Panel Discussion: Access and Futurity

[Janice Cheddie] So thank you everyone for coming and thank you for the speakers for some really amazing contributions too and to start the debate off. This is actually a moderated session, so I’d like to invite you after the panel discussion to reach out to the speakers and talk to them about any questions that you may have. First of all, I’d like to thank Vasundhara Mathur for holding this space and the Tate Modern. I think we all realise that for culture workers this is an extremely difficult, difficult time. And in doing so, culture workers are holding this space in cultural institutions to uphold that most essential assertion that all human life is of equal value and everyone has equal right to life and self-determination.

So I’d like to start off with different modes of archival practice. And just because it was missed out, and because this is the Tate, I’m also the Chair of the Rita Keegan Archive and a trustee of the Maud Sulter Archive. So I think artist archives also need to be held within this conversation. And I think they have a slightly different relationship to collective archives that we’ve been talked about today. So, yeah. So I want to start with the different modes of archival practice between the case studies that we’ve talked about, or obviously, Anasuya you don’t hold a collection or you don’t necessarily work with collections, but I think it’s important to talk about the conditions of formation, in which, within each of the archive collections, because we don’t collect everything in archives. So I want to look at what are the bounds of exclusion, of collecting and where we set them, and how they speak to what’s actually held within the collections. So I think that’s an important way that we start to think about what we talk about formations of community. And I think that the quote here is that ‘equally shaped by the kinds of material collected, what is arranged and described as well as excluded from these recordings of histories’.

So I think, I don’t know who would like to start. Do you want to start Rosemary? Because I’m very aware that the kind of, particularly for people who are kind of like born in the late 1990s, the idea of the kind of radical left was never a monolithic grouping within the UK or even kind of internationally. So I just want to talk about, because you’ve labelled it within the kind of, the slides kind of you’ve used different terminologies that point to, you talked about anti-authoritarian and you’ve talked to kind of a radical kind of anti-capitalist left. Perhaps where does the Mayday situate itself? Because I think particularly for kind of like migrant communities and minority communities, there’s quite a disconnect between those histories and those experiences than and within the archives that you hold.

[Rosemary Grennan] I mean, I use the term anti-authoritarian left mainly to sort of talk about what we don’t collect. So we wouldn’t collect the papers of a political party or we wouldn’t collect, and that’s not because they shouldn’t be collected, it’s just within the realms of what we do and the kind of movements that we’ve been associated with. It wouldn’t be the right place for it to be as well. We don’t really collect very much. We have collected one around housing, an archive around housing struggles and we are now collecting one about anti-militarised, anti-militarisation campaigns and peace movements in a much broader kind of spectrum. But things come to us and we do kind of acknowledge that our collection is partial and we would not ever sort of pretend otherwise. But yeah, I think anti-authoritarian really speaks to that relationship with like, different sort of organisational structures rather than trying to say this specific type of left organising as well. But we also work collectively. So in terms of who chooses, we have bigger discussions about who takes, whether we take that archive. And that could also be to do with space and also whether it sort of fits within that. And we also try and work with smaller archives as well. We’re part of the Network of Radical Libraries and Archives. And again, so the Feminist Library in Peckham or the George Padmore Institute, like, we hope to, we work with them within that network to try and kind of bridge those gaps without realising that we have to take everything ourselves. I think that answers the question.

[Janice Cheddie] So, yeah. So Alia, because I’m very aware, because it’s an archive of male prisoners, and if you look at, you know, the history of kind of Palestinian [inaudible] there’s been very prominent women taken into that, but also outside in terms of the, how the families gather support, that women’s voices are very prominent. And also, some of your work has also been done about chanting and singing and those kinds of songs. And I was just wondering about that relationship between this archive, which is about a very particular experience, a very particular time frame, and how does it relate to the kind of networks of solidarity which are both inside and outside of the present in relation to that, because there are obviously a defined exclusionary [inaudible], male prisons, male prisoners and stuff like that. So that is one level of exclusion, but are there other exclusion boundaries when the archive that you’ve talked about, that you can witness?

[Alia Al-Sabi] I mean, this archive only records the cultural production of the prisoners’ movement in that period of time. But they’re still producing. They’re not producing as much as they did before. Because their activity and that, their activities in the 70s and 80s were also a way to reinforce their political collectivity, which the Israeli authorities understood quickly and then tried really hard to break over time, which is why the prisoners’ movement is not as unified as it was back in the day. But there’s still a lot of symbiosis between the actions that happen inside prison and the production that happens inside prison and the prison writings in general, today, and how it sort of travels to the world outside. There are also lots of prison writers, prison writing. There’s a lot of, sorry, there’s a lot of prison writing that is produced by women. It’s more contemporary, which is not the focus of my research right now. But as you know, incarceration is actually one of the most common ways that Palestinians are subjugated to Israeli occupation. So every family has at least one or two members who were previously or currently incarcerated, and that includes both men and women. The women are a smaller subset of Palestinian prisoners, political prisoners, but they do exist. I am still not sure if there is an archive that exists of their writings in that period of time. There are contemporary writings that I’m aware of, which are incredible. But, yeah, I’m not sure if that answers your question, but it’s an ongoing sort of production that there’s always, there’s always like this very strong line, lifeline between prisoners inside prison and the Palestinian community outside, just by default of them being so, you know, Palestinian prisoners being so pervasively like part of all, the most, mostly families who live in Palestine.

