About the UK Community of Practice Knowledge Production Series
This essay is part of the Liberatory Archives and Memory (LAMy) UK Community of Practice knowledge production series. Together, memory workers, artists, and archivists share reflections, research, and creative practices that reimagine archives as
living, collective spaces of resistance, healing, and liberation.
By Dr. Savita Vij, Co-Founder, History Trunkies
Familiar Strangers
Over 30 memory workers, mostly from Global majority backgrounds walk into a room in Brighton on a sunny Saturday morning for a weekend together. What’s the punchline? Reflecting on the LAMY Brighton gathering in April 2025, our subconscious memories of the impact were activated as a team of co-designers. Having met a number of times virtually before the event, we had consciously designed for discovering links between “us”; hosting participants from different localities and niche projects. The intentions were to give space for attendees to co-create the experience – yet in a climate of digital, often hybrid working, making these connections in practice was not taken for granted. We shared the familiarity of working in heritage, yet mostly as strangers to each other’s work.
Open-Mic Curating
A highlight and the subject of this musing was the open-mic “spotlights”, where participants stepped up and curated their work. They provided audio-visual trailers of archival projects, immersive experiences and thought-provoking questions. Creative interpretations of various archives were poignantly presented as guided local heritage walks, poetry, photography and the re-imagining of objects as part of customs rather than (colonial) cupboard curiosities. 1
Devika curated “Uncomfortable Oxford” tours in which she uses play to engage her audiences in being curious about the colonial nature of curiosity itself. This is to navigate tours of collections classified as part of the 16th century “age of discovery” like the Pitt Rivers and Natural History Museum.
Photography was also playfully illuminated in “The Gate Darkroom” project based in South East London.2 Run by Caro Gervay, it gave a glimpse of family photographs being re-framed from stillness to the stories around them. The provocation was of self-curated images of Vietnamese women in the diasporic space questioning what was beyond the frame? This was explored in collective gatherings and conversations around their own photographs and experiences.
Whilst Marcia Michael, exhibiting her work at the Midlands Art Centre Birmingham, brought her mother (who has passed away) into the room as part of her current archival work, titled “The Family Album”. Poetry was used to communicate the dilemmas encountered of holding on to your core and body amongst patriarchal relationships.
Carol Ann Dixon raised other conflicts as she viewed the work of Carrie Mae Weems, notably “From Here I Saw What Happened and Cried’. As a lens-based artist, Weems dialogues with the photographs taken of enslaved people of African descent in the American South during the 19th century, as well as early-20th century archival images depicting the Jim Crow era of racial segregation. Whilst Dixon asks us about the educative potential and also harm of witnessing this documentation?
What struck me most in processing the impact of these sessions was an amplification of what I experience when immersed in archival spaces – being aware of deep emotional investments. I experienced this as an audience member in links between projects and personal lives with family members or ancestral ties. Geographies that archivists/curators connected with whether rural England or ancestral areas such as Vietnam or the Caribbean. Identifying issues that brought to the fore strong feelings. And the bringing to life of what can often be invisibilised, “closed”, restricted or merely an abstracted collection of objects/texts.
‘We’, as living archives
It is in these non-transactional moments of relating to participants as co-curators, sharing and unpacking their archival journeys and questions that I described in the post-reflection that as memory-workers “we are living archives”. Living Archives, as cultural theorist Stuart Hall describes are:
“…present, on-going, continuing, unfinished, open-ended. The new work which will come to constitute significant additions to the archive will not be the same as that which was produced earlier….This notion of ‘living’ is strongly counter-posed to the common meaning accorded to ‘tradition’, which is seen to function like the prison-house of the past.” (Hall, 2024 p89)
I use this term to capture participants’ being immersed in their work, where the boundaries between archival work and self-investments are blurred. Such as Nathaniel Telemaque’s production of a “Black Geographies” newsletter – engaging with place-based research of the landscape of Kings Hill, Dominica, using photography, research and local conversations; distributed back into these places.3 The past and archival sources can be seen as “companions” in the way Azoulay (2019, p16) describes it, rather than knowledge conquests. There is an instinctive sensitivity towards being ethical in the research. Redefining contact with institutional archives and heritage spaces which can confine and imprison the past; whilst active and playful readings through the camera lens or physical travel actively attempt to release it. In expansion of Hall’s notion, it is also thinking about how archives also live within and pass between us.
Emotional Inheritance
I connect it with psychotherapist Galit Atlas’s work on emotional inheritance. Feelings, unspoken, and unresolved traumas that pass on inter-generationally, can appear unexpectedly. In this space of memory work, it can show up as grief of losing heritage when ancestors pass or discussing violence behind the photo frame. In the case of this reflection, it especially relates to the emotions that arise when sharing histories of slavery, colonialism and the changing faces of racism. Venturing into the archives brings up the discomfort of navigating our own histories held in “official” archives. Or even knowledge withheld.
Iman Khan, takes the spotlight and inquires into her angst of academic institutional archives. She explores the links universities have with reproducing violence through ties to weapons production deployed in regions which reflect ancestry. There is an acknowledgement about the lack of conscious awareness of the links our own institutions may have. Whilst Nadine Aranki, as part of “Curate Brent” reflects on how to decolonise the museum space without reproducing being objectified – complex histories turned into, lets say, a porcelain teapot, which we collectively problem-solve in relation to common experiences of this.
Was this coincidental? In designing for connecting we thought expansively about bringing our whole selves in. The unintended impact was the exchanges of experiences that enable living and emotional inheritance to breathe. Being hosted by LAMY to process and question not just what we think, but what we feel about our work was priceless.
Atlas in her therapeutic practice speaks of how the “ghosts of the past are alive in our unconscious. To some degree, we are all gatekeepers of the unspeakable” (Atlas, 2022. ‘Emotional Inheritance’, p233). When memory workers from global majority backgrounds connect over our own histories, the punchline of the event for me is in the possibilities of archival work in the face of what may have been unspeakable. To speak through the archives, activate them as dynamic spaces of social connections. In doing so, this can hold space for traumatic legacies. Engaging in healthy bickering over the interpretations of tradition (which we experienced in Brighton). And, most importantly, gain the opportunity to connect collectively with the past and the struggles which go on.
References:
- Hall, Stuart. (2024). Selected Writings on Visual Arts and Culture: Detour to the Imaginary. Edited by Gilane Tawadros, Duke University Press, JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.15854247. Accessed 14 July 2025.
- Atlas, G. (2022). Emotional Inheritance: A Therapist, Her Patients, and the Legacy of Trauma. Little, Brown Spark. New York.
- Azoulay, A. (2019). Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. Verso. London.
Dr. Savita Vij is an educator and researcher focusing on community histories and facilitating learning experiences. She runs the platform History-Trunkies offering educational workshops and is currently undertaking an MA in History exploring Indian student activism in the 1900s. She studied Cultural Studies at Birmingham University and her career has included working in research for documentary dramas (Talespin Talkies), policy work (Runnymede Trust) and journalism (Asian Times and other publications). Current projects include ‘Antiracist Histories of Birmingham’ 1940s – 2025 with BRIG (Birmingham Race Impact Group) and commemorating the project ‘1964: Making History’ – Malcolm X’s visit to Birmingham through the archival histories of the Indian Workers Association.
Footnotes