Gathering #3: Accessing the Trans-Institutional ArchiveGathering #3: Accessing the Trans-Institutional Archive

These movements of archive interactions and collaborations, within and outside of institutions, are often bridged by workers who take the role of translator, mediating the languages of policy and connecting efforts back to communities to share ownership, agency, and responsibility for the narratives.

As is customary for our Public Gatherings, we opened the evening by reading a piece that inspired the theme for this event. This time, Delany read out Michael Karabino's Trans-Institutional Supra-Archives -- and so we begin activating the concept of the travelling, moving and present archive, one that /"we create, finding relevant information across institutional boundaries, linking archives based on what we seek, not where it is held./"

After a small update on the the project's process and more specifically zooming in our tools and methodologies, we laid out the evening's conversation format. Three conversations would map the way objects and archives enter, become-with, and eventually leave institutions; and how they contribute to building the discourses around race, colonialism, queer and feminist identities and the construction of belonging and memory amongst specific communities that are often overshadowed.

The first conversation welcomed to the digital stage Michael Karabinos and Rika Theo, in a closer look into Indonesian leftist resistance archives hosted in the Institute of Social History, in Amsterdam. The so-called NEFIS archives tell a story of resistance against Dutch colonialism, and can now be found in many different institutions in the Netherlands -- ranging from ministries to national archives. To approach these across many hosts, in a horizontal way, allows us to see how one story can spread its roots, a web that connects tangents and links.

Michael and Rika went back and forth with each other in a conversation that opened to the audience and allowed us to reflect on the different reasons why these archives are not hosted by the communities they concern -- in a first instance, they were seized by the Dutch military in the re-colonisation process. On the other hand, they became censored material for the Indonesian government and wouldn't be safe there. This is another reason as to why it is important to trace the web of the trans-institutional archive, and research between different archival histories.

But how to untie all these strings? Rika mentions the importance of accessible descriptions, and of contextualising archival objects: description is the key to trace the stories across the institutions. The institutions themselves are not the most important thing; finding the links and the stories across them is the most important -- and that's building the trans-institutional supra-archives.

The Zoom room hosting this gathering continued lively and warm, while we prepared for the second dialogue: we welcomed Nychenda Fecunda and the Black Archives' co-founder Mitchell Esajas, who came to share their different experiences and perspectives of the archive. Mitchell recalled the beginning of the archival activism project, how it started because of the gaps present in the history and representation throughout the different institutions he'd navigate. After the donation of numerous books, magazines, flyers, and other objects, by a Surinamese sociologist on Dutch colonialism, Mitchell and the rest of the New Urban Collective founded the Black Archives. In a non-institutional approach, the space hosts material for research but also moves it towards resistance and the present time, through exhibitions and events, and connecting to Black struggle today.Members of The Black Archives are also active in the movement /"Zwarte Piet is Racisme/", amongst others.Following on the trans-institutional, Mitchell pointed to the different material that can also be found in other archives, and that together make up histories and herstories of Black lives.

Nychenda offered a different perspective on this archive, as she shared some thoughts from her thesis that took the Black Archives as a case study, on understanding and unpacking the concept of Blackness. Recognising the archive as a vestige of power, we can see how it shapes imaginations, reality and identity. What happens when an archive takes a colonial concept, that of Blackness, and repurpose it for resistance and anti-racism?

In a critique of Wilkerson's /"Afro pessimism/", Nychenda understands the concept of blackness with an intersectional lens, thus acknowledging its potentiality as a dynamic and ever-changing concept. Like her grandmother's stew, working with potentiality means working with a hard history and turning it into a delicious and nurturing final result.
Mitchell and Nychenda discussed how the archive as resistance means not working with in a traditional way -- it means combining protesting with celebration, it means breaking taboos and activating the community.

It remains important to give place to spaces like the Black Archives, now that we see a growing need for positions such as the diversity officer. This can't be a part-time position for one individual, but is rather the work of a collective, repairing work for everyone and every day. The way The Black Archives activate their material is constantly for the community, making it accessible to /"our mothers/", adopting history as power.

Last, but not least, we welcomed Jos Boys and Aska Welford to share their research with the audience, calling in this evening from the UK. Jos opens up the talk by bringing us back with her memories of being part of Matrix, a network-cooperative of women architects, challenging patriarchal spatial systems in the 70s and 80s. Sewing threads of connection with our case study Vrouwen Bouwen Wonen, we were shown how this group challenged notions of architectural practices, labour, and working processes. And now, in the group's afterlife, there is the challenge of archiving it. How to start archiving through a collective of voices and lives, and what makes an archive feminist? In line with its network, the Matrix archive would have to be accessible, trans-disciplinary, and multi-vocal.

The archive doesn't represent finished products, and thus we should understand archives as moments made concrete, as longer processes. Both design and activism can then be expressed in the work, work in generating social change, and reflect on how they affect other lives and experiences. How to trace what happened to the artefacts from each member? How to tell stories with the objects?