[Janice Cheddie] So, yeah. So I understood, I mean what’s, because there are lots of archives which exist in a whole range of languages, which are held by individuals. So what’s the relationship with you, because you’re not working with a collection. What is your relationship with the actual thing which are collected by communities of solidarity?

[Anasuya Sengupta] I think for us a lot of it is about, as I was saying, sort of the human infrastructure of memory work, which is to bring people in relation and relationality with each other, because part of the ways in which we can be in comradeship, not just in allyship, I think, is to share practice, is to be witness, is to express each other’s memories in different spaces in ways that are testimony. And so for us, it’s, we have, our team includes feminist archivists themselves, but again, not those who might be formally trained, but who have created archives. For instance, one of the people who leads the Liberatory Archives and Memory programme is co-founder of a wonderful design archive in Malaysia called the Malaysian Design Archives, which includes archives about design but also about the queer community in Malaysia. Another is from Egypt and has worked on feminist archiving in Egypt. And the ways they think about this is, as you were asking, not just about collections, but about practice. So part of what we’re trying to do is to honour the artifact, but to honour the legacy of practice beyond the artifact. So that that is one of the ways in which we can build strength, I think, and power in archiving, in memory work on our own terms.

So you were asking, for instance, in a sense, the right to refusal as part of how do you select. So if you’re thinking about archives and archivists and memory workers on our own terms, some of it is about knowing what we want to offer the world and to do it on our own terms versus what we want, might want to refuse, or we might want to preserve in different ways than is open, as we often think about the word ‘open’. So we ask ourselves again, as we are open source evangelists, and at the same time we ask ourselves the question of power all the time. Open for whom? Open with whom? Open for what and why? So, for instance, indigenous scholars and memory workers who work with us will talk about sacred knowledges that are not meant to be shared or meant to be shared only very carefully and thoughtfully and intentionally. And yet Wikipedians might turn around and say, but no, everything needs to be on Wikipedia. Everything needs to be in Wikimedia Commons. So how do we negotiate those different layers of openness on the terms of the memory worker or the memory community itself?

[Janice Cheddie] I mean, I suppose one of the things that come, that comes up, which I think across the archives, which perhaps is perhaps a bit more difficult to articulate, is this, it was used in the beginning of this idea of gratitude, but I think there was a kind of reading which I read from one of the texts that you were circulated, which is, comes from the Southern California Library Association, which is a kind of collection of radical collections based in the States. And they have a users agreement and they talk within that, which is unspoken, but the cost of collecting this work. Now, they don’t detail what the cost is, but in recognising that there has a cost and there’s a cost of collecting that work and the cost, even though you’re using it for free, is something which should be recognised. And in having that, there is also a debt to the user.

If there is a cost, I don’t know if any of you agree with that. I mean, I’ll just talk about the Panchayat Collection because there is a cost of when people have collected the work unfunded, it’s been stored in people’s houses, but also the cost to the artist of giving the work to be distributed. And often that work’s unrecognised, unsung, and maybe the person who comes afterwards, it then becomes a vehicle for them to kind of use it to fulfil a whole range of other uses. So the question is, I suppose, is how we negotiate that, because I think it’s the kind of thing that needs to be present, because most of this is not done by people who have been paid for doing the work. There has been often a very deep cost to the archive. What, how do we articulate the cost? Do any of you want to speak to that?

[Alia Al-Sabi] I mean, I can begin. That’s a, that’s a really good question because I feel like especially with this archive, which is, I would consider an endangered archive, they’re dealing with very, very, very small budgets. It’s really under-resourced and under-preserved. Their books exist in very, you know, conditions that are not suitable for what this archive represents, I would say. But because of the political situation and also some corruption involved, there’s a lot of neglect, there’s a lot of neglect. And every time I visit the archive, I notice the signs of neglect accumulate on the covers of these books. But, you know, ultimately, I think it’s a question of survival. You know, it’s not a question of necessarily preservation at this point. And that preservation as survival, not necessarily as, you know, trying to get the resources to put them on better shelves or anything like that. There’s a real danger of these archives, being destroyed, looted, disappeared. And so I think, you know, this question of cost becomes difficult to navigate and negotiate because there’s a real kind of imminent danger.

