[Vasundhara Mathur] So nice to see you. Thank you both so much. And thank you for summarising that, because I was just trying to get, also, thank you all for coming. Oh my god, like, I can’t believe this has actually happened after months and months of planning it and talking to all of you. So we have about ten minutes for this conversation and I really want to kind of ask some questions that go a little deeper into all of your practices. Maybe, Aleema, your invocation to bring ourselves to the table a little bit. So, maybe I’ll start with you.
[Aleema Gray] Oh no!
[Vasundhara Mathur] I want to hear a little bit more about your process in curating this exhibition. And obviously we’ve spoken about this question of the institution and how we navigate it. I really, in thinking about this programme, it’s really complicated to curate a programme with so many, you know, all the people I wanted to invite are critical of the institution. So even when you’re approaching them from within you’re like, do you actually want to come here to talk about this? And if you do, how do I frame it in a way, how do we frame it in a way that we can make the space generative? Someone called it a takeover, you know, or someone, you know, but I think in general thinking of place, right? There’s space, there’s things, there’s objects, there’s material to interact with. What are the practices and how do we approach that material? I want to hear about your process in approaching the material at the British Library, and how you invited all these different collaborators in and built this public programme, in collaboration with musicians too to activate that archive, but also how to make space and make the place feel right, right for that.
[Aleema Gray] Wow, where do I begin? Yeah, it was a journey. The exhibition is very much a journey. Beyond the Bassline. Everything that I do, it starts with me just feeling my way through history, it starts from this kind of lived realm. And so I sit by the riverside in Portland, Jamaica. That’s where the idea kind of came from. So I was given the contract of, like, we want to document five hundred years of Black British music. Aleema, how can you curate this, you know? So it’s very much an impossible, so I must say that this is a partnership project between Dr Mykaell Riley’s Black Music Research Unit at University of Westminster. So he kind of gathered the research and he was like, he wants to do this. And I’m like, okay, so I kind of had to take myself outside of the institution for me to think, because I struggle to think inside these places. So I need to situate my feet within the community, within my community, within nature. So we talk about spaces and it sounds very mystical, but like making the space kind of tell the story in many ways, you know?
So I sat by the riverside and I was like, okay, what do we even mean when we talk about Black Britishness? What is Black Britain? And so I started asking myself a lot of these questions. How do I see myself as, because it’s not really a, I guess it’s not really an identity that I identify as. I’m kind of like Black in Britain, you know? So the ambivalence around these identities, and how can we bring that into one space and hold space. I guess in any exhibition I like to see it as a conversation, we’re inviting people into this conversation, and I wanted to make sure that there’s multiple different ways that people can engage with it. So I start from the outside. All of my work starts from the outside of these institutions. And I think about, what do I want people to know? And what, and how do I want people to feel? And so the feeling part comes very much within the design of the exhibition. So it’s very much thinking about space. So we think about the specificity of this British space.
So you was talking about water earlier, we start in the ocean, very much the ocean as a place that history happens, and then we end up in cyberspace. So I was kind of interested in some of the conversations around cyberspace, that each of these spaces tell a particular story. So I wanted people to feel like they’re going on this journey and sound is a part of that journey. But then also it’s like, what do we want people to know? How are we inviting them to think? And so part of that is thinking about what, you know, interpretation, people who work in interpretation would kind of describe as your key messages. When people walk away from the exhibition, what are the key things? And it’s definitely looking at music as a conversation. It’s documenting the African and Caribbean contribution to creativity, to innovation across time and space, across centuries. But then it’s also kind of pushing and disrupting. This is where that kind of House of Dread dynamic come into disrupting some of the isms and schisms around what’s popular culture. So a lot of people was probably expecting when they come to the exhibition, this is something that’s about punks and, you know, UB40 and all of these kind of stuff. And it’s like this conversation that we’re having, is actually the conversation that I’m having with people of African and Caribbean heritage first and foremost, and then secondly, you know, music fans and young people and so forth. So I guess a part of it is kind of just being unapologetic in many ways, like it just happens to be in this space of the British Library, but really it’s, yeah it’s a kind of Bun Babylon kind of methodology that we’re moving with.
