About

"This practice-based research explores methods of embedding systems of care into art practices engaged in memory work. It focuses on working with community archive collections that speak of and to racialised histories. Framed by reparative decolonial theories and trauma-informed archiving, the timely ambition of the project is to consider how this research aids clearer understandings of and responses to a recent rise in far-Right nationalist sentiment in the UK and beyond.

The proposal centres on engaging with racially-motivated, violent incidents and responsive anti-racist activism in South-East London in the early 1990s that remain under-documented in publicly-accessible archives. The research will look at new un-accessioned material from Thamesmead Community Archive and private collections currently in the custodianship of community organisers, documenting work by Greenwich Committee Against Racist Attacks and the Anti-Racist Alliance. I will research these collections in dialogue with existing institutional archives that hold material on race relations; and will facilitate making these materials public through a methodology of socially-engaged art practice.

Through this case study, the project aims to explore how methods of care-filled creative practice might facilitate documentation of, and engagement with material that speaks to and of black life, death, and resistance. It will map existing artist methodologies in engaging with archival racial violence, from initiative Decolonising the Archive (Bell & Joseph, 2009), to artistic provocations by Languid Hands (2019) and Gillian Slovo (2023). Working through a lens of socially-engaged art practice; the research will work towards establishing new creative care protocols, situated between ‘wake work’ (Sharpe, 2016) and recent developments in trauma-informed archiving (Laurent & Wright, 2023). As a cross-disciplinary study, it will draw upon voices across sectors; including individuals with archival, therapeutic, anti-racist activist and art-making experience. It will employ a mixed research approach that is collaborative, dialogic, creative, critical, and qualitative."