a2a726641c13e4f46cf0b60988bfa19d20dd6bc5a339d0d69930b0830/read-more.png" /> Suspecte n°8:Albert Bessis. Membre fondateur d’un comité judéo-musulman qui dérange <img width="867" height="397" width_o="867" height_o="397" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/70082d8a2a726641c13e4f46cf0b60988bfa19d20dd6bc5a339d0d69930b0830/read-more.png" data-mid="184140130" border="0" data-scale="70" data-no-zoom src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/867/i/70082d8a2a726641c13e4f46cf0b60988bfa19d20dd6bc5a339d0d69930b0830/read-more.png" /> Suspecte n°3 : Mahmoud El Abidi . Arrêté deux fois pour faits "séditieux" <img width="867" height="397" width_o="867" height_o="397" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/70082d8a2a726641c13e4f46cf0b60988bfa19d20dd6bc5a339d0d69930b0830/read-more.png" data-mid="184140130" border="0" data-scale="70" data-no-zoom src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/867/i/70082d8a2a726641c13e4f46cf0b60988bfa19d20dd6bc5a339d0d69930b0830/read-more.png" /> Suspecte n°6 :Laroussi ben Latifa dit "Loulou". Un fumeur de chira sous les verrous <img width="867" height="397" width_o="867" height_o="397" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/70082d8a2a726641c13e4f46cf0b60988bfa19d20dd6bc5a339d0d69930b0830/read-more.png" data-mid="184140130" border="0" data-scale="70" data-no-zoom src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/867/i/70082d8a2a726641c13e4f46cf0b60988bfa19d20dd6bc5a339d0d69930b0830/read-more.png" /> Suspecte n°9:Marie Hervé. Une convertie trop proche des “indigènes” <img width="867" height="397" width_o="867" height_o="397" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/70082d8a2a726641c13e4f46cf0b60988bfa19d20dd6bc5a339d0d69930b0830/read-more.png" data-mid="184140130" border="0" data-scale="71" data-no-zoom src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/867/i/70082d8a2a726641c13e4f46cf0b60988bfa19d20dd6bc5a339d0d69930b0830/read-more.png" /> Arwa Labidi is a Tunisian historian. She received her PhD from the University of Paris Nanterre (France). She is currently assistant professor at the University of Jendouba (Tunisia). She is the author of two series of historical investigation for the media inkyfada: Gens suspects (Suspicious People) and Le Dessous des dates (Beyond The Dates). Her research focuses on archives, national narratives, minorized histories and education. Arwa also runs regular urban tours of Tunis, focusing on the city's social, cultural and architectural history. Haïfa Mzalouat is a journalist and editorial manager for the French version of inkyfada, a Tunis-based investigative medium that produces long-form articles. She studied history, Arabic and political science. She has carried out numerous investigations, notably for the international Pandora Papers investigation, in partnership with ICIJ. Her favorite subjects are migration and historical articles. She edited the historical series - Beyond the dates and Suspicious People - produced by historian Arwa Labidi and published on inkyfada. ︎︎︎&nbsp;︎&nbsp;︎ Inkyfada is an independent, nonprofit media group founded in 2014 by a team of journalists, developers, and graphic designers with the goal of supporting the public interest through innovative journalistic content. With a particular focus on investigation, contextualization, and data visualization, Inkyfada produces content that helps a diverse readership understand and engage in the politics that impact their lives. Constructed with ongoing collaboration between journalists, developers, and graphic designers, Inkyfada’s publications offer readers accessible and enriching content. ︎︎︎&nbsp;︎ ︎ ︎ <img width="1920" height="12000" width_o="1920" height_o="12000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3084b5f27447b91d8a334b67c53fac3f0f461b1b0a821d0a2e2a70a2d7991e7e/Background-min-1.png" data-mid="184134925" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/3084b5f27447b91d8a334b67c53fac3f0f461b1b0a821d0a2e2a70a2d7991e7e/Background-min-1.png" /> ︎︎︎ ︎︎︎ https://archive-stories.com/Halwa-Mahyawa-and-Multiple-Registers-of-Life-in-the-Gulf Sun, 04 Jun 2023 23:10:50 +0000 archive stories https://archive-stories.com/Halwa-Mahyawa-and-Multiple-Registers-of-Life-in-the-Gulf <img width="4764" height="1951" width_o="4764" height_o="1951" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/358e836d303feacf99fd5f0cec267e8b81bc0d37efa3e25081b964d0d998cace/Kanwal-1mm.png" data-mid="185589722" border="0" data-no-zoom src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/358e836d303feacf99fd5f0cec267e8b81bc0d37efa3e25081b964d0d998cace/Kanwal-1mm.png" /> Kanwal Hameed Halwa, Mahyawa and Multiple Registers of Life in the Gulf <img width="650" height="650" width_o="650" height_o="650" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/42abcd120e22f23f1d78e806043eaf0acb47f5675d65555f35bc4c5ba1ba591b/A1.png" data-mid="185534038" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/650/i/42abcd120e22f23f1d78e806043eaf0acb47f5675d65555f35bc4c5ba1ba591b/A1.png" /> <img width="650" height="650" width_o="650" height_o="650" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/11ea284a01f28ddd93e72f2b8e87231009ca45f8f58a5186c88de84175f1c0ad/A2.png" data-mid="185534039" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/650/i/11ea284a01f28ddd93e72f2b8e87231009ca45f8f58a5186c88de84175f1c0ad/A2.png" /> <img width="650" height="650" width_o="650" height_o="650" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/539f410e7f139c8963c1037fcc8c8dde1ece3aa3ed15e45fc929883aa96d4d8e/A3.png" data-mid="185534040" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/650/i/539f410e7f139c8963c1037fcc8c8dde1ece3aa3ed15e45fc929883aa96d4d8e/A3.png" /> <img width="650" height="650" width_o="650" height_o="650" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/580a6355c92f002cdbb29ac8db3cb53aed2e051edfa5d5a8b541fb87bae991d1/A4.png" data-mid="185534041" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/650/i/580a6355c92f002cdbb29ac8db3cb53aed2e051edfa5d5a8b541fb87bae991d1/A4.png" /> <img width="650" height="650" width_o="650" height_o="650" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/321903a451755f4b25c4c59349981ae5a2961c9b9fcdc7d539b19464dde77aea/A5.png" data-mid="185534042" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/650/i/321903a451755f4b25c4c59349981ae5a2961c9b9fcdc7d539b19464dde77aea/A5.png" /> Step 1 <img width="650" height="650" width_o="650" height_o="650" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3630e295e16c4cd9685af2087d66f57bbf2d60a9a6ca5f3ea2a17e0484f65243/B.png" data-mid="185534045" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/650/i/3630e295e16c4cd9685af2087d66f57bbf2d60a9a6ca5f3ea2a17e0484f65243/B.png" /> Step 2 <img width="650" height="650" width_o="650" height_o="650" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/593bbd8638ee5e2ef255e3804bf353c3db4099b7f658980078521bec09f522e8/C1.png" data-mid="185534075" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/650/i/593bbd8638ee5e2ef255e3804bf353c3db4099b7f658980078521bec09f522e8/C1.png" /> <img width="650" height="650" width_o="650" height_o="650" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/184273873656cd6d89f912692428ec5730556a8c2ebc3610fff47ff8049bdcc0/C2.png" data-mid="185534076" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/650/i/184273873656cd6d89f912692428ec5730556a8c2ebc3610fff47ff8049bdcc0/C2.png" /> <img width="650" height="650" width_o="650" height_o="650" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/86093cf1684d0044d4ffb1bdc449e4f6783f8e74739923cb38a071dd9a29b5dc/C3.png" data-mid="185534077" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/650/i/86093cf1684d0044d4ffb1bdc449e4f6783f8e74739923cb38a071dd9a29b5dc/C3.png" /> <img width="650" height="650" width_o="650" height_o="650" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f953fa68c34027e1bbce6da618a9aa22fe5842eee20e8d83f2579e6b685491cd/C4.png" data-mid="185534078" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/650/i/f953fa68c34027e1bbce6da618a9aa22fe5842eee20e8d83f2579e6b685491cd/C4.png" /> Step 3 <img width="650" height="650" width_o="650" height_o="650" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e5fb3a702b3dacbd5bb2a174537e38e50397bd92dbdfccfe2730d6911207a41b/D1.png" data-mid="185545042" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/650/i/e5fb3a702b3dacbd5bb2a174537e38e50397bd92dbdfccfe2730d6911207a41b/D1.png" /> <img width="650" height="650" width_o="650" height_o="650" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7f360654c3ad29791844ac6d844e9781cb0e296aafb9f43a4d4751fd9cd02f18/D2.png" data-mid="185545044" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/650/i/7f360654c3ad29791844ac6d844e9781cb0e296aafb9f43a4d4751fd9cd02f18/D2.png" /> <img width="650" height="650" width_o="650" height_o="650" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6a6fc41250788236a5a26b8475b0c74dfa3b47e9490dde2aa71f61bb741e0331/D3.png" data-mid="185545046" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/650/i/6a6fc41250788236a5a26b8475b0c74dfa3b47e9490dde2aa71f61bb741e0331/D3.png" /> <img width="650" height="650" width_o="650" height_o="650" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d7cde5394b80ef1028561a948ae34495c9c48c0b17f61dae69d873a77d46ff2f/D4.png" data-mid="185545048" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/650/i/d7cde5394b80ef1028561a948ae34495c9c48c0b17f61dae69d873a77d46ff2f/D4.png" /> <img width="650" height="650" width_o="650" height_o="650" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ac2a4ff6f72eca487ab640ce0c21e3ceef63679fecdb7c50d928009a27ac6a74/D5.png" data-mid="185545050" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/650/i/ac2a4ff6f72eca487ab640ce0c21e3ceef63679fecdb7c50d928009a27ac6a74/D5.png" /> <img width="650" height="650" width_o="650" height_o="650" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/19dcdd4a1e2195d55598be135e4af1c8530edf621c2d1bec1bd520807f572244/D6.png" data-mid="185545052" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/650/i/19dcdd4a1e2195d55598be135e4af1c8530edf621c2d1bec1bd520807f572244/D6.png" /> Step 