Imagining Futures through Un/Archived Pasts

PI: Professor Elena Isayev

Funder: Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)

Archives are sites of negotiation about visions of the future. Decisions of what is to be collected, accessed or preserved tend to privilege certain narratives over others. It is about whose story will continue to be told and how, and whose silenced. These questions are acute in moments of post-conflict, displacement and reconstruction. This Network (British School at Rome, Stellenbosch University, University of Ghana, American University of Beirut, University of the Arts London, University College London, St. Augustine University of Tanzania) depends on linking expertise from contexts where these issues are paramount: in Lebanon, Tanzania, Ghana, South Africa.

The project aim is to facilitate the opening-up and sensitive use of existing archives to create new ones and articulate methods for egalitarian archival practices that respect multiple and divergent narratives. Through engaging with existing archives, special and non-traditional archives in-situ, creative open digital tools, open-studio events with different publics, the goal is to build towards a co-produced policy manifesto, in dialogue with governing bodies and supra-state organisations as e.g. ICCROM. The wider ambition, through exposing cultural practices as important sites of negotiation, is to advocate for culture to be officially recognised as a humanitarian need.