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Who does the work?

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.

Foreword

For this article, we came together as British-based researchers and artists with diasporic and Indigenous links to the global majority world. We wanted to reflect on our experiences of progressing issues of decoloniality within memory and heritage work. Following initial discussions at the 2025 LAMy convening in Brighton and then some of us attending Remix: Race & Representation in Bristol, we decided to co-produce a four-part narrative to address themes that emerged from our conversations, including GLAM workforce representation, practices of refusal, care and solidarity, alongside digital preservation of ancestral stories and community-held archival practices.
Who does the work? © Tosin Olufon

‘What I come across in the newspaper articles, doctor’s records, the infirmary register and even recent scholarship on Paul, are instances of relentless misunderstanding… these poems and experiments, then can only ever be a record of my search for parts of myself in the archive.‘ Remi Graves, Coal

The labour of decolonising UK archives rests largely on the shoulders of racialised people. This inequitable demand places an expectation that we will hold the space for the necessary repair work. This labour often drains the energy needed to imagine and build our lives, spaces and communities. Informed by ongoing discussions after the LAMy Brighton convening, we asked ourselves what happens when we stop trying to decolonise, how do we make space for self-development, and what community-held alternatives exist?

The wrong vibe by Erinma Ochu

Over a decade ago, I directed a public initiative where my office was based in a university museum. Some local community members refused to meet me there: the museum had ‘the wrong vibe’. Instead, we’d meet on a bench outside, or I’d visit folk on their patch. Over time, this refusal built connection and local investment. At an evening event for museum professionals, I experienced this wrongful vibe when encountering a sculpted head of a Benin King at a Norfolk museum. I was captivated yet felt watched. A curator rushed to my side, glass of wine in hand, gushing to tell me its history. I blurted out ‘Sorry, I don’t want to hear that story’. Museums are supposed to bring people together, but this schism silenced us both. Must we always cut through an atmosphere of pride in White privilege? How do we reconcile the colonial ruptures of diasporic and Indigenous heritage in the present? 

Why are you here? By Tosin Olufon

“Until the lions have their historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” Chinua Achebe, 1958

As diasporic and Indigenous communities, we are already rich in talent and story. Why spend our emotional energy defending our right to preserve our stories within colonial infrastructures that are slow to act or change, when some of the stories are mirrors that they would rather not face? When someone came to our door when I was little, and my father didn’t approve, he would ask, ‘Why are you here?’. As an Indigenous artist and researcher, I ask myself the same question in the digital space. Why am I here? Why have I chosen immersive technologies, like Virtual Reality, to preserve my heritage? What cost does silence bring? In the hands of the right craftsperson, a digital tool could move mountains. Immersive technologies empower me to authentically represent my ancestors’ voices as a form of decolonisation. To be absent from this space risks another form of colonisation. Big tech companies and heritage institutions often rethink their strategies when their profits or investments are at stake. Repurposing the master’s tools by designing systems of cooperation that acknowledge colonial history and redistribute value to benefit both parties, where the communities most affected receive a greater share, could offer a path to mutual liberation. As digital archives become subjected to the extractive logic of Artificial Intelligence we might also look to Care principles for Indigenous Data Governance as a means to consider Indigenous Peoples rights within and interests in digital archives.

Finding solidarity by Nadine Aranki

Producing exhibitions in an attempt to decolonise archives on limited time and often without safeguarding for what you will be exposed to in those archives, we have to ask what’s the point? Doing decolonising work often feels like rubbing salt into a wound, as the Arabic proverb says حط ملح على الجرح ḥuṭṭ miliḥ ʿalā al-jurḥ. Decolonisation is essential and must be done with Indigenous people with care, creativity and critical thinking. Without these practices, the process distracts from fighting real atrocities like genocides, and human-made starvations, but decolonisation remains an act of recognition and acknowledgement. So, we push through, decide to do it. And yet, we have to look after ourselves and support our families in our homeland.
The shadow of artist Nadine Aranki with other museum workers looking at the sea in the distance to which they had no access to due to checkpoints/ movement limitations © Nadine Aranki
Poetry offers a way to navigate the difficulties that we have talking about oppression, and is a space to create bonds. 

From the belly of the beast

From the belly of the beast

You can say the least

They care about everyone

But your life doesn’t matter

Especially when you go east

If you talk about the empire

You need to be subtle

Who said anyone’s an oppressor?

No need to mention attacks then

No need to mention attacks now

‘Cause the new empire doesn’t see you now

Like it did not see your ancestors if

You looked back

I wonder who became a settler in Canada?

Who worked on erasing its Indigenous

People?

It’s too “sensitive” to say their name upfront

I wonder how children in Palestine lose their

Life?

It’s a mystery but hush hush

The murderers’ emotions will be hurt if you

say it blunt.

Often the alternative for me is to foreground Indigenous people and ways of life: to place that above the colonial archive. For one exhibition, I placed herbs alongside the colonial object, and invited audiences to smell them. Decolonising archives then becomes a way to decolonise the senses. 

Whose knowledge counts by Abira Hussein

To exist in museums and archives, you have to be exceptional. These spaces are not easily accessible; conferences, networks, and opportunities may be open theoretically, but the routes are uneven, costly, and demanding. There are so few of us here, and those who are must navigate the weight of visibility and constant tests of legitimacy. My Somali heritage work has been shaped by long periods of unpaid labour. It taught me the contradictions of this space: having agency recognised and denied in the exact same moment; being expected to show gratitude for objects taken from our histories.