4 <img width="1300" height="650" width_o="1300" height_o="650" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7b22aaf75ab65c9bcbe4eb5e3643860b28411439da289f1934e5fa3afce2c534/E1.png" data-mid="185545150" border="0" data-scale="85" data-no-zoom src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7b22aaf75ab65c9bcbe4eb5e3643860b28411439da289f1934e5fa3afce2c534/E1.png" /> This work emerged from a conversation with a Somali friend who commented on the box of halwa I had brought from Bahrain, noting that it looked very similar to Somali xalwo from Mogadishu. Broadly speaking, there are two well-known and popular halwa&nbsp;variants in the Gulf – halwa Omaniyya (Omani halwa) and halwa Bahrainiyya&nbsp;(Bahraini halwa). I was curious about a connection to East Africa that my friend’s comment intimated. Here, through two food items - mahyawa (a condiment of dried fish and spices preserved in oil) and halwa Bahrainiyya&nbsp;(a traditional sweet flavoured with saffron and rose water and decorated with nuts) - I discuss the sea as an archive. [i] Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense, Princeton (Princeton University Press: 2009). I think about networks connecting the islands of Bahrain with the southern coast of modern-day Iran and the eastern coast of Africa. I propose an archival practice that reads the archive with life, outside of the looming building, the securitised access, the search through catalogue numbers and missing pages, the solemn (and often uncomfortable or angering) process of sifting through the registers of imperial bureaucracy. From Laura Ann Stoler’s suggestion[i] – to see the messy, scribbled, drafted and re-drafted letters and annotated conversations in the margins of Official Archives – I argue that official archives too are a form of politically situated vernacular. Drawing on a rich black feminist radical tradition, I propose that outside of these archives there are multitudes- which can intuit and invite knowledge production and ways of knowing that have not been contained by the repositories of the Archive proper. They compel us towards what Saidiya Hartman describes as, ‘… scraps of the archive … unknown persons, nameless figures, ensembles, collectives, multitudes, the chorus. That’s where my imagination of practice resides. That’s where my heart resides.’. I am conscious that for Saidiya, this practice is a way of redress for the, ‘monumental crime that was the transatlantic slave trade’. Here I extend her thinking to do something different, also with both material and immaterial resources, in the face of other forms of ignorance and erasure. The archival practice that went into writing this article was marked by these overlapping processes -&nbsp; Intimation: the introduction to an idea, concept or question. In this case, the discussion about Somali xalwo and Bahraini halwa, grounded in everyday life, which aroused my own political and academic curiosity about connections between Bahrain/ the Gulf, and other locations. Halwa/Xalwo, in Bahrain, Oman and Somalia is a mixture of white and brown sugars caramelised in a large metal pot, forming the base. Fat – ghee or vegetable oil - water, starch, and fragrant spices, nuts, seeds and colouring are added to it throughout the cooking process, which takes approximately three hours. Spices, seeds, nuts and colourings can include nutmeg, cardamom, saffron or food colouring and cashews, pistachios or sesame seeds. The ingredients vary depending on the type of halwa, and where it is being made. Before serving, the halwa is decorated with nuts or seeds. The final product is rich, has a silky jelly-like and sticky texture, and is often enjoyed in spoonful servings at celebrations with gahwa ‘Arabiyya, yellow Arabic coffee. A Bahrain variation involves eating it with khobz tannur, a light flatbread, instead of a spoon – and the Internet has shown me xalwo being eaten between a sandwich of biscuits … <img width="600" height="338" width_o="600" height_o="338" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b9d6b91171bf0988b52b90cca34b2f45df7c7a76050c77331d66d3521dc5ff1d/1.gif" data-mid="185529664" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/600/i/b9d6b91171bf0988b52b90cca34b2f45df7c7a76050c77331d66d3521dc5ff1d/1.gif" /> <img width="600" height="338" width_o="600" height_o="338" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3258209595a8a37bf70c5b8dfb439a82654e2614db56af90bcb41fd8d3e4191e/2.gif" data-mid="185529666" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/600/i/3258209595a8a37bf70c5b8dfb439a82654e2614db56af90bcb41fd8d3e4191e/2.gif" /> <img width="600" height="338" width_o="600" height_o="338" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/aa86d7e465d99038b663bc58eed4d3c581c4d5906b1150407fb59883b9205b27/3.gif" data-mid="185529689" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/600/i/aa86d7e465d99038b663bc58eed4d3c581c4d5906b1150407fb59883b9205b27/3.gif" /> <img width="600" height="338" width_o="600" height_o="338" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9a88c58fa05d9680f5605c4e8b5f4ae896b60397b2e08fadf271fb0ed472c4c7/4.gif" data-mid="185529692" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/600/i/9a88c58fa05d9680f5605c4e8b5f4ae896b60397b2e08fadf271fb0ed472c4c7/4.gif" /> Video showing the serving of halwa Bahrainiyya at a popular sweet shop in the Manama souq. [ii] Awet Teklehimanot, The Red Sea/East Africa and the Gulf. An Archaeological and Historical Investigation of the African Diaspora in Bahrain during the Islamic Period (7th - 20th c. AD). Unpublished PhD Thesis, Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies (IAIS) University of Exeter. I read a newspaper interview with a member of one branch of Bahrain’s most famous halwa making family, who claimed that one and a half centuries ago, his grandfather (Abdullah Ibrahim Showaiter) ended up in Zanzibar as a diver, and learned how to make halwa from people there, before returning to Bahrain and beginning his own halwa venture. I received a message from the same friend: ‘I also found out that they have similar xalwa in Oman – which makes sense too – they have [a] huge Zanzibar and Somali community there. Maybe there is a link with Omani and Bahraini xalwa!?!’. Archaeological findings in Bahrain, Iraq, and the UAE indicate that seaborne connections with East Africa date at least to the fifteenth century, and recent findings in the UAE suggest connections since the early Islamic era. Findings along the southern Red Sea also trace a route linking Eritirea and Ethiopia to India and Sri Lanka ‘transiting through ports in the Gulf’[ii]&nbsp;during the pre-Islamic period. I looked to a map of the Indian Ocean to think about contact between peoples. <img width="1620" height="2161" width_o="1620" height_o="2161" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a402c3705543536c8179b6974ed5d69027203aa63d09ca004aa9d091e339b14d/Map1.png" data-mid="185541623" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" alt="Map of the Indian Ocean" data-caption="Map of the Indian Ocean" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/a402c3705543536c8179b6974ed5d69027203aa63d09ca004aa9d091e339b14d/Map1.png" /> Mapping Currents: in this phase, I developed upon the initial ideas through further research and triangulation through multiple academic and popular/ non-academic secondary sources. I watched videos about halwa/xalwo, read recipes, looked up maps, read about Indian Ocean worlds, the Omani empire, and the slave trade in the Gulf. I looked to the local press newspaper for articles about halwa Bahrainiyya, and came across an interview with a member of a different branch of the sweet maker family - who claims that his grandfather (Hussein Muhammad Shwaiter) spent three months in Najaf, Iraq, learning to make what is now Bahrain’s famous halwa, which he began selling from his home in 1850. I researched links between Najaf and Oman – which I found were linked by steamship. Food, through its political, socio-economic, raced, classed, gendered and affective connection with land, is undoubtedly an archive. Vivien Sansour’s Palestine Heirloom Seed Library is a vibrant and critical political project which encapsulates one element of food as archive. Food is also, however, a vector for politics of belonging and difference, connection and longing for diasporic communities, and history and memory – as told in the beautiful and complex reading of Iranian cookbooks by Laleh Khalili. Vivien Sansour’s project compels us towards thinking about food as archive – work that is being carried out in different forms in Bahrain, for example by anthropologist Dalal Al Sheroogi. I however, was compelled by the article by Laleh Khalili to think instead with the sea as an archive, and to ask what connections are carried through the food I was exploring. I wanted to think about questions of history, human circulation and exchange (in their varied and unequal intimations) that arose from the food in question. I was careful while working on this piece to avoid contributing to a tendency in popular and academic works on the Middle East towards fetishizing the ordinary. I wanted to use the food item as an entry point to ask what it might tell us about politics, history, culture, memory and identity, human relations with each other and with the natural environment (the sea). <img width="610" height="669" width_o="610" height_o="669" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b9ea9a743d2c8dbd1a6693055ace207b6432e6058779e5b299c419913c1bd6a7/Social-media-sensation--Bu-Badee3-makes-a-mahyawa-sandwich-using-local-bread-that-he-describes-as-khobz-holi--referring-to-the-Huwala-see-below-who-ar.png" data-mid="185536277" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/610/i/b9ea9a743d2c8dbd1a6693055ace207b6432e6058779e5b299c419913c1bd6a7/Social-media-sensation--Bu-Badee3-makes-a-mahyawa-sandwich-using-local-bread-that-he-describes-as-khobz-holi--referring-to-the-Huwala-see-below-who-ar.png" /> Social media sensation, Muhamed Badeea Kamal @m_bu_badee3” makes a mahyawa sandwich using local bread that he describes as “khobz holi”, referring to the Huwala (see below) who are widely thought to have introduced this bread-making tradition and mahyawa to Bahrain. Watch Here Choosing a route: Once I decided I wanted to engage with sea-based connections, and the sea as a repository of knowledge and ways of knowing each other, this choice both expanded and shaped my research. I started to think about another unique local dish, mahyawa, its preparation process and history, in order to build some sense of the connections it suggested. I ate mahyawa with a childhood friend, whose aunt offered it to me with a type of flatbread called falazin, which we ate rolled up. Her aunt described the long process preparing mahyawa – the cleaning and drying of small fish known asmattoot – and preserving them in oil with spices over a period of several months. [iii] Fahad Bishara, (2016). “Ships Passing in the Night? Reflections on the Middle East in the Indian Ocean.” International Journal of Middle East Studies. 