To many people, the word “archive” means consigning emails or files to virtual limbo — the infinite repository of ones and zeroes that may just be needed in an unlikely future scenario. To others, it conjures images of dusty shelves filled with long-forgotten paperwork.
To scholars, archives are treasure troves. If they are digitised, research is quicker, cheaper and easier. Yet there is a quiet thrill in the labour-intensive analogue version: opening box upon box of yellowing letters, committee minutes and press clippings, knowing that buried in there somewhere is a nugget of knowledge, a key that will unlock new insights.
Admittedly, unless it is packaged in a Dan Brown-style narrative, this remains a rather unappealing process to most non-academics. That’s where artists come in.
It has become de rigueur to put “archival” into descriptions of artistic practice. Old family photos, found objects, much-loved community anecdotes and apocryphal stories: these are recognised as physical or oral archives, resources not only for exploring personal and collective identities but also for spurring creativity.
While artists drawing on historical materials vindicate their value and interest, it also places pressure on the notion of the archive itself. What constitutes an archive? Who is responsible for its care? How can its contents be made known and accessible, to wider publics? What are the risks that it will be exploited, misappropriated or destroyed?
That last question is not theoretical but, in an African context, based on centuries (even millennia) of bitter experience. From the ancient Library of Alexandria to more than one SA university collection in recent years, thousands of irreplaceable books and manuscripts have been lost to fire. Unnumbered African artworks and documents were stolen during the colonial period to enrich European museums. In the present era, online African archives remain precarious, often dependent on the digital and economic infrastructure of the Global North.
Such considerations create an urgency to the topic of the Re:assemblages Symposium held in Lagos this week. Timed to coincide with the Art X Lagos fair, the gathering was initiated by British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare and his Guest Artists Space Foundation. The Re:assemblages programme, curated by Berlin-based researcher Naima Hassim, saw contributions from more than 70 African and Afro-diasporic artists, academics and collectors seeking to “reimagine” archives not as “static repositories” but as “dynamic infrastructures for cultural production and exchange”.
Events included the launch of the African Arts Libraries Lab, a network connecting institutions and publishers in Nigeria, Senegal, Morocco, Kenya, Egypt and SA (represented by the African Literary Cities research project at the University of Cape Town).
Archival experimentation is also central to the practice of a handful of Southern African artists who have been making waves in that “dark heart” of empire: London. In October, the annual 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair featured a quartet of artists under the banner of Johannesburg gallery Guns & Rain. Zenaéca Singh explored the legacy of SA’s colonial sugar economy — built on indentured labour from India; Princia Matungulu (who was born in Lubumbashi) depicted Congolese stories and parables; Bev Butkow, inspired by the late poet Keorapetse Kgositsile, created “threaded paintings” to produce “a visual language at the intersection of poetry, repetition, rhythm and weaving”; and Namibian artist Tuli Mekondjo illustrated the history of missionaries among the Aawambo people of northern Namibia.
Mekondjo’s larger body of work is on display at St James’s church in Piccadilly. Designed by Christopher Wren and built in the aftermath of the Great Fire of London, this sacred building has become a popular exhibition space, and it is especially apt for the complex history that Mekondjo tackles with productive ambivalence. Using archival photographs and lace fabric, she dwells on the life and impact of the Finnish missionary Martti Rautanen, reflecting on the conversion of her ancestors to Christianity and the forms of cultural identity that were suppressed as a result.
This brings to the fore a paradox in African archives, so many of which have colonial origins: they simultaneously preserve features of the past and point to their effacement. The archive records absence and loss, but — when artists and researchers step sensitively into the gaps — it can also contain the promise of recovery and even restitution.
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