When I first stepped into a small conservation studio in Accra, I was struck by two things: the sound of conversations as much as the smell of starch and wax, and the quiet authority of a space run by a cooperative of textile artisans, conservators and community elders. They were repairing kente...
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Heritage
I first encountered a migrant-run radio documentary tucked away on a community...
Heritage
I remember the first time I ran my hands—carefully, with cotton gloves—over...
Heritage
I first encountered a project like MemoryMap while researching community...
Heritage
I remember the first time I saw a ritual object displayed beneath pristine...
When I first encountered a community-led language class in the Highlands of Scotland, I thought I was attending a local revival project: elders teaching syllables to kids, a few hand-stitched primers on the table, the hum of tea and conversation....
When I first encountered the slim pamphlet on a rainy afternoon in a secondhand bookshop, I almost missed the name of the press on the back cover: Hearth & Margin Editions. The pamphlet itself—an uncluttered chapbook of poems by a woman I'd never...
When a group of community musicians, archivists and cultural workers sat around a scarred kitchen table in east London two years ago, we didn’t set out to change council funding. We wanted to make visible what our ears already knew: that diasporic...
Handling sacred objects from other cultures is not an abstract curatorial puzzle — it’s a set of human relationships, obligations and risks that I have learned to take seriously through years of research, fieldwork and conversations with...
When I first encountered a stack of refugee-crafted zines at a small pop-up in a Parisian community centre, I thought I knew what I was looking at: homemade pamphlets, photocopied pages, hand-drawn covers. Aesthetically they belonged to the long and...
When a single carved mask returns to a village after decades — sometimes centuries — away, the ripple effects are rarely limited to the object itself. I've watched this happen in places where I’ve researched collections and oral histories: a...
I still remember the first time I stood alone in a reading room, a stack of colonial-era glass plate negatives before me. The images were beautiful, infuriating, and utterly opaque in different measures. Like many objects of empire, photographs...
I have spent years watching cities argue with themselves over paint. A wall that one group calls an act of vandalism can be, to another, a living archive of community feeling, a landmark of identity, or a potent political statement. The friction...
When I first began researching collections for museums and independent projects, one encounter changed how I think about authority in museums. I sat in a cramped community centre with a woman who had spent thirty years working in a food-processing...
When I first set out to co-curate a city-wide biennial, I resisted the usual playbook: glossy press releases, international list of star artists, and a roster of white cube institutions. What felt more urgent to me was listening—really...