48. 758-762. The Gulf has long been portrayed as an isolated backwater of modernity world, propelled from its primitive state into the dynamic global through the European and American discovery and subsequent exploitation of oil. I knew I was interested in understanding Bahrain and the Gulf as a place that connected with and was part of multiple worlds. And so, I identified that for this piece I would think about the connections between Bahrain the northern coast of the Gulf, and the eastern coast of Africa. I turned to the work of Fahad Bishara, who writes and shows in his work (along with others): ‘the potential that the Indian arena offered for breaking out of the stale narratives and stagnant and stagnant historiographies that characterized the study of the Gulf and South Arabia’.[iii] Once I decided to explore the sea as an archive, mapping connections that produced and reflected multiple registers of life in the Gulf, I expanded my repertoire to bring in another food item – mahyawa. This condiment is widely thought to have arrived to Bahrain with Arab migrants originally from the peninsula, who settled along the Southern coast of modern-day Iran before migrating again to the known locally as Huwala. I was told by a friend that the word mahyawa comes from the Southern Iranian dialect word which is combination of ‘ma’ (fish) and ‘oh’ (water), and another friend’s mother offered the pronunciation - ‘ma-wah’ - as the root of the word mahyawa in local Arabic. <img width="3178" height="3060" width_o="3178" height_o="3060" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b6deaa3655c75f191416ca4c6781bbdc8d945a15c18eac23538e635a71929842/Map-2.png" data-mid="185516960" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" alt="Map of the Gulf" data-caption="Map of the Gulf" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b6deaa3655c75f191416ca4c6781bbdc8d945a15c18eac23538e635a71929842/Map-2.png" /> [iv] 'Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf. Vol. II. Geographical and Statistical. J G Lorimer. 1908' [‎1160] (1253/2084), British Library: India Office Records and Private Papers, IOR/L/PS/20/C91/4, in Qatar Digital Library &lt;https://www.qdl.qa/archive/81055/vdc_100023515717.0x000037&gt; [accessed 24 November 2022] [v] 'Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf. Vol. II. Geographical and Statistical. J G Lorimer. 1908' [‎238] (265/2084), British Library: India Office Records and Private Papers, IOR/L/PS/20/C91/4, in Qatar Digital Library &lt;https://www.qdl.qa/archive/81055/vdc_100023515712.0x000042&gt; [accessed 24 November 2022] I went back to a map of the Gulf. As my markings show, mahyawa, connects the islands of Bahrain (as well as Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE) across the sea, to Southern Iran. According to my friend’s mother, it connects specifically with Fars, where many Bahraini families trace familial lineage. Her comment points to the regional diversity of Iranian food, which is borne out by the country’s geographic and topographic disparity – and my own discussions with friends from Northern Iran that had never heard of mahyawa. The Huwala are recorded in Lorimer’s Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf as making up just over 10 per cent of the residents of Manama in 1908[iv], and as the ‘most numerous community of Sunnis’[v]living in both principal cities of Bahrain at the time, Manama and Muharraq. &nbsp; Immersion: I then went on to explore both elements. This included thinking about how both the foods – as products of historical processes of circulation, exchange, dominance – are part of everyday life today. This is usually the phase of ‘collecting’ archival resources, and engaging in further secondary reading. To this I added elements of the quotidian: eating, visiting the souq (market) where halwaand mahyawa are sold. I made two visits to a popular halwa shop in the Manama souq and observed the selling of halwa to queues of customers, including locals as well as visitors from Oman and Hasa, Saudi Arabia. I thought about the re-circulation of the foods – as products – and about the historic trade circulations that would have provided the ingredients which went into the making of halwa and mahyawa, and the ways in which these may have changed based on economic and political conditions. <img width="3766" height="2824" width_o="3766" height_o="2824" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/cfd79b71f080165da1f03e1cd3fa03bbe74a760882284d5221c7871724aa8b22/A-popular-halwa-shop-in-the-Manama-souq--owned-by-a-branch-of-Bahrains-iconic-sweet-making-family--Showaiter.jpg" data-mid="184346572" border="0" alt="A popular halwa shop in the Manama souq, owned by a branch of Bahrain&rsquo;s iconic sweet-making family, Showaiter" data-caption="A popular halwa shop in the Manama souq, owned by a branch of Bahrain’s iconic sweet-making family, Showaiter" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/cfd79b71f080165da1f03e1cd3fa03bbe74a760882284d5221c7871724aa8b22/A-popular-halwa-shop-in-the-Manama-souq--owned-by-a-branch-of-Bahrains-iconic-sweet-making-family--Showaiter.jpg" /> <img width="3929" height="2946" width_o="3929" height_o="2946" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/cdf2278285df18c4bca723c917a8fbb5fb211fb35c71e07bc09b8e458cdc7466/A-well-known-caf-in-the-Manama-souq--Hajis--sells-mahyawa-by-the-bottle-as-well-as-freshly-baked-khubz-tannur--a-flatbread-with-which-it-can-be-eaten..jpg" data-mid="184346573" border="0" alt=" A well-known caf&eacute; in the Manama souq, Haji&rsquo;s, sells mahyawa by the bottle as well as freshly baked khubz tannur, a flatbread with which it can be eaten" data-caption=" A well-known café in the Manama souq, Haji’s, sells mahyawa by the bottle as well as freshly baked khubz tannur, a flatbread with which it can be eaten" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/cdf2278285df18c4bca723c917a8fbb5fb211fb35c71e07bc09b8e458cdc7466/A-well-known-caf-in-the-Manama-souq--Hajis--sells-mahyawa-by-the-bottle-as-well-as-freshly-baked-khubz-tannur--a-flatbread-with-which-it-can-be-eaten..jpg" /> [vi] Donna Honarpisheh. "The Sea as Archive: Impressions of Qui Se Souvient De La Mer." symploke, vol. 27 no. 1, 2019, p. 91-109. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/734653. I read a beautiful meditation by Donna Honarpisheh on The Sea As Archive… in the Algerian novel Qui Se Souvient De La Mer (Mohammad Dib). I was especially struck by the thought that: With the presence of these absent traces, the sea as archive points to world events that slip away from the apparatuses of recordkeeping either because their essence defies conservational practices or because the state prohibits their keeping.[vi] [vii] Omar H Al Shehabi, Contested Modernity, Sectarianism, Nationalism and Colonialism in Bahrain. (Oxford, OneWorld Publications: 2017). [ix] Rosie Bsheer, Archive Wars: The Politics of History in Saudi Arabia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, September 2020). It encouraged me to ask what the sea as an archive could tell us about the way in which people know themselves and each other – and how do these archives sit within, or in contestation with, official records and representations? The legalisation of who is known as local and foreign in Bahrain (as elsewhere) has been a contested[vii] process, structured largely by a British colonial administration acting with local ruling powers. I am interested in the the world that recedes from both official and external purview – even while it is present in the lived experiences of people. In this world Oman, Zanzibar, Najaf, and Southern Iran are part of Bahrain’s local history, linked across the seas, and seen here through their connections through mahyawa and halwa. Tidying complex and entangled pasts into a palatable and powerful National History[ix], inevitably involves a selective approach to ‘world events’ – or in this case, ongoing processes of circulation and migration of communities, traders, labourers and enslaved divers that traverse the edges of nation and empire. I think the sea as an archive, however, suggests that the essence of these worlds might not defy conservational practices, rather they are conserved through their continued practice and production in ordinary life. Surface, review, broaden the horizon of thought: this phase involved sorting through ideas and findings, writing, reviewing, and raising new questions - always thinking about power. Keeping the dynamics of power in sight helps to clarify the historian’s romantic notions about ways in which we knew each other in the past. The story of the sea as an archive of circulations of relationality and exchange in the Gulf is also the story of imperialism and the sinews of violent control over land and resources, the wretched history of slavery and colonialism, and the hardship, gruelling experience and exploitation of diving. It raises questions about the dynamics - popular and authoritarian - that produce today’s iterations of the ‘Arabian’ and ‘Persian’ Gulfs (without underplaying the political contestations this