I have spent enough time around archives to know that preservation is never a neutral act. Every recording, every transcript, every label attached to a song reflects a choice: what gets saved, what gets described, who gets named, who gets omitted, and who gets access later. When I think about a...
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Heritage
When I first started paying close attention to provenance, I thought of it as a...
Heritage
When I first began working on exhibitions that included living ritual...
Heritage
Why this question mattersWhen I first visited a community-run conservation lab...
Features
I remember the first time I sat with a displaced family clutching their phones...
Why this question mattersWhen I first visited a community-run conservation lab in Accra, I was struck by a tension that felt both practical and ethical: how to teach and share specialist conservation skills with the wider world without turning...
I remember the first time I sat with a displaced family clutching their phones and a printout from a neighbourhood app called MemoryMap. The map markers, timestamps and user notes seemed to hold the kind of granular, contemporaneous information that...
When I first heard about a cooperative in Lagos wanting to surface its textile archive under the evocative label àṣẹ threads, I felt an immediate mix of excitement and caution. Excitement because the name nods to a living spiritual and...
When I first started spending time in Accra, it was the small, peer-run repair shops and studio-labs tucked between markets and art spaces that kept pulling me back. These were places where knowledge circulated not as files or fetishised objects,...
I remember first hearing about archivebridge at a small gathering of curators and community archivists in Lisbon. Someone passed a phone around and pulled up an interface that looked deceptively simple: photos, place names, oral notes, and a...
Technology is reshaping education across the world, and France is no exception. From interactive whiteboards to digital homework platforms, the modern classroom in France is evolving quickly. What was once a system known for chalkboards, notebooks,...
When I first started working with diasporic makers—artists and craft practitioners who had migrated or whose families had moved across borders—I was eager, idealistic and, frankly, inexperienced. I believed that connecting their work to new...
When a museum agrees to display living sacred regalia on loan, it is taking on a responsibility that extends far beyond transport logistics and label copy. These objects are not inert artifacts; they are embedded in ongoing practices, relationships...
I remember the first time I held an ase thread in my hand — a slender, hand-twined cord whose colours and knots carried meanings that were whispered more than written. In Lagos markets I watched makers stitch small orders for tourists and priests...
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...