[Vasundhara Mathur] Yeah. I think what you’re saying, it kind of rings true with the title of this panel, which is talking about responding to the archive. And I approached archives as a researcher, and lots of things happened to me in the archive. I worked on the Yuri Kochiyama collection that Thai shared a few images of. I cried in that archive. I didn’t feel wonder and joy all the time. I was crying. I was feeling worried and scared. And at one point I was reading a lot of letters by political prisoners and then got a scam call and thought I was actually being scammed because I was so embedded in the reality of, you know, what was going on with those people. And my work in response to that, my writing, and I could do that as a writer, was staying true to those feelings. But in terms of when you think about curating and creating space, how do these institutions, how does the internet and how we access it, how does, how do kind of, and I think what you’re talking about is maintaining things, but also how do we disrupt and change the structures that hold these collections, and how do we design responsive ways of holding them?
And I think maybe Abeera, it’s good to talk to you as a designer about that a little bit. How can we, you know, I always kind of bring this kind of ‘how might we’ question to the equation. Because there’s a lot of resistance when you, when it comes to grappling with history. Oh, can we touch that? Okay. Are you sure that’s, you know, and you’re like, well how could we? Could we make it happen? Because I think that how, you know, how does that kind of design question, because that question comes from design thinking.
[Abeera Kamran] No, absolutely. And as a designer, you’re always in problem-solving mode. Yeah. And so one of the kind of realisations I’ve had in my research and following from Mindy’s, Mindy speaking about how the internet, the materiality of the internet, traces the contours of the colonial, like, structure. And so I see that in my research all the time, like, even though all of the technology is there, it’s just that it’s set up in the wrong way. It’s set up in the, in the way that mirrors the same kind of like reductive, myopic ways of looking at the world and problem-solving. And so, and then, earlier on with Janice asking the question of what does it cost to archive, and whose...? And so I think, like, there’s something really wonderful that happened with these Urdu newspapers is like the politics of refusal. I mean, maybe we don’t need technology to solve anything. Maybe we don’t need to disrupt anything. Maybe just refusing, there’s something in that as well. And so I kind of, I take that as, when I’m working, I take that, my designer hat with a pinch of salt, like maybe I don’t, do I need to disrupt this? Is it, and what does it mean and how to do that?
[Vasundhara Mathur] Or does disruption mean solving something?
[Abeera Kamran] Yeah, yeah, exactly.
[Vasundhara Mathur] Because a lot of the problems that, kind of, we’re grappling with with these kind of questions is like, does something, can it be solved? No. But what can we do then kind of with what we have and what can we make, and how can we collaborate and bring people into the equation? Because I think this idea of archives as a way to bring people together in the digital and the physical realm is really what kind of inspired me putting this together. Yeah. I think that that is a really kind of, maybe that’s a good place for Mindy to come in. Because what you’ve created, Mindy, is a very responsive kind of mechanism, but it’s also challenging and it’s also fun, and it’s also kind of, yeah, it is responsive in many ways. So it would be really, and even just kind of the technology that we have right now of sending memes to each other, right? And like how we actually communicate with one another is like, oh yeah, I’ll send you this thing, look it up, I’ll send you that thing, look it up. You know, and I think there’s something to, say about embedding those kind of modes of loving one another and communicating and finding pleasure in, and Ajamu I think is going to go into this, finding pleasure in, in collecting things and gathering things in that kind of basket, Mindy, that you were talking about. Yeah. Maybe you want to expand on that a little.
[Mindy Seu] Yeah. I think the, similarly connected to what other people have spoken about, this idea, this project in particular really emerged from this idea of like grassroots archiving, how we can create like methods or frameworks for other people to do this intentional kind of collection on their own, and intentional storage. I think that because a lot of the works that I deal with are quite ephemeral and born digital, there wasn’t really an archival mechanism built into it. So when thinking about how to store them, it’s not quite media archaeological, but more so what are we intentionally choosing as a collective group?What is important to share for a specific community? And I think this is where the difference is, because some other organisations maybe have this approach of saving everything that’s ever published online, every meme that’s ever sent, every webpage ever published. But this actually almost starts to feel like a form of inundation or erasure unto itself because it’s so buried. So actually creating frameworks for people to intentionally save artefacts on their own might be a way to maybe encourage a bit more autonomy, but also provide some tools for how we can think about our own histories.