infers, I do sometimes wonder, whether the sea laughs at us as we chafe and tussle over its name). This story invites further questions; for example, about changing relations with the sea in Bahrain through land reclamation and privatisation, and how the archive of the sea and the way it pushes past methodological nationalist has been re-shaped and framed within a glossy nationalnarrative. It asks us to push past methodological nationalism, but also to examine the socio-economic mesh of race, nationality, class, and gender shaping ideas and structures of belonging in the modern Gulf. It reminds us that these ideas have been forged, challenged and shaped intellectually, affectively and materially through the connections sought and torn by peoples across multiples scales of time. In this piece I discuss archival practices to suggest that thinking about the archive asks us to think about epistemology: about knowledge and its production, and not just about sources. How do we move, work, and think differently when we are outside of the politically classified (and reified) Official Archives? What are the material and theoretical implications, expectations, and limits of working and thinking in this way? What changes, when we think about land in connection with water, what forms of mapping do we engage with, and what layers of understanding can this produce? Thinking about the sea as an archive is also thinking about the limits of knowing; sitting with the sense that we cannot fully know or capture something so vast, and the tug which pulled us is rendered incomplete as it is remade repetitively through the water in motion. [x] Rosie Bsheer, Archive Wars: The Politics of History in Saudi Arabia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, September 2020). All this is to suggest that the archive lives. Like the histories it carries, it too has been claimed, catalogued, contained, channelled across oceans. Against and through these processes, in which it has been scattered like light mirrored on the surface of water - and like water - it hides, it connects, heaves, and crashes onto distant shores. The processes of dissemination or dispersal, as the process of knowledge production, are always inflected with dynamics of power. The living archive is, and contains the multitudes. As Donna Harpisheh reminds us, there ‘… is a temporal order of another kind, namely the sea, a liquid materiality whose continuous undulation both erases and re-generates. The turn to the sea in Blue Humanities scholarship, as well as foundational work in Black Atlantic scholarship (most notably, Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic, among other works), fore-grounds the sea as a fundamental space in the study of modernity, history, and temporality.’ Kanwal Hameed&nbsp;is an inter-disciplinary historian with a background in Middle East Studies, and currently a Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at the Orient Institut Beirut. She received her PhD from the Institute of Arab and Islamic Affairs (IAIS) University of Exeter, UK.She has published “One Struggle, Many Fronts: The National Union of Kuwaiti Students and Palestine”, Eds. Sorcha Thompson &amp; Pelle Olsen, International Solidarity with the Palestinian Revolution (1965-1982), London (IB Tauris: 2022), “Toward a liberation pedagogy” co-authored with Katie Natanel and Amal Khalaf, Kohl Anticolonial Feminisms January 2023, and “The Quiet Emergency: Experiences and Understandings of Climate Change in Kuwait” co-authored with Deen Shariff Sharp, Abrar Alshammari, Kuwait Programme Paper Series, LSE Middle East Centre (13) 2021.︎ ︎ ︎ ︎︎︎ ︎︎︎ https://archive-stories.com/Weaving-with-fragments-and-fractures Sun, 04 Jun 2023 23:18:18 +0000 archive stories https://archive-stories.com/Weaving-with-fragments-and-fractures <img width="4673" height="2239" width_o="4673" height_o="2239" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/57b0c110c405d8120e8faa4928c358115ffc177b6b7cdc930a26730fc23a8b7e/Weaving-with-fragments-and-fractures.png" data-mid="180979830" border="0" data-no-zoom src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/57b0c110c405d8120e8faa4928c358115ffc177b6b7cdc930a26730fc23a8b7e/Weaving-with-fragments-and-fractures.png" /> Fozia Ismail Weaving with fragments and fractures I want to reflect on an archival practice that started off in Somali food and a questioning the invisibility of African cuisine in publishing to researching muqalmad (dried camel meat) and cassatte tapes with Somali community in Bristol. Mostly it’s a question that is rooted in how Somali people survive now and then. &nbsp; Dhaqan meaning 'the common thread that connects Somali peoples to their ancestral homelands' (A. A. Ilmi) What I have learnt through the various food and art enquiries that I have been engaged in, is that much of that survival is based on a concept of culture or dhaqan philosophies that are embodied but always in relation to others (past/living ancestors and community).&nbsp; Accessing this knowledge can often be a tense process, excavating parts of yourself not yet known by using everyday material culture. If done in the spirit of friendship and love as practiced by the elders we worked with and are inspired by it can also, be one full of healing, joy and laughter. &nbsp; <img width="1998" height="1723" width_o="1998" height_o="1723" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/af91dced54d91a22f8d03998efac045d5220639de51dd34ce2e457be5cd40714/Weaveing-50.png" data-mid="186689306" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/af91dced54d91a22f8d03998efac045d5220639de51dd34ce2e457be5cd40714/Weaveing-50.png" /> In my family (and many Somali families across the diaspora) cassette tapes would be sent instead of letters and when these tapes would arrive, they would often arrive with muqalmad- dried camel meat, an important part of Somali nomadic culture. Family and friends would listen to the tapes and share in the camel meat. This was a joyful but also sometimes painful experience that reinforced a kind of living in between landscapes. For younger members of the family there was also an anxiety about what to record back to these unfamiliar voices echoing from this little machine. The aunts and uncles you have never met as well as the inability to communicate back in a mother tongue that you were not necessarily fluent in added to the strange experience of recording your voice back on these cassette tape letters. <img width="2997" height="2305" width_o="2997" height_o="2305" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ed0b0f3284cd83621ea6c24b96aa0227a0e225eefdb0b39737c5de1b957df841/Event-without-people.png" data-mid="190897480" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ed0b0f3284cd83621ea6c24b96aa0227a0e225eefdb0b39737c5de1b957df841/Event-without-people.png" /> The initial work of Camel Meat &amp; Tapes explored the use of cassette tapes. These tapes became a valuable vessel for the diaspora to communicate with families they were forced to leave behind, sharing stories ranging from day-to-day events, to the intimacies of private life. In 2019-2020 as part of my Bristol City Fellowship for the Arnolfini gallery I worked alongside two artists (Ayan Cilmi and Asmaa Jama) for a period of 6 months with Somali elders to explore this use of cassette culture in our community. All these sessions were recorded on cassette tapes and digital recorders which were then edited to make a 360-degree soundscape. We wanted to create a soundscape that would envelop and surround us in the musicality of Somali women, whilst exploring the tensions of communication between multiple people and landscapes. We also worked in and with the British Empire &amp; Commonwealth Archives which are based in Bristol. <img width="2560" height="1440" width_o="2560" height_o="1440" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c335b9fc9b3dc06f706ccc4228cee7830d2be2f9aba1721225fecc3ac4094257/Still_all_1.20.1.jpg" data-mid="186150315" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c335b9fc9b3dc06f706ccc4228cee7830d2be2f9aba1721225fecc3ac4094257/Still_all_1.20.1.jpg" /> <img width="2560" height="1440" width_o="2560" height_o="1440" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c73fbd09d5346db3dd3f530c161dd1a1cd19bf30a445a29cc0919278be38981c/Still_all_1.22.1.jpg" data-mid="186150317" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c73fbd09d5346db3dd3f530c161dd1a1cd19bf30a445a29cc0919278be38981c/Still_all_1.22.1.jpg" /> The elders had a session with Somali objects that were contained in the archive. The response from our elders to this session was fairly dismissive of the objects that were collected and a questioning of why there was so much effort and value placed on objects that were seen as functional everyday items. A pair of shoes for example that were assumed to be handmade by the collection, was recognised by the elders as mass-produced item by a well-known factory in the south of Somalia. Another object which was mislabelled as a food container was identified by the elders to be a drum. The ritualistic way in which everyday objects were given a scared quality through being held in the collection was also interrogated. The wrapping up of objects in bubble wrap, fine paper, lovely boxes and the use of gloves repurposed these everyday items into something akin to the parable of the emperor’s new clothes. These objects were not inherently valuable except in relation to their being acquired by the British Empire and Commonwealth Collection. &nbsp; This illustrated the gulf in value judgments between the archive collection and the communities that these objects were taken from. In contrast an object that was considered sacred, a very beautiful Thumbnail Quran, should not have been in the collection according to the elders, partly because it was being stored incorrectly (this was rectified) and because it is an item that could be use of to someone spiritually. There was even a joke made by the elders encouraging us to pocket it, and take back what did not belong there. This session highlighted to me that this was not where Somali culture was contained. Somali culture is living and this was so beautifully demonstrated by the elders who ended the session by spontaneously singing the Somali independence song when Somali people in the north won independence from British rule. We loved the process of capturing these sonic acts of resistance in response to the archive.