Making History: A Study of Archives

Historic archives feed our identity and origin stories. But who builds them?

Art Jameel recently wrapped up its second iteration of Night School with architect and writer Todd Reisz, which chose to focus on the complex role of the archive as a tool and resource in the making of history, its control and its circulation. The programme consisted of eight seminars with students and professionals structured around readings, films, and visual works responding to contemporary life in the Gulf. In 2022, the programme coincided with the exhibition Off Centre/On Stage curated by Reisz, inviting residents to observe the role of design and architecture in Dubai’s growth as a megacity.

This year, guest lecturers Rosie Bsheer and Hind Mezaina took centrestage. Rosie Bsheer is Associate Professor of History at Harvard University, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on oil and empire, social and intellectual movements, urban history, historiography, and the making of the modern Middle East. Hind Mezaina is an artist, writer and film curator from Dubai known for her blog and podcast The Culturist, and Tea with Culture. Her practice delves into themes of collective memory, the notion of heritage and depictions of the UAE in the media.

Traditional connotations of the words ‘history’ and ‘archive’ seem to indicate a close association with grandiosity or spectacle. The words play on our imaginations of how cities and nations as well as individual and collective identities are built, and often stake their claim as a source of an objective truth of our time ー something that Bsheer suggests is not so simple. To make sense of the contemporary reality of archives, Bsheer encourages an understanding of history as containing traces only of ‘some pasts, not all possible pasts’ and therefore only some truths and not all possible truths.

How are Archives Built?

The Oxford English Dictionary describes an archive not only as ‘a collection of historical documents or records of a government, a family, a place or an organisation’ but also ‘the place where these records are stored.’ The conversation around the archive therefore necessitates critical examination of its spatial manifestation. Bsheer contends that the discovery of historical documents is often followed by its physical dissemination through various routes including trade in the black market and private acquisitions which means that these materials become part of a dynamic, fluid market system that spreads across geographies. Given their movement, literal and figurative, and the inevitable manipulation they could undergo due to organic decay, human error, and logistical hindrances, we’re left to wonder what is lost. Forged? Duplicated? Spotlighted? Who has the liberty to acquire and claim responsibility for these materials?

Anchored in the case study of Saudi Arabia’s post Gulf War agenda of large scale urban redevelopment of the Holy City alongside the building of a formal national archive, Bsheer’s research posits the inherently revisionist nature of history and the role of the archive ー institutionalised and otherwise ー in manufacturing hierarchies that steer a community, a city, or a state's metanarrative.

City as Archive

State-run bodies across the world, whether in the context of diplomacy, policy-making, or education, often turn to historical records to shape the narrative of a nation. Similarly, the built environment too, it could be argued, is continually restructured for the same reason. Changing skylines, renaming of historical landmarks, redevelopment of neighbourhoods, new lines of transportation to move through a city ー all these physical changes pave the way for a new future, but simultaneously advocate for a certain reading of the past. Unlike the neat tucking away of documents in literal fortresses, which typically remain at a safe distance from the public, the changes within the built environment have a direct, visceral effect on the everyday experiences of those who inhabit and move through it.

Taking into consideration both, Bsheer's study on geographies and monuments of our region as sites of tension in the making of historical narratives, as well as the various locales that are depicted across five films in Hind Mezaina’s film programme, we're led to further question how space, a city or landscape, functions not merely as a backdrop, but as an archive in its own right. As rapidly globalised contemporary urban metropoles become sites of layered temporalities (where the built environment evidences a progressive overlaying of the material and physical residues from various moments in time) these sites find themselves in a state of continual demolition and rebuilding. As such, what is brought to the fore, and what is left in the shadows? What do we have access to? Who makes these decisions? What subsequently shapes our memory of the city? What or who shapes its future?

‘Erasure is not simply a countermeasure to the making of history: it is History.’
ー Rosie Bsheer, Archive Wars

Archive Documentary

The series of films curated by Hind Mezaina takes us from Karachi to Nevada, showing us the ways in which history is produced, shared or sold across cultures, spaces, and timelines. The films echo Bsheer's research in questioning the association between objectivity and the archive, bringing to light how 'deeply fraught the business of making history' truly is.

In Madiha Aijaz’s Memorial for the Lost Pages and These Silences Are All the Words, we enter deserted public libraries of Karachi where its remaining users ー including those who continue to oil this forgotten machine ー raise important questions of the disappearance of language; Urdu, in this case, and the role of the written word in an attempt to preserve it in postcolonial Pakistan.

Yasmine Benabdallah’s How to Reverse a Spell: The Promise of an Archive (2022) ー a film that visually centres itself on a computer screen ー tells the story of a futile attempt through new technologies (a phone call and an online archive) to access the lost public archives of Morocco.

Benabdallah’s film is followed by Richard Misek’s A History of the World According to Getty Images (2022) and both prod at something larger and often misconstrued ー the idea of the digital as democratic. While the former film is an individual’s search for an understanding of Morocco's historical artefacts, Misek’s film gives us a macro view of the internet as an equally cryptic repository of archival material characterised by algorithms, paywalls, intellectual property laws, and other forms of restricted access. A History of the World According to Getty Images shows us visuals of wars, breakthroughs, expansion of space, proliferation of industries, revolution, and crises as caught on camera that have become embedded in our collective memories through their mass dissemination on the World Wide Web. By purchasing these paid video clips from Getty, Misek releases them from captivity and brings them to a wider audience ー this summer onwards, the film will be available on its main website.

Finally, Time Capsule by Jan Ijäs presents us with a clean slate, asking what would it be like to start an archive anew in a space untouched by the erosion of time. The film chronicles the journey of an artist who buys a piece of land in the Nevada Mountains and builds an underground library with the aim of preserving texts on art, science and spirituality for the next 2000 years. His library also accepts book submissions by anyone who can find him. The visuals shuttle between this library concealed within the walls of a solitary, spaceship-like building, scenes from the local landscape and lives of immigrant labour. While on one hand the film highlights the role of the library in preserving ‘the important aspects of man’s written inheritance for the future,’ it also, perhaps unintentionally, leaves us wondering who has the privilege of replicating this tabula rasa approach to knowledge building.

With the growth of digital tools and increased access to materials, we’ve seen an increase in independently formed archives. Artists, scholars and others interested in documenting their personal histories and those of their communities, turn to a network of trust to develop informal or non-institutionalized archives. The artist’s attempt to make sense of the friction between the familiarity of everyday experience and the unfamiliarity of a complex past that underpins it, ultimately results in the creation of one’s own truth. Artistic licence allows us to question the tools of history, and when supported by careful methodological training, has the potential to disrupt hegemonic narratives. Who are the creators of these archives and can any collection of oral, digital, photographic or printed matter truly be objective?

Far from being a source of absolute evidence, what the archive offers instead is a porous, breathing, expanding pool of knowledge we can continually take from, add to, and piece together in an effort to make meaning of the voices and events that form our individual and shared identities. Much like in a city, the archive may lead us to new paths and maybe some dead ends, but limitless potential to create anew, while always questioning our sources.