The chat continued with lively, parallel conversations and thoughts inspired by our discussions. Catherine connected liberatory archival practices like these to bell hooks' thoughts on the connections between theory and social practice. Aska shared her practice with unions and workers, noting that vulnerability can mean radical openness. From their work with two different labour unions in the UK, Aska shared how the potential for collective action can also come from archiving, as a practice of sharing the often invisible worker-made knowledge, that is then met with the challenges of /"making public/". Connecting with the work of Matrix,speculative storytelling can be one way to navigate the tensions that come with collective work and subsequently with archiving. Amalgamating stories from worker to worker can connect and reinterpret their experiences, while at the same protecting each individual's story. Working Group member Harriet Rose Morley joined the conversation in archiving this thorny material, collecting different voices within one collective. It's important to have the contradictions also involved -- showing them through witnessing, oral herstories, and thus always resisting the force inherent in archives of thinking in authors. Storytelling can have a reparative potential, when individual experiences are foregrounded, and by mixing them, resisting the flattening.

With such thoughtful and fruitful contributions, time went fast, as usual -- we reach the end with the desire of going on endlessly, imagining archival futures and activating presents. One audience question from Frederik stayed with us: /"We´ve heard about both speculative fiction and (Black) imaginaries - could we maybe reflect on the role of imagination or speculation in changing the archival ´business as usual´?/"

This evening was filled with potentiality, resistance, imaginations and realities -- all that we can do to keep changing the archive, and to keep Collecting Otherwise.
We would like to thank everyone that was present and shared this evening with us.

Rika Theo is a researcher, trained archivist, and writer. After working as an economic journalist in Indonesia, she changed course, researching international mobilities and archives. She completed her PhD in international mobility and development from the Faculty of Geosciences, Utrecht University. Currently, she focuses her research on the inclusivity and accessibility of archives, especially the archives that were displaced from Indonesia to the Netherlands, including, for example, a more inclusive archival description for the displaced Indonesian archives at the International Institute of Social History (IISH) Amsterdam.

Michael Karabinos is an archivist and historian living in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His focus is on historical recordkeeping/archival systems, particularly in (de)colonial settings in Southeast Asia. From 2016-2019 he was a Deviant Practice Research Fellow at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. Karabinos received his PhD from Leiden University and was previously a visiting fellow at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He is co-editor of the book _Colonial Legacy in Southeast Asia: The Dutch Archive_s ('s-Gravenhage 2012), and his work has been included in other publications. He currently teaches in the Media Studies department at the University of Amsterdam.

Mitchell Esajas is the co-founder of New Urban Collective, a network for students and young professionals from diverse backgrounds with a focus on the Surinamese, Caribbean and African diaspora. Esajas studied business studies and anthropology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. In 2016 he co-founded the Black Archives in Amsterdam, a cultural centre based on a unique collection of books, documents and artefacts documenting the histories of Surinamese and Black people in the Dutch context. The Black Archives develops exhibitions and public programmes based on the collections and urgent societal issues.

Nychenda Fecunda is a sociologist of Dutch and Afro-Caribbean descent. She graduated cum laude from Erasmus University with an MA thesis on the function and form of Blackness in decolonial archiving practices. She is also a host and organiser for the Rotterdam based KLAUW collective which provides safer spaces for the Queer POC community, locally and abroad.

Aska Welford is an architectural worker. They write about and participate in unionising, cross-community solidarity, worker-to-worker knowledge, and dismantling spaces of production. They helped set up a new member-led trade union for architectural workers in the UK, United Voices of the World: Section of Architectural Workers. In the 18 months before the union launched, they took part in a Workers' Inquiry, a survey-from-below of the architectural sector, as well as the shared frustrations and dreams of workers. The Workers' Inquiry also included archiving practice with members of the New Architecture Movement who set up the previous trade union for architectural workers in the late 1970s: learning from their struggles as well as their successes.

Dr Jos Boys is Director of Learning Environments'' Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Centre (LEEDIC) at the Bartlett, University College London UK; and Programme Lead on the MSc Learning Environments. Originally trained in architecture, she was co-founder of Matrix feminist architecture and research collective in the 1980s and one of the authors of Making Space: Women and the Man-made Environment. In relation to this practice, Jos co-curatored an exhibition about Matrix at the Barbican Art Centre in London, titled How We Live Now: Reimagining Spaces with Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative, for which a related online archive is being developed. Jos's research and practice explores how everyday social, spatial and material practices come to frame what is 'normal' and 'ordinary', and to work with others on design interventions that question our assumptions about who gets valued and who doesn't.

Harriet Rose Morley is a multi-disciplinary artist and builder based in The Hague (NL). Working with furniture building, architectural installation and collaborative projects, her work is often reliant on public interaction and collaboration through workshops and conversations that provide an accessible and inclusive insight into topics of urgency within art in public space such as the relationship between politics and art, care and therapy, artist labour, alternative education, and self-build ideals.