About
“Settler colonialism operates through ecological, spatial and infrastructural destruction, alteration, appropriation and expropriation.”
“How do you have memory without landscape, as landscape disappears so do the memories.”
Archiving the Present is a multi-site digital community archive project of "remembering as insurgent practice" and memory as creative practice, from a distinctly centroamericanista y localista perspective (Cañas 2023).
The project began as a collective quick response to the destruction of a Salvadoran community mural (painted by the children of the Salvadoran community in the Kensington flats in 1990) as part of a $10.2 million ‘redevelopment’ of the Kensington Community Recreation Centre.
Archiving the Present asks: who gets to be remembered and what gets to be preserved in settler-colonial Australia? How does memory and embodied archiving occur for sites deemed to have no “heritage significance” by national and state-level heritage organisations? What does it mean to engage in acts of creative remembering that sit outside of heritage regimes? How do we remember within displacement and in the context of ongoing dispossession?
Why the present? Archives have often been associated with the past-tense in order to justify capturing, cataloguing, defining and making object-of peoples, stories and sites. As Lara Khalid writes “time is always controlled by the hegemonic power” (2020, p.50). Therefore by situating the project in the present we challenge the archival power and situating these dynamics in our daily embodied practices.
The project seeks to develop alternative practices of remembering and archiving- in ways that do not conform to whiteness and aesthetics of colonial forms of remembering (i.e. Plaques, statues). The project centre’s creative responses as multidisciplinary and multi-perspective responses that are not only community informed but embodied and importantly- community led.
“We all need histories that no history book can tell, but they are not in the classroom—not the history classrooms, anyway. They are in the lessons we learn at home, in poetry and childhood games, in what is left of history when we close the history books with their verifiable facts.”
[1] in ‘Displacing the Anthropocene: Colonisation, extinction and the unruliness of nature in Palestine’ (2022)
[2] April 6th walking lecture as part of Counter Cartographies: the Absent Map (2022)
[3] as described by Bolivian theorist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui in her book, ‘On practices and discourse of decolonization’ (2020, p.xxxii)
[4] In ‘We’re still alive, so remove us from memory. Synchronicity and the museum of resistance’ (2020) Errant Journal special edition ‘when are we?’
Methodology
Archiving the Present centre’s creative practice as acts of present (temporal) and presence-ing (existence) in ways that complicates and wrestle with the tensions between: private and public, digital and physical in-situ spaces, memory and history, communal and institutional. The project grapples with colonial temporalities and challenges the idea of memory, displacement and archive as experienced in the past tense.
Haitian American academic Michel-Rolph Trouillot challenges temporal sequence in its construction of the past as fixed, as certain and as isolated. The assumption of linear time classifies ‘all non-westerners as fundamentally non-historical’ he writes, dissociating the embodied and the present lived realities of bodies that carry history (p.7). He reminds us that ‘The Past - or, more accurately, pastness – is a position’ (p. 15) Archiving the Present challenges the pastness as position as well as historical and narrative production and archival power. The term ‘archiving’ is also intentionally phrased as a verb, as an act of creative remembering and as a way to enact accountability.
Furthermore, by centering creative responses this project doesn’t treat archiving as simply a form of documenting as a neutral practice. It acknowledges that archives have a colonial history of masquerading as objective, and are instrumental in the construction of dominant narratives. Therefore by inviting creative responses the project looks to challenge this history and instead shift archive as a community and a creative as well as generative practice. The project also seeks to de-centre the location of power in terms of who curates, narrates, interprets and assembles archives. The project reminds us that “everyone’s an archivist” and mapping can be a collective practice.
This project hopes to be a growing living archive.
[5] Historian and archivist Eric Ketelaar cited in (re)claiming Archives (2022) https://futuress.org/magazine/re-claiming-archives/
[6] curator of Riwaq’s Absent Map, Dana Abbas zoom lecture (April 6, 2022)