[Vasundhara Mathur] Absolutely. I think it also kind of poses the possibility of memory work being this really expanded, undefined practice. And many people with many different practices having the inclination but also the openness to approach archives and do things with them, you know. And what you said Abeera about like the detail, and paying attention to that detail, and being able to represent multiple commitments to things that other people might not be committed to, might, you know, I think that’s quite an opening in terms of ways forward, to disrupt and think about what this work could actually entail.
Sorry, I’m just seeing the two-minute sign that we need to kind of wrap up quickly. But do you have any kind of closing remarks in terms of how you’re feeling about these questions, something you wanted to say? Any of you?
[Mindy Seu] I have a quick thought. So I currently teach at UCLA. Three weeks ago there was an encampment for Gaza solidarity and that was brutally shut down, with little support from the institution. And after this, when we were looking at Royce Quad, there were all of these artefacts left over. Protest posters, tents, etc., and the UCLA libraries wanted to store and save these posters. To some degree, it’s important to consider like the longevity of these things as a marker of a specific moment. But there was a lot of pushback from SJP, the student body that was organising these, because it would almost serve as a token that the university could point to in twenty years, saying, like, ‘Look at this movement that happened here’. Maybe at that point they would change some of their positioning, but it just seemed a bit antithetical to the point of occupying that space to begin with. So I think this idea of storage and claim, it’s sort of positioning, that we can be very intentional about and also choose to withhold from an institution if that is considering, or is continuing to exemplify our points or our stance.
[Vasundhara Mathur] Exactly. Exactly. And I think, I think you’re right, this goes back to the first panel where Rosemary is working, from MayDay Rooms, is working on this brilliant project called Leftovers, thinking about these digital archives that people create on their own, that maybe they’re, maybe they anonymise themselves in putting them online. But what, you know, what does it mean to think about decentralising too, and, yeah, and still networking in different ways, connecting things in different ways, making them available in different ways. But how does the digital realm kind of offer us opportunities, thinking critically still, but offer us opportunities to do that differently and maybe use the institution as a place to talk about it, or a place to kind of use, you know? Yeah. Gather.
[Aleema Gray] Yeah. And I think it’s also just, echoing off that it’s also about, I guess, the thing that we must contend with, you know, moving in and out of these institutions is, you know, the question of ownership. Is the question of authority and ownership. And I think that’s something that, you know, keeps on resurfacing time and time again. You can do the work but who is owning these things that we’re gathering? As you know, as Mindy was saying, you know, it can become tokenistic. So opting out, and choosing to actually say no, becomes that kind of point of actually engaging with those affirmative methodologies as well.
Yeah, and I think, I don’t know, I think it was part of one of the reports I was reading, but there was this line saying ‘Nothing with about us without us’. Right. And these diversification modes, things that, you know, obviously they need to happen, but they need to happen in a certain way. And refusal is a big part of that. So I think, yeah, maybe that’s a good point to wrap it up and move to... Thank you so much. Thank you.
Aleema Gray is a curator, researcher and public historian. She is the Curator of ‘Beyond the Bassline: 500 years of Black British Music’ at the British Library, London, and founder of House of Dread, an anti-disciplinary heritage studio.
Abeera Kamran is a designer, web developer and researcher, working between Birmingham and Karachi. She is an AHRC funded PhD student at the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication at the University of Reading.
Mindy Seu is a designer and technologist. Her practice involves archival projects, techno-critical writing, performative lectures, design commissions and close collaborations.
Vasundhara Mathur was Tate’s research lead for Our Heritage Our Stories and curator of The Archive is a Gathering Place programme.