&nbsp; We were deeply aware of the value of the sharing of knowledge that was rooted in Somali consciousness that was taking place in ways that would have a meaningful impact on the way we worked as a collective going forward. This work led to us forming a Somali feminist art collective called dhaqan collective, which Ayan and I continue to develop. Asmaa Jama has now left the collective but her poetry and insights were a wonderful addition to the first iteration of these inquiries. Camel Meat &amp; Tapes Part 2 worked with young Somali people to create a soundscape in response to the themes that emerged from the first project. A sort of call and response. <img width="511" height="875" width_o="511" height_o="875" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c7897aa155e8265a5e50e3afad8c6b4d69ed3b4e3acc3571cad187f700c5d843/Casette-Player-new.png" data-mid="190897047" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/511/i/c7897aa155e8265a5e50e3afad8c6b4d69ed3b4e3acc3571cad187f700c5d843/Casette-Player-new.png" /> <img width="366" height="409" width_o="366" height_o="409" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8b791681ec46d244dc72f4b334a67dc7baa2f896131e3796cb53f71f00bb006f/Tape-2.png" data-mid="190897283" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/366/i/8b791681ec46d244dc72f4b334a67dc7baa2f896131e3796cb53f71f00bb006f/Tape-2.png" /> <img width="2560" height="1440" width_o="2560" height_o="1440" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1ec3c5d882f37ca241f8f59b6831e42f2668541c54ba78d54429c48352c1659f/Still_all_1.23.1.jpg" data-mid="186150319" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/1ec3c5d882f37ca241f8f59b6831e42f2668541c54ba78d54429c48352c1659f/Still_all_1.23.1.jpg" /> Making the film&nbsp; We wanted the soundscape that the young people made to connect to the soundscape that&nbsp; the elders made. The young people explored themes such as disconnection and rupture from Somali culture but also the quiet resilience of their parents and grandparents. Underpinning this was a longing to learn more about Somali culture. There were also humorous counterpoints to some of the heavy topics that were explored, which included the deaths of loved ones. So, between thoughts of identity and belonging you have the reality of everyday mundane acts of life, recorded in real time by cassette. We wanted to impose the voices of the young people on the British Empire &amp; Commonwealth&nbsp; Archive, to centre back those lives that were taken and changed through the actions of empire building by Britain. The film centres a shadowed figure walking through the corridors of the&nbsp; archive, interspersed with shots of objects (a wooden carving of elderly face, stuffed tiger, shoes etc) including the objects that the elders handled as part of initial project for Camel Meat &amp;Tapes in 2019.&nbsp; <img width="2560" height="1440" width_o="2560" height_o="1440" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3be7486865c66d9d3fca3a377bdebcc5b5ed15c18caa2d3b66ef53c1202f6922/Still_all_1.28.1.jpg" data-mid="186150321" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/3be7486865c66d9d3fca3a377bdebcc5b5ed15c18caa2d3b66ef53c1202f6922/Still_all_1.28.1.jpg" /> It ends with the figure coming to a table and opening an green archival box, which they repeat over and over with the viewer not seeing what the figure sees as it’s filmed from behind. They then stop and their body and hands become more lit and they wash their hands. This then cuts to the face of the figure and as sparkly lights illuminate the face and they leave the building to light. There is then a peaceful moment with plants and bees which are contrasted with the deadness and the stillness of the animals and objects in the archive. The film ends with a sea gull flying over the building and then stills of the young people involved in making the soundscape, with a dialogue from the elders from our first soundscape which describes community and importance of holding space and each other, to hold your friends with love. Then it ends with the independence song that the elders sang at the archive.&nbsp; The sound track to the film is made up of 3 vintage Somali tracks from the 1920’s-1950s’, some recorded on vinyl and others on vintage reel to reel tape, sourced By Ibrahim Hirsi and Idel Rasheed from the wonderful archive group Waaberi iphone.&nbsp; &nbsp; <img width="2560" height="1440" width_o="2560" height_o="1440" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/fe57f2407e82ddc6c9c6e875e064373446622669adc3902e98cc1da0a7f24734/Still_all_1.36.1-1.jpg" data-mid="186150322" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/fe57f2407e82ddc6c9c6e875e064373446622669adc3902e98cc1da0a7f24734/Still_all_1.36.1-1.jpg" /> The visuals were filmed in 16mm film rather than digital to keep with the theme of the materiality of recording on tape, which gives the film as well as the sound a grainy and textured quality. The main body of the film was captured with the Aaton&nbsp; LTR 54, with 500T colour negative Kodak film stock. The portraits were captured with a K-3 16mm camera utilising expired 500T colour negative Kodak film stock. These were captured by a wonderful young filmmaker called Omar Sultan. The content of the cassettes that the young people recorded on were edited and turned into a soundscape which formed the basis of a short 10 min film on archives. We loved the process keeping to the theme of using analogue technologies for both the sound and visual element of the project. &nbsp;We like the physicality of analogue technology as it forces you to be present and slow down. You don’t necessarily see/hear what is captured at that time, it’s to fiddly to rewind constantly with tape and with filming it’s a daunting but exciting surprise to see what comes out once it’s been processed. We recognise the privilege of having had the opportunity work with this medium, it is expensive process, time consuming and risky. We appreciate the Arts Council for giving us the chance to experiment with the materiality of capturing our work on archives in this way.&nbsp; The young people were really interested to explore the themes of language, disconnection and cultural memory and we believe having the chance to experiment practically with cassette tapes and making their own recordings by interviewing family members with this medium was&nbsp; a really interesting way to tease out some of these themes. Elements of the first soundscape for Camel Meat &amp; Tapes which we did in 2019-2020 with Somali elders was incorporated into the ending of the film. The independence song that the women sang in response to objects from the Empire &amp; Commonwealth Collection which was recorded with cassette tape at Bristol Archives was an important starting point for the film and the film ends with the elders’ voices over images of the young people who were involved in creating the soundscape.&nbsp; We see a core part of our practice as building with fragments and fractures -&nbsp; through displacement and trauma, many Somali traditions have been lost. We are engaged in a process of cultural recovery while acknowledging the many gaps that still exist. We embrace these fractures. Rather than trying to faithfully recreate a lost Somali culture, we instead focus on the acts of (mis)translation; on how past and present, personal and collective, might be collaged together to create outcomes that resonate today.&nbsp; Our latest project Audible Tapestries, has allowed us to research Somali nomadic weaving techniques and tactile technologies that can be incorporated into. When you touch the woven object elements of songs and conversations follow particular threads. This has involved us picking up a thread (figuratively and literally) from a conversation with an elder from our first project about the importance of songs for remembering the weaving pattern and structure in whatever object you are making. Conventionally, all weaving is done by women in Somali nomadic life from the creation of the Aqal (a portable house) to almost all of the household objects within it. For example, an essential woven object is the Haan, that holds &amp; preserves milk (in particular camel milk) and is also used for churning sheep milk into Subaq (a ghee like substance) which forms a butter essential for preserving food such as camel meat. The craft and art of weaving has largely gone unacknowledged because it is considered a woman's role which much like most tasks carried out by women is marginalised within society and gets ignored by written archives. Somali nomadic people have a variety of songs that are used during their work, these are work songs called heeso hawleed which they sing to pass the time, and entertain themselves. The songs can be new or off the cuff, the melody or the words can change. Ayan and I have been learning traditional nomadic Somali weaving for the past year. We're open to the fact that we don't know enough about our cultural practices and that we're still learning what it means to embody it. We are trying to relearn what it means to be Somali for us, in our own way with all its complexities. Through weaving we found an act that can slow us down. A kind of therapeutic practice that has allowed us to weave through the ruptures of Somali diasporic experiences. We believe that reclaiming Somali culture can help to create roots, a sense of identity, shared experience and belonging. In order to do this, we imagine our projects as spaces of reprieve; enclaves where our community can gather and regenerate through collective, creative actions, such as weaving textiles or preparing food. Dr. Ilmi’s paper on African ancestral wisdom captures this well: [1] Ahmed Ali Ilmi, ‘Somali Dhaqan philosophies and the power of African ancestral wisdom’ in African Identities (Volume 13, 2015 - Issue 2), PP. 97-110. “Somali dhaqan cultural philosophies are indigenous African philosophies that encapsulate multiple bodies of living comprehensive knowledge. These philosophies are the founding pillars of Somali societies inasmuch as they are overarching principles governing Somali peoples. In their cosmological sense, dhaqan philosophies are the common threads that connect Somali peoples to their ancestral homelands in Somalia and to a communal way of life.”