I’ve watched, too many times, an object with a fraught past slip through the formal checks of an auction house and reappear decades later under a new catalogue number and a glossy photograph. It’s painful because the path that led that object from a community to a saleroom is rarely linear: it...
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Heritage
I remember the first time I sat in a cramped apartment in London listening to...
Heritage
When museums or galleries ask to borrow wearable sacred regalia from living...
Heritage
I have been thinking a lot about the ways neighbourhood apps can move beyond...
Heritage
I remember the first time I stood in front of a ritual mask that had been...
I have been thinking a lot about the ways neighbourhood apps can move beyond local listings and event calendars to become instruments of cultural restitution—practical, forensic tools that help displaced families prove ownership of cultural...
I remember the first time I stood in front of a ritual mask that had been returned to its community after decades in a European museum. The moment was thick with relief, gratitude and a fragility I hadn’t expected. That object—a carved face,...
Translating a refugee’s oral testimony into a VR experience is one of the most intimate and powerful forms of storytelling I can imagine — and one of the riskiest from a legal and ethical standpoint. When you move someone’s memory into an...
I have been thinking a lot about archives that are alive — not museums under glass but accumulations of practice, ritual and pattern that continue to breathe through people’s hands. A textile archive in Lagos, curated by a cooperative, is...
I started thinking seriously about the idea of smartphone audio mapping by migrant street vendors when I overheard a vendor in Marseille describing not only the spices he sold but the names of the neighbourhoods his parents came from, the songs they...
I first encountered a repatriated box of colonial medical records in a climate-controlled room that smelled faintly of paper and old glue. The documents had travelled hundreds of miles, from a colonial administration office to a local community...
When I first stepped into a tiny silk workshop in Varanasi, the air was thick with the smell of hot metal and boiled dye, and a single electric fan stirred a tired rhythm against rows of handlooms. The place was no more than a courtyard and three...
I’ve spent a long time thinking about objects: how they carry meaning, how they travel, and how their meanings can be transformed — or damaged — when they move into different contexts. When a sacred headdress, a carved reliquary or ceremonial...
When I first heard about MemoryMap — a hypothetical neighbourhood oral-history app designed to stitch together personal memories, photographs and geolocated testimonies — I felt a familiar thrill: the possibility that digital storytelling could...
Why a digital portal feels like repair — and why it can also repeat harmWhen I first encountered a community-run digital repatriation portal, it felt like a small miracle: images, recordings and documents that had been separated from families and...