[Ellie Porter] Okay well, firstly, I mean, thank you so much for such insightful and compelling presentations. I also wanted to thank you, Vasundhara, for putting on such an amazing programme today, and I think that sometimes archiving is seen as a real solo endeavour and actually it’s not at all, it’s a communal endeavour, and I think this set of conversations, this set of presentations actually emphasise the urgency and necessity of this kind of work for the present moment. And kind of referring kind of back to the way that this conversation is framed around dreamkeeping from the Langston Hughes poem, I guess kind of what connects all of your different approaches is that you’re kind of drawing your sources, you’re finding kind of inspirational points of reference, kind of in various different places, in art, in poetry, in community, in the ecology and I think that’s, that’s really significant. But also the, you know, the many possibilities that can emerge when you approach archives, you know, with imagination and you actually kind of lean into the entangled and the unruliness and the unknowable. So I thought I’d just open up the conversation – and just to say as well that we’re not going to ask the audience to respond but if you would like to ask the speakers any questions after our discussion that would be great. I thought I’d actually just begin by asking about dreamkeeping and if this resonates with your own work and your own methodologies in any way, and by dreaming I kind of mean it in the political sense, the dream, the necessity of dreams, rather than the idea of the kind of wonder or awe that, Thai you were referencing. It’d be great to hear what your thoughts are.
[Christine Eyene] I think maybe from my perspective it’s sort of reflecting what George was doing when he documented District Six, so his view has always been that he was creating an archive for the future, and for me, you know, that’s, I think the dream is maybe that one day his work is recognised, but not just for the sake of being recognised, because it speaks to, you know, chapters of the Black British history that that’s not being spoken about and also it sort of helps contextualise works by other artists, for instance, he was commissioned by the Times Educational Supplement in ’71 to take pictures of Handsworth, and for me, when I look at John Akomfrah’s work, I mean, like, ‘Handsworth Song’, you know, I think of George Hallett’s work that was created in ’71 and how you can create a sort of visual narrative and so for me it’s the dream is that, you know, we are given space to sort of yeah provide those narratives that are being overlooked by institutions. I mean, as far as I’m concerned.
[Thai Jones] Yeah, well, I, when I was reading the poem it, the poem describes people giving their dreams to someone for safekeeping, to protect those dreams from the rough realities, the rough fingers of the world, and you know, one thing that struck me when I was re-reading it today in the context of archives is that you know of course you can interpret that any number of ways and you know, part of what makes these archives stay fresh and relevant is that you can always bring new questions to them, you know, so you can look again at really any document, at any source, whether it’s a written source or an oral history or artwork, and you bring what’s in your mind today to those sources and that’s sort of part of how we keep turning again to the same questions over and over with a fresh perspective rooted in what we’re experiencing today so when I heard that poem today it was, it struck me that if you think of it in terms of archives and archivists and activists as, you know, people who can be or should be trusted with your trusted, with your information, with your sacred information, and can you know that they will be treated in a way that’s as you would wish and that’s something that obviously libraries and museums have not done historically. But I wonder, you know, you could read that in a different context and think of a totally different set of questions.
[Eddie Bruce-Jones] Yeah and I mean, I’m just, I resonate with the question of the necessity in dreaming and when I go into the archives and I’m flipping through these documents, I, I feel like if I don’t something bad will happen. If I don’t use imagination and I don’t dream because we are, you know, like Thai said, during your talk, Thai, you said, you know, these records weren’t created for us as audiences, they were created for a different set of users and those records aren’t the records that are going to keep the dreams and the way that we use them can be open and speculative and imaginative, or we can use them as a script, and using them as a script just isn’t an option if we want to retain the dreams that we have so I feel like it’s a necessity. And it’s, it’s also because we’re living with ghosts, you know, we’re living with our ancestors and with the accountability we have to the figures of the past, so.
[Ellie Porter] Tao do you want to comment on the question?
[Tao Leigh Goffe] Sure. I'm not sure, am I, can you hear me?
[Ellie Porter] Yes, I can hear you perfectly.
[Tao Leigh Goffe] Am I visible on the screen?
[Ellie Porter] Yes. Yeah.
[Tao Leigh Goffe] Well yeah, I guess it was really great to have this poem as a guide, because I think this idea of keeping is important and the question of who the keepers are, and I think it comes down to this question of safety and who we can trust, as Thai was saying, because, yeah, here in New York City, it was very apparent that Columbia University and many other universities were just ready to grasp all of the posters, the ephemera, the archives of the encampments before the protests had even ended. So I think this question of keeping of dreams is one that requires a lot of ethical forethought in terms of who is being entrusted, and who the dreams are being kept safe from. And the quote that I shared from Toni Morrison when she says, ‘we are dreaming all wrong’, it’s interesting that she juxtaposes dreams as different than truth and as different than art, so I’ll just leave that up there because I feel like we’re engaging with art maybe as imagination and a space to do something otherwise.
