Join Pelumi Odubanjo for a day of practical learning and engaging with personal archives. Taking the lead from Anita Mckenzie and her collection, which is currently housed at the Black Cultural Archives in London, this event will explore personal archives and look at different black feminist practices of how we can engage with archives through preservation, research, and artistic work. Focusing on individual and family archives, the workshop will ask participants to think; What is your archive? What and who forms part of it? What does your personal archive say about you and your heritage? What is the social function of our archives?
Participants will be invited to interact directly with the Anita Mckenzie archive and will have the opportunity to engage physically with the donated materials at the BCA. Through this engagement, we will think about the different themes in Anita’s archives, including; community, representation, heritage, and archiving as a political and social endeavor. The workshop will allow us all to think collectively through Anita’s archive, and gather and think towards alternative methods of collection, preservation and remembering.
The McKenzie Heritage Picture Archive (MHPA) was a photo licensing agency established by photographer Anita McKenzie in 1996. The archive provided publishers, broadcasters, and other organizations with images of African, Asian, and Caribbean people, cultures, and communities spanning the 18th to the 21st centuries.
You are invited to contribute to the workshop photographs from your family archive, but are also welcome letters, diaries, posters, and video and audio recordings. The primary goal of this workshop is to show the value of our personal archives while presenting parts of the Black and other racialised, cultural experiences across different diasporas.
Limited spaces for 18-25’s only. Sign-up using link.
Pelumi Odubanjo is a curator, writer, and researcher based between London and Glasgow. Pelumi works with photographic archives, artists and cultural artefacts to create and explore dialogues across global Black diasporas and geographies. Her research and curatorial practice build on theories of racial, gendered and diasporic praxis, and consider anti-colonial and indigenous communicative practices as a form of exhibition-making which forge new spaces for encounter, knowledge, and pluralities.
 
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