“The structural racial, class, and gender inequalities that exist within the museum echo the global structural inequalities born out of slavery, colonization, racial capitalism, and imperialism… Requests for the restitution of objects arise from a long history of dispossession that echoes extraction as a logic of racial capitalism.”
Françoise Vergès (2024)

These experiences are structural, not incidental. Job interviews and rejections are less about capability and more about whose knowledge counts. Community-held and lived expertise is often delegitimised unless reframed to fit institutional language. As scholar, Ramon Amaro observes, our presence is mediated by systems that decide what it can mean, even in digital form.

Old Port in Mogadishu  Images courtesy of Barni Qassim © Harry J Mason 1982

Glissant’s Poetics of Relation suggests another approach: opacity as a form of autonomy, relation without assimilation, recognising that what makes us unique cannot be fully understood. Perhaps the question is not how to better decolonise the archive, but how to stop trying and, instead, create spaces that belong entirely to us. An example of this is the Culture House in London, the first permanent Somali exhibition space, ‘presenting narratives of origin, displacement, migration, and new belongings’ within Somali culture and reconnecting British Somalis via community-donated objects and fostered by the Anti-Tribalism Movement. Another example is the UnMuseum, developed by the Black South West Network (BSWN) in Bristol. The UnMuseum aims to serve as a ‘decolonial reconceptualisation’ by empowering those whose stories have been marginalised or erased. 

‘Ultimately, building for liberation is not a style but an orientation. It situates architecture within long struggles against empire and captivity, and calls contemporary practitioners to continue that lineage — to design not for control, but for the expansion of freedom itself.’ Amara Spence

We conclude that whether we are creating new museum spaces, breaking through or transforming existing or emerging systems, centering lived experience using creative tools that offer self-development and community building as a way to offer liberatory alternatives. 

 

Nadine Aranki (she/her)
Nadine Aranki is a Palestinian curator, cultural worker, facilitator, coordinator and content producer based in London. She is a member of Brent Artist Network. Aranki has worked in the fields of culture, human rights, and education in Palestine and the UK. She is the author of the report ‘Conversations with Culture, Heritage and Tourism Actors in Palestine: Needs and Challenges within a Context of Extreme Military Violence’. With Meg Peterson, she co-curated The Many Lives of Gaza, a 2024 touring exhibition that has been shown in London, Birmingham and Norwich.

Abira Hussein (she/her)
Abira Hussein is a researcher and curator of Somali heritage, based in the UK. Her work explores how digital technologies, including virtual and mixed reality, can transform engagement with colonial-era archives and reconnect diasporic communities with their heritage. She uses participatory methods to co-create community-driven archival spaces, challenging dominant historical narratives and fostering inclusive, culturally rooted remembrance. Hussein has collaborated with institutions such as the British Museum, Barbican, and The National Archives. Her projects include the VR experience Coming Home (2017) and the Mixed Reality NOMAD project (2018).

Tosin Olufon (she/her)
Tosin is a Yoruba artist and researcher of Nigerian heritage. Her practice centres on reimagining African folklore for virtual reality and 3D animation, using immersive storytelling as a tool for heritage preservation. Through her work, she explores the possibilities of a decolonised immersive archive that resists static preservation and reflects the voices being represented.

www.tosinolufon.com
www.linkedin.com/in/tosin-olufon

Dr Erinma Ochu (they/them)
Erinma is a storyteller and biologist experimenting with collective consciousness as a form of earthmaking. Their poem ‘How to read the atmosphere’ was shortlisted for the 2025 Disabled Poets Prize. As Watershed’s inaugural Researcher in Residence they are enquiring into epistemic justice. They are Wallscourt Associate Professor in Immersive Media at UWE Bristol’s Digital Cultures Research Centre, a Stuart Hall Foundation’s Scholars & Fellows network alumni and storytelling champion on sustainable computing research initiative, NetDRIVE.

https://www.watershed.co.uk/studio/residents/erinma-ochu
https://www.linkedin.com/in/erinmaochu/

 

References

Abdi, S. (2025). ‘Artefacts were just sitting in suitcases in people’s homes’: the London museum preserving Somali culture. The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/sep/02/artefacts-london-museum-preserving-somali-culture-house

Amaro, R. (2022). The Black Technical Object: On Machine Learning and the Aspiration of Black Being. London, Sternberg Press.

Carroll et al. (2018). The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance. Global Indigenous Data Alliance https://www.gida-global.org/care 

Egbe, A. & Hussein, A. (2024) Prioritising community values and access. The UnMuseum Conference: Uncovering the Unseen, Understanding the Unheard. Presentation. https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/13420127 

Grave, R. (2025). Coal. Monitor Books.

Glissant, E. (1997). The Poetics of Relation. The University of Michigan Press. 

Harris R. & Bryant, P. (2024). Birmingham Museums Citizens’ Jury. Shared Futures.

Palmer, L.A. (2025). Heritage and Ephemerality: The Politics of Black Cultural Memory. https://whoseknowledge.org/ 

Popple, S. Mutibwa D. H., and Prescott, A. (2020). Community archives and the creation of living knowledge. In: Popple, S., Prescott, A and Mutibwa D. (eds). Communities, Archives and new collaborative practices. Series: Connected Communities. Policy Press: Bristol, UK; Chicago IL, 1-18. 

Puente, G. &  Muhammad, Z. aka White Pube (2019). Everything that is wrong with museums. NPU-konferansen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHf8qHNPZkk 

Vergès, F. (2024). A Programme of Absolute Disorder: Decolonizing the Museum. Pluto Press

Spence, A. (2025). Architectures of Abolition: Imagining a built environment from carcerality to liberation. Substack: https://amahraspence.substack.com/p/architectures-of-abolition

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