[Ellie Porter] I think I’d also just like to ask about self-archiving, just in response to you know Tao what you just said and Thai what you were saying and also, I guess, you know, Christine, thinking about, you know, George Hallett almost kind of documenting the world around him, basically, and in a sense how you’ve almost kind of continued that legacy on his behalf and are now kind of sharing it in this forum, kind of what do you feel maybe drives the necessity to archive and in reality, in a practical sense, what does that look like and what kind of support do you need as memory workers to actually sustain that work? I think that’s a really critical thing to kind of discuss.
[Christine Eyene] For me, it’s our experience as Black people where, you know, I don’t know, I grew up in France and I was born in France, and, you know, being told every time, oh, where are you from? You know, you’re made to feel that, you know, don’t belong. And so for me, this archive is about embedding our presence, but also for the younger generations to have a sense of our history, you know, our collective history and yeah, so that’s, for me that’s the importance. And then physically, like I said, I had those images for, I mean I came to England in 2001, so I came with some of these images but I didn’t have a sense at the time that I would do something with them, for me they were more like George’s images and they’re, I have a sort of like emotional attachment to them but little by little, you know, I realised that they were an important body of work. So the challenge that I’ve had is space and that was a great thing that Lubaina offered me the chance to be to bring those images to, to Preston. But now Lubaina is not at, I mean, the archive is moving, and so, yeah, the question of space and being able to digitise all of them, some of them are digitised, but not all of them, and as the previous panel was saying, there’s a cost to, you know, like in terms of time and yeah there is a cost attached to that and I guess a lot of us do that, you know, for free and, yeah, that’s my take on this.
[Thai Jones] Yeah well, you know, people create archives and when they do, it’s, you know, often to express who they are and you know, what they think is, is of value and often it is because they are utilising a technology to fulfil some type of a project, I mean, certainly the kind of, the vision of a, an imperial archive, the Archive of State is an archive that is intended to hold power and maintain control but when you think about someone like Yuri Kochiyama, you know, part of her collection is a series of guest books where she would invite people into a gathering place; I mean, I do think that sort of part of the inspiration for today’s conversations is from Yuri’s work, that she would invite and everybody who ever visited would sign a guest book and so now she has dozens of these books, which are just a manifestation of her sense about the socialness of building a social movement. But she also was involved in all of these organisational activities, so she has daybooks and Rolodexes and contact information and speeches so, you know she has constructed a system and part of what’s really amazing about that archive is that students can see how, how it was constructed and how the construct of her system allowed her to accomplish what she did. And so earlier speakers talked about Instagram and how so much of present archives, digital archives are relying on corporate power and, you know, Yuri’s archive did not rely on that but of course it had has its own limitations, it wasn’t searchable, it was, you know, it had its own thing, so sort of understanding the specificity of different technologies of information is key to thinking about what archives can do but the fact that it really also expressed her kind of human ideas is what makes that collection so powerful.
[Eddie Bruce-Jones] Yeah, I mean, what I also hear you asking in that question is how do you archive your, yourself and your own journey. So as in terms of, I mean, I wish I kept a journal because Tao mentioned that at the beginning we were thinking about trying to get all this stuff digitised, and filling some gap in the structures that exist to try to take it on ourselves so we could take control of the archiving. But then, then the other aspect is archiving the journey and the process and the frustrations and the new questions that arise in community, because it really is communal and having those stories passed on to others, so, so there isn’t really, I mean, for me, it’s not about documenting necessarily, but about making sure that something’s transmittable and, and has a life in community, that, that becomes kind of the bigger part of the process to me, which is probably why I dismiss my own impulse to just write everything, because there’s so much conversation still to be had.
[Tao Leigh Goffe] Yeah, I would add that we have to confront the taxidermy impulse of what it means to archive and the kind of morbid way in which what is preserved, you know, becomes suspended in a way. And Eddie and I really grappled with that over the past several years and I’ve become very wary of institutions, such as one in Germany that talked about digitising the world, this idea of having and holding and keeping everything and I really think that what Christine said is true about space. We need space in many different ways. But that includes not only data and storage space and cloud space, but it also includes the kind of physical and emotional space to do this work that is so heavy. So, yeah, I think that there’s a lot that we can think about in terms of how institutions are able to give us as practitioners that space, and that they really should put money behind it. It should be incentivised. So, yeah, it’s been great just navigating that landscape, in terms of grant funding, with Eddie and we’re lucky to be able to have the money and the space to work across institutions, to ask these ethical questions and not only questions of capturing everything, but actually to consider the question of capture itself.