And even in my work, I am always sort of butting up against just like the immediacy of it and the urgency of it, which sometimes inhibits my ability to, like, engage with it in terms of its content as much as I need to think of it as an object that needs to be saved. So yeah, I think, yeah, I think a lot, lots of questions on its access and futurity, for example, as we were talking about this panel, somehow become strange to consider, because of this imminent danger that these archives are always facing all the time.

[Janice Cheddie] Yeah. But what I was trying to get, which I think the agreement is trying to get, is the personal cost and whether there’s a repair that we need to acknowledge in, for the collectors, many who if we’re dealing with archives from the 1970s and onwards, are actually often still alive. And I think that was what I was trying to get at, because there’s a huge personal cost within the archives that you’re dealing with. And I suspect that some of the kind of contents of the notebook are not discursive. Some of them are deeply personal in the whole kind of ways. And it was a, it’s trying to kind of recognise the cost that those communities take in gathering that material, preserving that memory. How do we then acknowledge, perhaps, that there is a repair, perhaps there’s even a debt for those who come behind. Do you want to speak to that Anasuya?

[Anasuya Sengupta] I could, but very humbly because I think it’s an enormously important question and a very difficult one. And I think that understanding of repair and care is central to the way we work. But it’s also messy because even as you want to acknowledge and hold and repair and multiple forms of cost because the emotional, intellectual labour, as well as the cost of offering to the world, you know this, the cost is of multiple kinds, and the cost of just surviving as you do this, is hard to quantify financially. And yet there has to be some way in which we understand that. But it’s also hard to know, because there’s been so many people at the heart of this legacy, of this practice of memory that all we can do, I think, in the ways that we try and do it, is to reach out to those that feel like they are at the heart of the communities that we’re working with and ask them to think about how they would define these practices. So whether it’s honouring those that they seek the advice of, honouring those who contribute, what are the different forms of honour? What are the different forms of respect and repair that we can, that we can offer?

So just for it as a practice, we hold as, you know, everyone who, advises us or participates in convenings that we do, we make sure that they are, that they are supported financially and otherwise, because so often we are in convenings and we are in meetings where the honour is assumed, of just presence, right? That you, that you’re being invited to something and therefore you should feel enormously grateful for that without the gratitude actually being reciprocal. So that reciprocity, that relationality, I think, is at the heart of that, of the repair. But I also acknowledge how difficult it is and how complex it can be. But we need to ask that question you’re asking all the time.

[Janice Cheddie] I mean, going to the question of access, I suppose, because there’s a lot of talk about access, equality of access. But there’s very little discussion, particularly as we move into the digital, of where, of what are the frameworks that we should be using to talk about access? Because particularly if we look at the relationship to artists, there’s an assumption of like, the archives of Black artists should be freely available to the current generation without recognition of IP or whatever. But what are the frameworks? Are they ethical, that we need to talk about? Are they legal? Because if we look at the British state in particular, you know, the National Archives has actively destroyed archives and the position to for those communities to access of [openly a legal?] recourse. So where are we positioning ourselves? Is it simply that an ethical thing of where you say that these archives should be accessible, or is it something that we actually need to talk about? If we’re going on a rights-based approach at a time when international law has seemed to be ineffectual, how do we articulate the, that, you know that, how do you have a framework that we agree with? What is that access to be based on? Do you want to talk to that, Rosemary?

[Rosemary Grennan] Yeah. I suppose with, say, something like Leftovers, which takes a very kind of open access approach, we do also have some limits within that as well. So it’s more things that have previously circulated in a public, like it could be, it’s not just journals. I gave the example of Spare Rib. It’s also flyers. It’s also posters. It’s also things that have been used previously to kind of often organise or galvanise movements or get people to come to protest or this sort of material as well. And we took, yeah, we, it was a, I suppose, a political decision that we thought that they should remain part of the movements that they previously, like the documentation of those movements as well. However, things like personal, I think there’s also a discussion about like, shouldn’t necessarily digitise everything and there’s some that, and we don’t digitise internal personal papers or any of that because, yeah, again, also, that’s to do with respect and permission, but also to do with, they weren’t previously a public document and they should not be that as well.

In terms of, I often think that access ultimately does really come down to a legal framework that one might not agree with. And there’s always, I think, always some argument not for open access. And that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be thought through and it shouldn’t just be a blanket thing. But I do think often these are much more institutional legal frameworks than they are actually ethical or political kind of stances on that as well. So we have taken that position. And so far no one’s asked us to take anything down. So fingers crossed as well.

