Correcting Our Collecting

Mahasin Ahmed (they/them) is a community organiser based in Glasgow. They founded Exhale.Group CIC, an organisation providing Queer and Trans BPoC with free sober spaces for connection and collective healing.

In this blog they share their experience of taking part in Correcting Our Collecting delivered by Decolonising The Archive in collaboration with Synergi.

I first became interested in archiving after watching ‘Sudan’s Forgotten Films’ (2017), a documentary about the work of two Sudanese men who devoted over 40 years to preserve the country’s national film archive. As someone with Sudani heritage who had been trying to learn more about my culture and history, I always found a lack of archival and historical materials available on Sudan. We got very little mention in museums; it was usually a small paragraph next to vast collections from Ancient Egypt, if anything. It was treated as a faraway land that nothing really happened in. The lack of information in public archives and my inability to engage with the elders in my family, due to my lack of Arabic, meant that I felt unable to access my own heritage.

A few years later, my interest in archiving peaked again when beginning my work with Exhale.Group. I organised a workshop with artist Natasha Thembiso Ruwona who had made a film to highlight and engage communities with the work of Scottish-Ghanaian artist Maud Sulter. Encountering this work was the first time I saw a Queer BPoC person represented in the cultural history and context of Scotland. This set me on a journey of trying to find more of us, more BPoC and QBPoC figures to look up to, to learn about and study – but my journey was cut short due to the lack of preservation of their existence.

I still didn’t fully understand what archives were at this point. To me they seemed to be boxes of files tucked away in a museum basement, only accessible to those with a pass. I began thinking about future generations like me. Would they be able to see any of us in the archives? Would they be able to learn about Sudan? About the Queer BPoC club nights I danced in? Would they see themselves represented, or would there be an even larger hole? I wondered how our legacies would be preserved and whose hands would they fall in. I thought about the images from my own life – vanished due to the deletion of Bebo and my high school Snapchat account.

How do we preserve legacies? Who decides what’s important to preserve and display? Who should access archives? Who should be in control of the narrative? These questions were at the forefront of my mind when I began the Correcting Our Collective course.

At our first session I was introduced to the idea of an “embodied archive” – its materials not just documents, professional films and images, but also music, recipes, oral traditions, stories and spiritual teachings. Things we can collect from our elders today, anything we have access to. This made the concept of archiving less daunting to me, it spurred me on to ask my dad more questions about life in Sudan, and to try to dig out old photos from my grandmother. 

We were also called to reflect on our own biases and perspective – asking ourselves why we want to tell this story, is it our story to tell? How are we making room for other perspectives?

We also spoke about how archives are set up and how materials are displayed. Paying attention not only to the words around it, but the curation of the material in the space, the space used, the format, the context. Crucial lessons were gained in this from our sessions with Mitchell Esajas, co-founder of the Black Archives in Amsterdam. Mitchell spoke of examples such as design choices in their exhibition ‘Facing Blackness’ where visitors had to pull out drawers in a cabinet to view colonial imagery, rather than having it on the wall facing you. He also showed us how counternarratives were displayed in the exhibition to combat colonial narratives.

With course lead Connie Bell, we also visited an example of an exhibition on slavery where such things were not considered. With the knowledge from previous sessions, there was a stark brutality to the way these materials were displayed. Traumatic images were at the height of children’s eye level – there was a lack of context, one-sided narratives, and complete lack of humanity.

This brought up important considerations about engaging with archives as a spectator too, Connie taught us that when approaching such materials we need to ground ourselves, letting our bodies know “I am an observer to this material, this material is not about me”.

Another way of protecting ourselves is to avoid passive consumption of knowledge. In such spaces, we must always question and critique and seek context, to avoid the narrative being hijacked by bias and one-sided perspectives. I thought about times when I left museums feeling inspired, and other times when I left feeling drained – what were the conditions that caused these reactions, how could things have been done differently? How could I, as a spectator, engage in the materials in a more informed way?

Having the opportunity to learn from the wisdom of the course facilitators and the other participants on the course was invaluable to me in my journey interacting with archives, and hopefully one day building my own. Most importantly I’ve learned that cultural memories are not always tangible – they are feelings, deep knowings and behaviours that we have inside of us. For now, I will start at home; preserving the memories of my loved ones and co-creating the narrative together.

Deep gratitude to DTA, Synergi, and to the other course participants for their generosity and wisdom.