work in progress
Archive through the lens of the African studio
work in progress by Francis Annagu
The project's work, Archives, calls into question the traditional museum model by proposing a ‘democratic cloud structure' which reinvents the standard, in effect, shifting the paradigm towards a very open archive. Most people can't get into the archives of traditional museums, where it's been locked up against the non-privileged. Museums are usually open to the privileged people of society, and even those that could award monetary rewards to traditional museums. Hence, archives are supposed to be democratized so that everyone can use them unrestricted.
This curatorial project is an archive of social portraits of a few Nigerians from the seventies. The object of the work is to visualise pre-modern social life and connected cultural materiality. The most iconic images in the archives are those of women and nuclear families in social transition. These collected photographs reflect some of the roles of Nigerians in the post-21st century. It demonstrates the significance of having a narrative within a geocultural space — and makes space for multiple voices and experiences. The rewriting of the studio's history and what it represented in the community it occupied at the time is therefore consequential.
How can current thinking in archives engage society at large? The curatorial work provides a radical view of contemporary archival issues, but also hopefully, the possibilities opened by the digitization of collections. And that cloud archive innovation will contribute to the (great) museum's long-term competitiveness.
The digital revolution changed how archives are created and preserved. The project focuses on this transformation’s impact. How must museums and archives meet the challenges of digitally generated cultures and how does the digital revolution influence traditional object preservation? Traditional museum archives are vulnerable to fire, moisture, flooding, theft, vermin and other hazards, but this archive makes it less worrying. The mission of this archive is therefore to present the importance of an unconventional museum and its role in contemporary structures. And it aims to be open to all and sundry without restriction so as to define its purpose and educational role.
The African studio lens offers a window onto other social-portrait images from Japan, Argentina and Korea. This will be considered later into the curatorial project. The curator, also as director of the archive, will collect photographs from the studio to democratize and digitize a non-traditional archive. In order to help us look at the possibility of a new archive in a dominant traditional museum structure.
How to implement the project
The 10 or 15 images will be collected from the African studio collective and reproduced for proper archiving on cloud. Then people from different walks of life will be invited to visit the archive to see the project: images and text. Then each visitor of the archive would be required to write shortly, about what they think of a non-traditional archive. The idea is to bring others into the curatorial research and Archive through the lens of the African studio theorize this archive. Thereafter, the curator will develop a long-form article on the experiment, experience, and perspectives of the archive as a new structure of the Great Museum. However, the people I would invite to see the archive--from Europe, Asia, and Africa will work alongside in the future on finding perspectives from their countries, in which to expand the whole collection.