[1] It has been a real privilege to do this slow work of connecting with our own knowledge practices and systems outside the institutional framing of what an archive is. Whether it is weaving, or recording folk songs and conversations, or cooking, it is an expansive way of exploring what it means to be in a community with others. For us we are not necessarily focusing on immediate content creation or outcomes. There is a careful balancing of how we ethically work without commodifying our culture, whilst recognising the material realities of needing to survive and thrive. It’s going where our curiosity to learn about ourselves and others takes us. It’s accepting the risk of experimenting and failure all while still trying to work from a place of love and abundance. Maybe it is that some Somali people have regularly found themselves trapped in situations of precarious survival which leaves little opportunity to pass on knowledge, practices, or traditions. There is a feeling that this has led to a sense of rootlessness, that in turn continues the cycles of trauma. However we are more than our traumas, there is a pleasure in so many aspects of Somali culture and we want to resist the tendency of not giving space to the joyous, pleasurable and the unknowable (not everything has to be shared) even amongst the chaos. I am very thankful not to be in this journey alone, working with Ayan Cilmi has been such a privilege and an essential part of these creative explorations. Also want to thank Ben GJ Thomas who has been a wonderful sounding board and mentor for these conversations and a wonderful ally in the art world. &nbsp; I want to end with words of the wonderful Audre Lorde: As we come in touch with our own ancient, non-european consciousness of living as a situation to be experienced and interacted with, we learn more and more to cherish our feelings, and to respect those hidden sources of our power from where true knowledge and, therefore, lasting actions comes - Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider Fozia Ismail Fozia Ismail, scholar, cook and founder of Arawelo Eats, a platform for exploring politics, identity and colonialism through East African food. She has worked with a range of cultural institutions including London School of Economics, Museum of London, Serpentine Gallery, Tate Modern, National Trust, The Courtauld, Bristol Old Vic, Battersea Arts Centre, Wellcome Collection Watershed and Arnolfini. Her work has been published by Oxford Symposium on Food &amp; Cookery and Vittles. She has been featured on Observer Food Magazine,&nbsp;BBC Radio 4 Food&nbsp;Programme, Oxford Symposium on Food &amp;; Cookery Ox Tales podcast, Food 52,&nbsp;London Eater, Vice Munchies, Vittles &amp; Bristol 24/7. When not critically eating her way through life’s messiness she can be found plotting with dhaqan collective, a Somali feminist art collective based at the Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol. dhaqan collective is a feminist art collective led by Ayan Cilmi and Fozia Ismail, centering the voices of womxn and elders in our community, and privileging co-creation and collaboration. Our practice seeks to find ways of building imaginative futures that support Somali people here and in East Africa to resist the threats over cultural heritage.︎ ︎ ︎ ︎ ︎ ︎︎︎ ︎︎︎ https://archive-stories.com/A-Small-Archive-of-Secrets-and-Intimacy Sun, 04 Jun 2023 23:10:54 +0000 archive stories https://archive-stories.com/A-Small-Archive-of-Secrets-and-Intimacy &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;<img width="4468" height="2479" width_o="4468" height_o="2479" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d76b806d8917f4abcd2cfd0131b3f713a16856a2e6ee9077e110ed4f621c5ae3/Luiza-Icon.png" data-mid="186794579" border="0" data-scale="91" data-no-zoom src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d76b806d8917f4abcd2cfd0131b3f713a16856a2e6ee9077e110ed4f621c5ae3/Luiza-Icon.png" /> Luiza Prado de O. Martins A Small Archive of Secrets and Intimacy <img width="1200" height="906" width_o="1200" height_o="906" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/34055c8b68e6e371829e0df09a00f43cf3865c9cd714b4b3e7cc241df0d78d09/Lace-2.png" data-mid="186800039" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/34055c8b68e6e371829e0df09a00f43cf3865c9cd714b4b3e7cc241df0d78d09/Lace-2.png" /> For the past several years, my artistic research has focused on exploring themes of reproductive justice, herbalist knowledges, and forms of intra-communal care. Holding control over who gets to have children, how, and by what means is a key strategy for maintaining colonial divisions of labour. Engaging with intimate histories of abortion has played a fundamental role in developing my understanding of the articulations between reproductive health and anti-colonial resistance. Much of my work takes place in contemporary Brazil, where abortion is not only illegal, but often perceived as a taboo topic altogether. In the context of a nation-state built on the exploitation of labour of Black and Brown peoples, the struggle for reproductive rights clashes with intersecting forces — significantly, the political and economic interests of colonial oligarchies, and the maintenance of gender-race articulations that position white bourgeois subjects as the ruling class. Access to reproductive care is, then, consolidated along the lines of gender, sexuality, race and class — guaranteed to white bourgeois subjects to serve patriarchal interests, and denied in various degrees to those subjects whose identities fall outside of those narrow confines. Along the way, I’m honoured to have been entrusted with the personal narratives of those who resist and struggle, every day, to uphold abortion as a human right — for themselves, and for others. These stories unfold endlessly, changing the paths of individuals, communities, families. In this piece I offer brief reflections, reverberating from three narratives shared with me by comrades in Brazil during this research process; a small archive of secrets and intimacies. ——— “My menstruation was really late, so I had some really strong cinnamon tea with a few other herbs in it; my mother and my grandmother used this, too. My menstruation finally came soon after that; I’m pretty sure I had been pregnant before I had the tea.” I’m chatting with T. She is telling me about her previous experiences with contraception and how, confronted with the possibility of being pregnant, she decided to turn to this popular folk remedy. Cinnamon tea is known in Brazil as something that helps one “descer a menstruação” — bringing down menstruation — and is widely used by those who want to resolve the uncertainty of a late period. She tells me that not too long after drinking a few cups of this infusion, she felt the familiar, dull pain of cramps; these contractions, however, seemed much stronger. The subsequent bleeding was more intense than she was used to, and she expelled some unusual tissue. Her period had only been late for a few days, and her last ones had been quite regular; although she hadn’t had a pregnancy test, she was sure that this had been a very early pregnancy. Even just knowing was hard; from the moment that she confirmed a pregnancy, its termination would constitute a crime. If she didn’t know, she wasn’t doing anything wrong. T. used this infusion because she knew that her mother and her grandmother had used similar remedies before her; in the region of Brazil where she comes from, many people make use of these preparations. A herbalist friend guided her through the process, helping her brew the mixture — which included a few other herbs, in addition to cinnamon — and stayed with her during the termination. I hear the gratitude and reverence in T.’s voice as she speaks of this friend and the care and love she extended to her, and to others in similar situations. I ask her how she felt after it was all done. She says: “It felt like she helped me get born again, as myself. She helped me give birth to myself.” I hold T.’s secret with reverence for those who came before her; for those who helped her and others; for the communities that emerge around the need for reproductive care. An archive of care, invisible but to those who call for it through the loving whispers to the ancestors. —— “Sis, let’s switch to the secret chat?” I’m chatting with S. I’m in Europe, she’s in Brazil; the subject of our conversation holds vastly different weights on opposite shores of this ocean. We know that we need to be careful. We’re already talking through an encrypted messaging app, but now we create a special chat: the messages we exchange here will self-destruct within 24 hours. We can’t risk it: getting caught planning what we’re planning can lead to prison time. The fear is the worst thing about this: this constant, nagging feeling of powerlessness that makes us feel fragile, exposed, helpless. Talking to each other helps us realise that we’re not alone. We understand that we share the same fears — but that those fears cannot take hold of us, make us helpless and powerless. Sharing knowledge, we make each other visible; we help and sustain one another. It is through this labor that we create the new paths that can re-articulate the realities around us. Connecting us through the threads of online communication is a shared desire to reject, to destroy the restrictions that position us in roles we did not agree or consent to perform; restrictions that imprison us within a very limited scope of self-definition. Being visible to one another