Samlande tankar participates in the MSA Nordic Conference 2024 “The Art of Conviviality – Memory Studies Association Nordic’s Third Annual Conference“, 24-25 of October at Malmö university.
The panel talk Communities Gathering: Rereading Pasts, Reimagining Futures is moderated and organized in collaboration between artist Johnny Chang, Macarena Dusant as part of Samlande tankar/Collecting Thoughts, and René León Rosales and his ongoing research at MKC regarding community archives. For the program, visit the conference’s webbpage here.
Communities Gathering: Rereading Pasts, Reimagining Futures
This session is a panel discussing community archiving, the politics of gathering, and its relationship with community work and cultural institutions.
In connection with the project Samlande tankar/Collecting Thoughts at Grafikens Hus and research conducted at Mångkulturellt centrum (MKC) in Fittja, the panel brings together Yahia Zaied, Jenny Diệu Thúy, Mamak Babak-Rad, and René León Rosales to unfold the urgencies but also challenges of organizing community archives. Gathering critical global majority perspectives in Sweden, the panel digs into the work of community archiving, collective memory and sustaining struggle and resilience through gathering practices.
Many diaspora, indigenous, global majority, and grassroots community perspectives and experiences that affect and transform society from below are rarely represented in official archives and museums. These conditions make it difficult to learn from our pasts, draw and build connections across generations and communities, and understand the broader conditions of specific community struggles.
Community archives often aim to address this absence, and emerge out of and are shaped by a community’s needs. For diaspora communities this often is motivated by a desire to document and reimagine cultural heritage generating new presents and futures through shared experiences and struggles. Community archives cares for these invisibilized stories, desedimenting and entangling microhistories to retell history, nourishing the potential for new senses of heritage and belonging. They have the capacity to challenge hegemonic narratives and ideologies of the nation state, troubling and dismantling myths of imagined communities while supporting different and emergent cultural practices and forms.
Participants:
Jenny Nguyen is an activist, human rights lawyer and writer based in Malmö. Her work centers around challenging current narratives of belonging(s) against the backdrop of a system of nation states and contemporary capitalism. She is especially interested in intergenerational trauma and collective ways of healing.
Yahia Saleh is a board member of Black Archives Sweden, as well as an activist, researcher, author, and social worker. His work explores the intersections of migration, forced displacement, memory, sexuality, and masculinity. With deep involvement in socio-political initiatives across Egypt and Sweden, Yahia is committed to advocating for Nubian cultural and land rights, while also championing the visibility and well-being of migrant and Black queer communities. His research is grounded in active community engagement, focusing on marginalized communities’ lived experiences. Saleh holds an MA in International Migration and Ethnic Relations from Malmö University, Sweden, where he was awarded the MIM Master Thesis Award in 2023 for his outstanding master’s dissertation.
Mamak Babak-Rad works as a learning and development strategist by day and serves as a passionate community worker in her spare time.
René León Rosales has a Ph.D. in ethnology. He works as a researcher at the Mångkulturellt centrum [Multicultural center] and is affiliated to Social work, Södertörn university. His research delves into issues of how racialized urban landscapes affect learning processes and identity formation in young people, with a special interest in social and norm critical pedagogy. He is also interested in how cultural processes, such as archives, can be used to counter the negative effects of structural racism for marginalized groups and neighborhoods.
Johnny Chang is an interdisciplinary and interdependent designer, artist, and researcher based in Stockholm. As a cultural worker, his practice is interested in discursive processes of sense making (and breaking)—or poetics—of visual and material languages in relation to social-historical conditions toward nourishing collective, resilient capacities for sensing, feeling, and being. Chang’s artistic research attends to questions regarding care, access, and tactics for gathering, listening to and centering knowledges that emerge from diaspora liminality, community histories, collective organizing, and social movement archives. He is currently an artist in residence with Samlande tankar / Collecting Thoughts at Grafikens Hus, and an organizing member of Munnen, a community library and project space in Bagarmossen, Stockholm.
Macarena Dusant is an independent art historian, editor and writer. Her work focuses mainly on power structures, the notion of the public realm and mechanisms of exclusion within western contemporary art. Dusant has been involved in different independent cultural and artistic organizations, working mainly with art collectives. Currently she is the curator and process leader for the project Samlande tankar/Collecting Thoughts, a three year art project where Grafikens Hus – a museum for contemporary printmaking, together with scholars, curators and artists investigates and formulate a vision and methods to build a collection from a post-colonial and intersectional perspective.
Image: Robert Nilsson Mohammadi. The graffiti in the image, “Kämpa Malmö” (Keep Fighting, Malmö), was a spontaneous memorial in support of Showan Shattak, who was attacked by right-wing extremists and nearly beaten to death on the night of March 8, 2014. While Showan Shattak was in a coma, fighting for his life, a solidarity march gathered more than ten thousand people who took to the streets in support.