I also, I mean, it reflects a bit back on your previous question as well. We’re very lucky to have an archive that a lot of the people are still alive, and we have close relationships with our depositors, and we try and involve them in the conversation about that archive. But also it really brings up an idea of, like, the value of the material that they’re depositing and also who it belongs to as well. And some people will have meticulously indexed their whole lives, and that is a great effort and also does us a lot of, saves us a lot of work. And some people just have some flyers that they’ve kept in the back of their closet. And I’m really interested in the sources of where these archives come from. But if you look at our Leftovers or our catalogue authors are actually the, as I said, the field that is missing the most because they are groups, they are collectives, they are individual. They’ve chosen to remain anonymous. They’re one person pretending to be a lot of people, or they’re a lot of people pretending to be one person. And so this is quite interesting in terms of rights and access, because actually those frameworks are not usually talking about these kind of movements. And I think, yeah, I always find that quite interesting.

[Janice Cheddie] Yeah, I mean, just for the final question, because there’s been the concept of gathering of archives, particularly when we’re talking about social movements. You know, there’s lots of networks and solidarities. But at the heart of it, there’s actually defiance, state spaces of refusal. As custodians and scholars at these archives how are these kind of multi-faceted nature of these archives, how have they transmitted across generations, across particular historical contexts but also perhaps across languages as well? Because that, how do we do that while holding on to the kind of power of something which actually keeps behind that refusal to not to be reduced to something which is not human? How do we hold on to that?

[Anasuya Sengupta] I think we’re all looking at each other. Another excellent question.

[Alia Al-Sabi] I mean, I guess I also want to speak a little bit to the question of access and then tie into this question, because I always have this dilemma of working with this archive. I’m just a PhD student toiling away in the archive doing my thing, but I always wonder whether its obscurity is actually what protects it. And so I would sometimes fear it getting attention and then that’s when it gets destroyed. So, you know, I do see it as a site of refusal. The from, from what I’ve seen, these prisoners were reading Cuba, Haiti, you know, Algeria was like, definitely like a strong sense of the global struggle in that moment. And I feel like that continues.

And I know from my encounter with this archive, you know, it really sort of, it really energised and enlivened my imagination of what could be done in this moment by seeing the sort of heritage and legacy of resistance that, you know, just travels across time and never stop. And I think the challenge is to find ways to activate, you know, these, archives and that moment in time into the present. And there’s always a fluidity. And I think that’s also an element of how these archives can be haunted, because there’s a sort of disruption of linearity, linear time. There’s the past is always the present is always the future. And so I think, for me, my approach to thinking of these archives is to think of them not just as objects, but as living organisms. Yeah, I think that’s what I would say.

[Rosemary Grennan] I think also maybe going on from this as well is that we do digitise a lot and put stuff online, but we don’t put everything, because you can’t because also it takes a really long time. But it is really important to have that space. And I think that’s where a lot of those relationships and also things that can be kept under wraps, everything doesn’t have to be available. Being able to hold that material, read through it in a kind of like longer way for like, younger generations is hugely important, to have that space, to be able to also discuss that thing, the things that they’re looking at, which I think maybe you don’t often get with these big kind of repositories as well. And I think that can be a space of kind of ongoing defiance in conversation with that historical material. And I think that’s really important because I think above everything Mayday Rooms thinks of the archive as this kind of like social relation that is hugely important in political work as well.

[Anasuya Sengupta] I think it’s such an important question and simultaneously a difficult one, because it’s, it in a sense encapsulates all the contradictions of our world because on the, just even as an archive, in some ways an archive at, in the formal definition and practice of it is a very structured space. And yet we’re talking about it as a site of defiance, as you said, of resistance, of being ungovernable. And so how do we, in a sense, make sense of what is seemingly contradictory in this structure and non-structure in defiance and memory, in artifact versus refusal? And I think part of it is, and in again, it’s so important in the digital world to ask this question because so much in the digital world is about recency, because what we know best is what is most recent, of our memory, of our knowledge.

So even as I invoke Akka Mahadevi from eight centuries ago, she’s an exception. Her vachanas and other vachanas that have come to us through oral transmission is almost, is such an exception to the almost boulder-like version of what’s happened in the last twenty years. Because the internet is all about the last twenty years. And even on that, even the archives of defiance and resistance that are digital are on proprietary platforms that could immediately, like Instagram, half of our most extraordinary archival work by independent folks, by individuals, by collectives, especially in different languages, is on Instagram. That’s it. Facebook turns it off tomorrow. They censor, they shadow ban, which they do all the time. And it’s over. So I think, again, all your questions are so important, Janice, because I don’t know whether they have glib responses and I don’t think they should, but I think they are the questions we have to continually ask ourselves in order to be defiant and ungovernable and memory workers of respect and repair.

[Janice Cheddie] Okay, so I’d like to thank all the panel because it’s been very wonderful conversation, and do speak to them in the break and I’m sure they’re willing to answer questions. And again, thank you to Vasundhara for inviting us to the panel. So thank you everyone for coming.