Workshop: Creating Living Archives (Video Recap)

Made good on an old promise: You can now find our pilot workshop 'Creating Living Archives' on YouTube!

Program Description: Reworking the historical process for personal and familial archives that better reflect our values. Designed to address the unique challenges Black and Indigenous people face when recovering our family histories, this workshop translates archival terms for more experiential understandings.

Central Ideas & Questions

• Connection is what keeps memory alive and accessible to us - vulnerable artifacts exist in isolation until they don't exist at all
• Identify the values you want to organize your archives around
• Who is this work in service of? Empire of the people?
• Voyeuristic vs embodied archives
• Cultural artifacts are best preserved using the strategies of their cultural creators
• How can I note my relationship to this artifact in my handling of it?
• Futurist thinking: How might someone interpret the system you're creating when you're no longer here to explain it?

In Retrospect

Filmed in February 2024 at For Keeps Books, there are a lot of firsts happening here! It was also my final semester at Georgia Tech and approaching the height of the student encampment movement. Preparing to graduate from a school whose research institute received over 95% of its funding from defense contracts. I found myself increasingly disillusioned with the end goal of my research being behind another paywall. That felt so far from the original intention behind this interest. More interested in seeing how these ideas hold up in the arena. This workshop was originally planned to be a one-off for my graduating thesis, but communal workshops quickly became central to my practice.

The actual program was about 90 minutes long, with the greater portion of that time going to the 'restorative description' activity and group discussion. After editing this down to 25 minutes, I realize how little needs to be said when we leave room for intuition. Sometimes folks come out looking for answers they already possess, and the most impactful thing I can do as a facilitator is point you back to yourself. Thanks for hearing me out anyway!

Extra shout of gratitude to the incredible Rosa Duffy for hosting us at For Keeps & my right hand, Miles Freed, for holding it down as production manager!