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 timestamped trail. What struck me was not the slick...
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Arts
Technology is reshaping education across the world, and France is no exception....
Heritage
When I first started working with diasporic makers—artists and craft...
Heritage
When a museum agrees to display living sacred regalia on loan, it is taking on...
Heritage
I remember the first time I held an ase thread in my hand — a slender,...
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...
I remember the first time I sat in a cramped apartment in London listening to field recordings made half a world away. The songs carried weather and kinship and the scent of ceremony; the recordings themselves were brittle, their provenance scrawled...
When museums or galleries ask to borrow wearable sacred regalia from living ritual specialists, I always feel a mix of exhilaration and responsibility. These objects are not just artifacts; they are active participants in belief systems, embodiments...
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...