allows us to come together as dissenting subjects. We discuss the ways in which we can navigate restrictive spaces and legal loopholes; we plan strategies for disrupting roles assigned to us by patriarchal forces. We must move across these spaces like hurricanes, or floods, or earthquakes, she says to me; we must be forces of nature. There is no other choice. Together we push the boundaries of what we are allowed to do, and what we are not. Our dissent, our rejection to patriarchal order becomes stronger as more and more of us become visible to one another. Alone, each of us is a gust of wind. Together, we create hurricanes. In 24 hours the words in this secret chat will persist only in our memory — but their effect will reverberate long after. These are the secrets we hold in our memories; an archive that guides our steps and our hands as we heal each other. This is an archive of breezes, winds, hurricanes; moving air, impossible to trap. —— “I think a neighbour helped her. It’s hard to know the details though; she didn’t like to talk about it, because she felt she had committed a great sin. But she did what she had to do.” M. is talking about his mother, E. One of ten siblings, he tells me he is lucky to have been one of the youngest. The oldest ones had it much harder, he says, having grown up with the pangs of hunger and added responsibility of working to support the rest of the family through their most difficult years. By the time A., their youngest, came around, their mother knew she could not have another child. So when she became pregnant again, she decided to end it. She never told their father; this was between her and one of their neighbours, a rezadeira[1] and herbalist who had helped her. [1] a woman who performs prayers and rituals to heal illnesses, physical and otherwise, within a community. Until the end of her life, E. was deeply religious. To her, that abortion had been an affront to God; a grave sin, whose weight she carried with what felt almost like a sacred form of reverence. Decades later, when one of his brothers was taken by a serious illness, M.’s mother confessed to him that she thought it was because of her sin. Grief opened old wounds. Over fifty years after her abortion, she was still at a crossroads: grateful for having had help in a time of need, carrying the burden of her decision, living a life she changed for herself. E.’s secret shaped her and her family; an act that offers, perhaps, an insight into the reverberating affections that are part of these archives. It is love who moved her to make a decision, and it is this same love that guides her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren through their paths. —— What does it mean to hold an archive of secrets? What lies in the silences, the great gaps between whispers? How do we hold and honour these confessions, of friends and strangers alike? The struggle for reproductive justice is a struggle for the right to determine — sharpen, conceal, blur, enhance, darken, fragment, elaborate, destroy, highlight, complicate — the contours of the self. It follows that this also implies the right to determine what narratives, what stories are shared around one’s identity and mode of being in the world. Which words are uttered, and which are not. Holding these secrets means learning a language of interstices and gaps, pauses pregnant with doubt, bifurcated paths leading to the unknown. Learning to honour an archive of secrets feels, often, like grasping at air; movement guided by feeling. Luiza Prado De O. MartinsLuiza Prado De O. Martins is an artist, activist and researcher. Their work moves between installation and food, using performance and ritual as a way of invitation and activation for audiences. Their practice explores anticolonial strategies in relations and knowledge between food, infrastructures and technology, and questions what structures and process are needed for collective concerns of care.Their current artistic research project, “Un/Earthings and Moon Landings” reimagines past, future, and present histories of silphium — a plant once used as an aphrodisiac, contraceptive, and cooking spice in the Roman Empire. Thought to be extinct for 2,000 years, the plant might have recently been found again.Their body of work spans food, performance, video, text, installation, and sculpture, and has been shown at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Savvy Contemporary, Akademie Schloss Solitude, and Kampnagel, among others. Luiza is one half of the artist duo We Work in the Dark, and a founding member of the Decolonising Design collective.︎ ︎ ︎ ︎ <img width="1920" height="10000" width_o="1920" height_o="10000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/63f2ba5570d256ededc7826b4cd63d72f28c5cb8bcfadd5fe23d13420b3f0b7c/Luiza-background.jpg" data-mid="186794271" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/63f2ba5570d256ededc7826b4cd63d72f28c5cb8bcfadd5fe23d13420b3f0b7c/Luiza-background.jpg" /> ︎︎︎ ︎︎︎ https://archive-stories.com/rebellious-eyes-through-the-archive Sun, 04 Jun 2023 23:12:30 +0000 archive stories https://archive-stories.com/rebellious-eyes-through-the-archive Philip Rizk rebellious eyes. through the archive. <img width="4361" height="2803" width_o="4361" height_o="2803" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b0fe2a66cc9d638b3d033058e8b954af9d11b33b5fff61cd248eafb514c16b57/Philip.png" data-mid="186721559" border="0" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b0fe2a66cc9d638b3d033058e8b954af9d11b33b5fff61cd248eafb514c16b57/Philip.png" /> [1] In the film Mapping Lessons by Philip Rizk, we travel with K through time and place to a Middle East being colonized. Putting in conversation struggles from the early days of the Soviets, 1936 Spain, the Vietnamese resistance and the Paris Commune to the Syrian Revolution. Kulthum Auda found me while I was searching for a protagonist for the film Mapping Lessons.[1] &nbsp; There are scatterings of rough anecdotes about her available in Arabic, in Ramallah’s public library I found a poorly researched biography, and in English a single article based on her writings in Russian state archives. Kulthum was a teacher from Nazareth who traveled to Russia with her doctor husband on the cusp of the first Imperial war, where she volunteered as a nurse, and then participated in the Russian Revolution. Later, Kulthum spent some years in the rebellious sailor’s city of Kronstadt, then worked for a women’s organization headed by avant-garde feminist Alexandra Kollontai while based in the Ukrainian countryside, one of the hotbeds of opposition to the Bolshevik monopolization of the Revolution. Amongst those villages the anarchist Nestor Makhno had led an army of farmers against the remaining pro-tsar Russian troops and began establishing farmer-run Soviets. The Bolsheviks first allied with the Ukrainian Makhnoists, but the party found these soviets too much out of their control and so assassinated all the farmer generals and brought the troops under their control. The Bolsheviks knew only one revolution. There is no record of Kulthum becoming a member of the Communist party. Maybe she saw through the hypocrisy. Though if she did, she could never have uttered those words except behind closed doors, never left a trace of opposition to that mighty state. Later in her life many of Kulthum’s Arab compatriots were put to death in Stalinist Russia, she herself was arrested, after which her writings became ever more scientific.&nbsp; Kulthum made only one journey back home as an ethnographer in the 1920s. In my film, hers were the eyes with which I wanted to see bilad al-sham - the Levant - in that moment of rupture between the end of the Ottoman Empire and the coming European colonial onslaught. Hers were traveling eyes that would have sought home and the familiar, her travel writing would have entailed a longing and desire for the smell, the trees, rekindling a connection to place. But she also came with rebellious eyes, baptized in revolution, critical eyes, that likely embodied a kind of internationalism that saw no borders. For it is not unlikely that her vision for the future would have been shaped by her mentor Kollontai, who believed in "a coming world in which everyone would live in communes, women would be free to choose whatever sorts of romantic relationships met their needs, and dedication to the 'great laboring family' of the collective would be more important than 'ties to relatives’.”[i] Her sentiment is echoed in Claire Fontaine’s call, “thinking against ourselves will be the necessity of the revolts to come, as desubjectivisation (taking distance from what we are, becoming something else) will be the only way to fight our exploitation…it will mean stopping believing in the necessity of identifying ourselves with the place we occupy.”[ii] InMapping Lessons, Kulthum seeks Palestine and finds a militant struggle in Syria—though these are not categories that existed then. On her journey home, she must have longed converse in the dialect of her home town, but the language of struggle against the oppressor had also become a part of her in the Russian Revolution. In some of her autobiographical notes, she wrote about her family in Nazareth, “they could not understand…that I had found my own place in life in this country, in the revolution, which in those years I more readily felt with my heart than I understood with my intellect.”[iii] Unlike colonial archives, stocked to the brim with diplomatic correspondences, personal letters, statesmen’s diaries, and army reports that establish the imperial status quo, the archive of our traveler is limited, and tainted by the possibilities of her environs, as well as the archivists into whose hands they fell. Kulthum’s unfiltered diary would have been unlike the travel books that “gave European reading publics a sense of ownership, entitlement and familiarity with respect to the distant parts of the world that were being explored, invaded, invested in, and colonized.”