Activating Archives - the colonial photo archive in decolonial digital memory work

Activity: Talk or presentationLecture and oral contribution

Description

Digital media provide minoritized communities with new opportunities to articulate memory discourses that challenge dominant understandings of the past. This paper focusses on the circulation and repurposing of colonial photographs by indigenous people and formerly colonized groups. Reclaiming colonial photos found in the digitised collections of heritage institutions has become a common decolonial strategy (Lydon, 2021; Marselis, 2017, forthcoming; Peers, 2021), but communities may also scan and upload private photos to (counter-)archives in order to increase the visibility of their perspectives on colonial history. Drawing on theories on activation of archives, the paper presents a comparative analysis of two cases that exemplifies the hybrid routes of colonial photos as they become travelling memory objects; Digital dissemination from archives and to shared memory work in social media versus crowdsourced uploads of photos from offline private family memories to digitised community-archives.
he second case study concerns Dutch colonial history and examines the crowd-sourced, photo-database 10.000 Ancestral Mothers (10.000 Voormoeders), initiated by a genealogical association (Indische Genealogische Vereniging) for postcolonial migrant communities with a background in the former Dutch East Indies colony (now Indonesia). Mixed-race families have in recent years increasingly engaged with the life stories of their indigenous, ancestral mothers, who lived in concubinage with European men. These women are marginalised in the colonial archives and the aim of the database is to collect photos of and information about them. By honouring their indigenous, female ancestors and inscribing them in their family trees, the participants challenge racist hierarchies, which would until recently have downplayed or silenced indigenous family members. Furthermore, the paper will show how the database project is connected to a broader trend in offline representations of Dutch colonial history, where novels, artworks and museum exhibitions have engaged with similar themes.
Period24 Oct 202425 Oct 2024
Event titleMSA Nordic Biannual Conference 2024: The Art of Conviviality
Event typeConference
LocationMalmö, SwedenShow on map
Degree of RecognitionInternational

Keywords

  • Digital media
  • photography
  • reclaiming
  • colonial history