[Ellie Porter] Yeah, I think that’s such an important point, that there needs to be programmes of support, like networks of support to enable people to actually do this work, which is challenging in many, many different levels. And that needs to be kind of financial, emotional, kind of we all need to be part of a community, which has is part of an ongoing conversation, which I think why this forum in and of itself is really significant. So with that kind of in mind, just thinking about, like, the kind of time and the depth of engagement that’s actually needed to do this really urgent work, basically, there’s a kind of contrast between the kind of urgency and then the time in the in depth engagement that’s required to do it in a way that is ethical, that isn’t formulaic, that doesn’t kind of replicate structures of the past. What do you kind of feel is the particular experience of engaging with archives in certain contexts and certain spaces, just thinking about the institutional, the personal or the private space, and also I kind of wanted to just delve a little bit into, before I move on to the digital, what the significance is of kind of handling physical material, kind of what kind of knowledge can you acquire, can you kind of engage with when you’re actually handling material you’re able to touch, you’re able to kind of spend time with without being looked at, I think that’s another key thing, kind of what is the environment that’s required to truly engage with archival material?
[Eddie Bruce-Jones] I can start off, I guess, the, yeah, I mean, I’ll have to say, as much as I think it is really important to go beyond, I’m really nerdy when it comes to sitting in an archive for hours and hours and like, poring over these old documents. I think one aspect, like many of us have mentioned, these colonial records are crumbling and so part of it is having physical space and the resources to be able to handle material and have it be made available. The other is being able to access the material in such a way that you can look at it over prolonged periods of time because, you know, I’ll go into an archive and there’ll be a stack of 150 indenture documents and they’re A3 and they’re very, you know, finicky, and to actually look at them and to really spend time with them, study them, to look at the handwriting, to figure out how the connections can be drawn between them, to read between the lines about what’s written and what probably is closer to an accurate representation of what people were experiencing, or why they decided to write what they wrote, it takes so much time that if they’re not digital, then you just really need even more time to spend with them. But it’s, it is something, you know, it’s not just a text on a page, it’s an artefact, and to actually be able to get a sense of some of the historical context, it’s important to spend time with the physical artefacts, which is why I do think, you know, the physical sense of this material is really important and digitising it does trans, it transfers it into a different format where there’s something lost because you, I don’t know, there’s something in an encounter and the ability to imagine certain things gets translated, in a way. So, yeah.
[Christine Eyene] Yeah, I think, I mean, I go back to this idea of space, like physical space. I know, for instance, for myself, I need, I need to be able to lay all those pictures and like, all the different elements of, you know, of the archive and yeah, what you’re saying about, like the, having the actual artefacts and, yeah, it’s a different experience. And also I’m thinking, also coming back to the idea of space, I also feel that, you know, the, having the those images and the, you know, those work, those works within institutions, because I always feel that when you do an exhibition, when you’re engaging with the institution, there is also a political space, you know, what’s, what space is given to which stories, you know, which stories are being overlooked or, or neglected, and I and I feel that in the case of George Hallett, I mean, there are institutions and they know who they are that could have engaged with his work before, before me. And, and yeah so that’s something that I’m, I’m sort of like, trying to tackle. Yeah. Space.
[Thai Jones] Well, I’m going to answer especially in the context of saying something about digital, just in case we don’t have time to, to go to another question, but, you know one of the things that’s important, I think, when you consider the difference between seeing the original materials and then putting them in a digital archival format is the way that the context of the overall original archives can be distorted. So I think you do want to find some way digitally to reproduce some of the impact of the documents themselves in terms of scale, for instance, and materiality. But often you can, you know, intentionally or unintentionally misrepresent the archive itself so, for instance, you often see institutions that are trying to represent themselves as diverse institutions, strategically digitising and prioritising collections related to marginalised people, and then you end up with a digital version of an archive where the stories of people of colour are, are you know, are much more present online than they would actually be and so there’s a way that the sort of the radical erasure of those stories is being lost as they move into a digital format. So there’s a lot of, you know, really important questions that need to be considered as you make that translation.
[Christine Eyene] Yeah, maybe if I can add I mean that’s also an issue I have because for me it’s also about you know, who, who gets access to this archive and who’s physically present in those spaces and you know, I want to take a example of Lubaina Himid’s work, forgetting the, Naming the Money, where you see those installations of, you know, African, you see these, these cutouts of African people, you know, in the space and, and for me it’s also about us as Black people having access to those spaces where, you know, sometimes, they are, they can feel quite hostile and, and so I feel that, you know, having access to the physical object and institutions facilitating that, because I’m not sure how many people, you know, would go to the Tate Archive, you know, will they feel included? Would they feel that they belong? I know that for a long time, even when I was a student in art history in Paris I didn’t feel like I belonged in a gallery. So I think also the physical presence in the space, you know, yeah, manipulating those objects that can sometimes be, you know, reserved to ‘specialists’, I think it’s, this physical presence is very important as well.