[iv] There are a slew of technologies the conquerer developed in order to conquer—gun powder, the battle ship, the cannon, barbed wire, borders, and the transformation of a flying bus into a war machine. But the effects of the weapons of private property, of writing and cartography were crucial to the brutal project, for “more indigenous territory has been claimed by maps than by guns.”[v] Thus, the importance to join Mary Louise Pratt in inquiring about the codes with which travel and exploration writing has produced “the rest of the world.”[vi] In Mapping Lessons I wanted to subvert their codes by finding new ones to produce a different world, an imagined but real one, a radical but possible one. Kay Dickinson reminds us that the Arabic root s-f-r, from which English gleans ‘safari’ includes the derivatives: to shine, brighten; to unveil, to embark, she then channels Roxanne L. Euben who “attributes to the rihla [journey] what is ordinarily ascribed predominantly to ‘theory’:…to link and to imagine a beyond.”[vii] My starting point in image-ining a beyond was the most radical experiment in contemporary history of the Arabic-speaking world, one written out of most his-tories: the Syrian Revolution. <img width="1200" height="600" width_o="1200" height_o="600" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c7296e57b6a51a1ebabbe064157095c72654640f7e45c006bd8b60f62aed729a/titelbild__I2OJsN-frontend.jpg" data-mid="186723726" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c7296e57b6a51a1ebabbe064157095c72654640f7e45c006bd8b60f62aed729a/titelbild__I2OJsN-frontend.jpg" />The Zerda or the songs of forgetting, Assia Djebar, film still, 1982 [2] 858 is an archive of the January 25, 2011, revolution in Egypt. It is of course just one archive of the revolution. It is not, and can never be, the archive. It is one collection of memories, one set of tools we can all use to fight the narratives of the counter-revolution, to pry loose the state’s grip on history, to jeep building new histories for the future. At some point in 2012 someone passed by the Mosireen office, to drop off footage to add to the collective’s archive.[2] Mosireen had formed in the summer of 2011 with the aim of creating counter-propaganda to government and private media outlet’s slandering the revolution’s true intentions: the desire for the fall of the system. Unlike most of the material we were shooting and collecting, S. brought footage they had filmed on a journey to Syria, where they had spent time with one of many local councils that had sprung up in areas liberated from the Assad regime. This exercise of community self-governance was deeply radical, though tragically short-lived, overtaken by forces on all sides loathe to allow it to blossom. The revolutionary experiments have been cast into non-existence due to its few allies and by a media machine’s incessant desire for the spectacle of war and mass displacement. What I heard and saw in S.’s archive was part of the silenced narrative of rebellion, an “exclusionary zone of tremendous magnitude.”[viii] It taught me to keep myself open for when I encounter it, especially when it goes against my pre-disposed beliefs even be they radical ones. The colonial and neo-colonial archives, past or contemporary, make space for local and foreign elites, their memories, their desires, their music, their way of seeing. Rarely, do we have access to desires and dreams of the ones who oppose power, and so we must imagine these judged by their actions. We need to strain “against the limits of the archive…to tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling” in order to counter erasure of certain people and narratives.[ix] The stance of Kulthum traveling through the world inspired my own movement through the archive. In Mapping Lessons, the archive that was brought to Mosireen’s office, gets dislocated in space—with images of similar struggles across the globe, and in time—excerpts of Kulthum’s imagined travel diary include a conversation about the revolutionary local councils with the Syrian anarchist Omar Aziz in 2012.[x] Kulthum’s method of travel, then inspired my method of image-making. On February 17, 1917 Kulthum and her fellow revolutionaries toppled Tsar Nikolai II and removed his family from power. Soon thereafter, the archive of the royal’s footage fell into the lap of editor and filmmaker Esfir Shub. Her 1927 feature film The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty was the first film of its kind, editing images in such a way as to undermine the intentions of their creators. She imbued images intended to serve authoritarian domination with new meaning for a radical counter-narrative, subverting the power that once lay in them. Years later she did the same with images of the Spanish revolution to counter the images of a global fascist conquest of another radical experiment. Reflecting on the origins of the moving image and its coming to the colonized world, Michael Allan writes, “film makes thinkable Egypt in an entirely new manner: the transformation of the timeless and eternal Great Pyramid to the immediacy of the actuality film.”[xi] Unlike the Lumiere’s images of conquest I don’t want to make thinkable, I want to make revolt imaginable, I want to “take the imagination to go visiting.”[xii] In Passagenwerk, Walter Benjamin reveals “a world of secret affinities,”&nbsp; a “whole magic encyclopedia,” and not unlike the pre-colonial tradition of the Arabic citation of text as a form of respect for its author, in the film I want to do the same for the images’ takers as well as the struggles they depict.[xiii]&nbsp;Following Esfir Shub and Walter Benjamin’s strategies of disrupting archives, I want to disrupt “the image of thought to the point of no return.”[xiv] In Mapping Lessons a sequence about the male gaze of desire excerpted from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis is set side by side with images of military conquest of Vietnam, and revolutionary Spanish communities, and aerial footage of Palestine filmed from a German military plane prior to its European colonization. The sequence is accompanied by contorted sound of Wagner’s Cry of the Valkyries, in an attempt to lay bare the image-takers intentions. Their gaze was one of the imperial eyes that the journey of Kulthum wants to undo. Mapping Lessons also shows strategies of autonomy from the archive of revolution. Here, tutorial-like, we see how to source energy locally while under siege, cook with a sun oven or how methods of agro-ecology are passed down from one generation to the next. To grow food without reliance on external, private or state systems is the bedrock of autonomy. &nbsp;In her final novel Fantasia, Assia Djabar describes the arrival of the French fleet that is about to conquer Algiers for 130 years, with artists on board. They are ready to represent the event before it happens. It is time we do our own drawing and represent a different narrative, traveling with liberated eyes through time and space, and through the archive. It takes “a certain amount of madness…to turn your back on the old formulas,” be these in how we create our liberated spaces or how we tell its stories. [xv] Let us move with rebellious eyes through the archive, and through life. For we must prepare for the struggles to come. [i] Menicucci, Garay, “Kulthum Auda, Palestinian Ethnographer: Gendering the Palestinian Landscape” in The Landscape of Palestine — Equivocal Poetry, Birzeit: Birzeit University Publications, 1999, p.85. [ii] Fontaine, Claire, Human Strike has Already Begun &amp; Other Writings, PML Books: 2013, p.55. [iii] Menicucci, Garay, “Kulthum Auda, Palestinian Ethnographer: Gendering the Palestinian Landscape” in The Landscape of Palestine — Equivocal Poetry, Birzeit: Birzeit University Publications, 1999, p.84. [iv] Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, New York: Routledge, 2008, p.4. [v] Quiquivix, Linda, “When the Carob Tree was the border: On Autonomy and Palestinian Practices of Figuring it Out.” in Nature Socialism. 2013, p.6. [vi] Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, New York: Routledge, 2008, p.5. [vii] Dickinson, Kay, Arab Cinema Travels Transnational Syria, Palestine, Dubai and Beyond, London: Palgrave, 2016, p.19.[viii] Gordon, Avery, The Hawthorn Archives: Letters from the Utopian Margins, New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2017, vii. [ix] Hartman, Saidiya, “Venus in Two Acts,” in Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2: 1–14. 2008, p.11. [x] Aziz, Omar, "A discussion paper on local councils in Syria,” in A World without Maps. Rizk, Philip (ed.). Delhi: Kochi-Muziris Biennale, [2011] 2022. https://www.filfilfilm.com/s/About-a-World-wo-Maps_rizk_full_publication.pdf [xi] Allan, Michael, “Deserted histories: The Lumière Brothers, the pyramids and early film form,” in Early Popular Visual Culture, 6:2, 159 — 170, 2008, p.168. [xii] Arendt, Hannah, Lectures on Kant’s political philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982, p.43. [xiii] Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2002, p.540 &amp; p.207. [xiv] Kuecker, Elliott, “Post-Qualitative Inquiry and Walter Benjamin’s “One-Way Street”,” in Qualitative Inquiry, 1–10. 2018, p.3. [xv] Sankara, Thomas, Thomas Sankara Speaks. Atlanta: Pathfinder Press, 2007, p.232. Philip RizkPhilip Rizk is a film-maker &amp; writer from Cairo living in Berlin. In his films he experiments with methods of “making the habitual strange.” In Out on the Street (2015) he uses performance, in his found footage films Mapping Lessons (2020) and&nbsp;Terrible Sounds (2022) he experiments with the technique of montage. In a world that is breaking down, a question that runs throughout Rizk’s projects is, “how do we prepare ourselves for what is to come?” Rizk is a member of the Mosireen video collective behind the archive 858.ma. His writings include the essay “2011 is not 1968: a letter to an onlooker,” and the co-authored book with Jasmina Metwaly On Trials: A Manual on the Theatre of Law (Archive Books, 2021). He irregularly teaches in classrooms and workshops. He is a 2022/23 fellow of The Berlin Artistic Research Grant Programme. ︎ ︎ ︎ ︎ ︎︎︎ ︎︎︎