When I first began talking to textile workers in Lagos about the idea of an archive, the question that kept coming back was not simply whether their work could be sold internationally, but whether the act of archiving might extract something vital from the people and practices it sought to...
Read more...
Heritage
I remember the first time I stood in front of a protest banner that had been...
Heritage
When a ritual mask returns to the village from which it was taken—whether...
Essays
I remember the first time I watched an oral testimony translated into an...
Essays
When designers reach into archives for inspiration, they are touching more than...
I remember the first time I watched an oral testimony translated into an immersive environment. The intimacy of standing beside someone as they recounted a journey across deserts and seas felt powerful, but it also made me acutely aware of...
When designers reach into archives for inspiration, they are touching more than fabric and silhouette: they are engaging with lived histories, forms of labor and systems of power. I’ve long been fascinated by the moment a utilitarian garment...
I’ve been watching the surge of virtual exhibitions from grassroots collectives for several years now, and each project seems to ask the same, quietly provocative question: can a loosely organised group, working outside museum walls and finance...
I’ve spent years working between museums, independent presses and community projects, and one question keeps coming up whenever public art meets shifting neighbourhoods: what should you actually ask before commissioning a piece where people’s...
I remember the first time I stood in front of an object whose label told me almost nothing. A carved figure, beautiful and worn, with one sentence: “Unknown origin. circa 19th century.” I felt cheated—not because I wanted every forensic...
When I first encountered a community-led language class in the Highlands of Scotland, I thought I was attending a local revival project: elders teaching syllables to kids, a few hand-stitched primers on the table, the hum of tea and conversation....
When I first encountered the slim pamphlet on a rainy afternoon in a secondhand bookshop, I almost missed the name of the press on the back cover: Hearth & Margin Editions. The pamphlet itself—an uncluttered chapbook of poems by a woman I'd never...
When a group of community musicians, archivists and cultural workers sat around a scarred kitchen table in east London two years ago, we didn’t set out to change council funding. We wanted to make visible what our ears already knew: that diasporic...
Handling sacred objects from other cultures is not an abstract curatorial puzzle — it’s a set of human relationships, obligations and risks that I have learned to take seriously through years of research, fieldwork and conversations with...
When I first encountered a stack of refugee-crafted zines at a small pop-up in a Parisian community centre, I thought I knew what I was looking at: homemade pamphlets, photocopied pages, hand-drawn covers. Aesthetically they belonged to the long and...