[Tao Leigh Goffe] Yeah, and I would say there is something definitely sacred, I nerd out like Eddie at the idea of the texture of the paper and just being in the physical archive, and our task has been how to translate that experience to those who may never have stepped foot in the archive, but to also make them feel that it is accessible. Because oftentimes, even when archives are public, it’s not clear to the public that that’s the case. So we are developing our website to really be a kind of immersive experience that brings the user to what a mangrove might be like and I would say as much as touching the actual physical indenture contracts from the 1800s, actually going on a swamp tour in Trinidad and being with the mangroves made me able to imagine a kind of sensorial experience and kind of hope for the sort of refuge and the kind of people who could have hidden in those mangroves. So it’s, it allows a kind of speculative sense of engaging with the archive to actually be in the country, to actually engage with community members there and to think about what these archives mean to the people that are there so, Eddie and I have made efforts to work with local technologists in Trinidad for that reason but we’re still, it remains to be seen how we’ll grapple with this multi-sensorial question, like, how do we give you a sense of the humidity of the Caribbean and the crumbling of the paper?
[Ellie Porter] We have such a short time left and there’s so much more to discuss but I wondered if you kind of wanted to also comment on the sensorial but also I really wanted to ask as well as the kind of final question, really, how you feel the archives, either in a digital space or physical space, can actually be mobilised or activated, I guess to help us respond to the present. How do we actually, yeah, activate and create a relevance to the present moment, kind of how do you balance the needs of the past or the needs to kind of preserve and the needs of the, the now?
[Christine Eyene] I think briefly, for me, the collection needs to be digitised and I have my own website that I created, so I’ve put some, even preparing this I had to, like, go back into the exhibition I did in 2005, but also it would help connect these, some of George’s images with the works of other artists like Peter Clarke, Gavin Jantjes and also Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, who did, who has a painting, whose, like, that really resembles a photograph by George Hallett so it’s also, yeah, sort of giving access to this, iconography also of Black resistance, yeah, from the 70s, yeah, yeah.
[Thai Jones] Yeah well, I, you know, in a sense, I think that one of the most important things we can do is to share the skills and practices of research and to make sure as many people as possible are empowered to understand how to use the archives, to feel comfortable going into the archives and creating their own new knowledge and challenging sort of received wisdom from the past and training people, showing people how historians and others have used the archives for nefarious ends, really shows people that they can go in and use the same materials for their own purposes.
[Eddie Bruce-Jones] Yeah and in thinking of a colonial archive and what it means to have an integrated set of materials, and the colonial records are notoriously in, you know, not digitised and I think digitising them would give us a really good view of that part of the archive but because those dreams haven’t been captured in those records, the archive is so much more expansive that there are other materials that could should also be made accessible, whether digitally or not. But yeah, to have complete records would at least provide that text in its, you know, in its fullness, to allow us to use it in coordination with all the other artefacts that we’ll need to view.
[Tao Leigh Goffe] And I would say we need to take the slide that I saw by Thai of liberating the archive seriously, if we’re talking about land back and repatriation, what would it mean to give the archives back? What would it mean to truly find living descendants to whom these objects are significant? And I would say that we’re seeing this more and more but museums could invite artists to activate archives and collections and to remix them, so I think there’s many possible creative ways to, to activate the archives that we can actually put money behind in terms of funding these initiatives.
[Ellie Porter] Thank you. Thank you so much.
Eddie Bruce-Jones is Professor of Law and Head of School of Law, Gender and Media at SOAS, University of London. His current work is an interdisciplinary history of British indentureship focused on the route between Kolkata and Kingston.
Tao Leigh Goffe is Associate Professor at Hunter College, CUNY, where she teaches classes on literary theorv and cultural history. She is the author of ‘Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean and the Origins of the Climate Crisis’ (2025).
Thai Jones is the Curator for History at the Columbia University Archives. He teaches critical research and the history of radicalism, and is the author of several books, including ‘More Powerful Than Dynamite: Radicals, Plutocrats, Progressives, and New York's Year of Anarchy’ (2014).
Christine Eyene is an art historian, critic and curator. She is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Art at Liverpool John Moores University and Research Curator at Tate Liverpool.
Ellie Porter works on independent projects with artists’ archives and organisations. She was formerly Head of Programme at the Art360 Foundation and developed the Recollect programme with support from DACS.