 want to know that we're recording this session so that you can listen to it again afterwards but also so that people who aren't able to join us live can listen to it again too so we can hold this on record at SOAS and I think also with some of the participants involved. This is the third part of a series of conversations that have been curated by colleagues at the SOAS Center for Gender Study as part of the SOAS Festival ideas called Transnational Dialogues and the idea behind these dialogues is that we meet together colleagues from SOAS talk with colleagues around the world to think about the connections that have been brought about by Covid so shared global lockdowns, economic downturns and recessions but also about the ruptures and disconnects and the differences in the ways in which Covid is impacting all our lives across the world but also within very close geographic proximity. We've talked a lot in the media, there's been a lot of talk in the media about Covid being an unprecedented event, something that's been unknown in our lifetimes and yet at the same time so many ways in which the pandemic is working reveals and exacerbates long-established inequalities and violences that have structured lifetime, structured society for many lifetimes. We've got this kind of disconnect between something new on the one hand but something that is actually revealing ongoing inequalities and actually making them worse in many ways and so this panel is looking at this tension or these processes through a focus on the archive in particular and that focus comes from my own particular interest. I'm the one who's kind of roped everybody into this and my name is Eleanor Newbegin. I'm a lecturer in South Asian history, modern South Asian history in the history department at SOAS and I'm also very interested as well as the history of modern South Asia. I'm interested in questions about histories of race, of gender and of what it means to decolonize history teaching in Britain at the moment and those interests have come from teaching at SOAS itself so SOAS is the only university in the UK that teaches a BA and MA history program that trains students in history through a unique focus on Africa, Asia and the Middle East. We teach European histories because those histories are intimately connected to the histories of Africa Asia and the Middle East but we do so through a different focus and that different focus actually asks questions about the very nature of history itself, the discipline and how it works and the archive is a central point of those discussions. The classic archive is an archive produced by the state. That's a record of society through the state's eye view organized around social categories and social problems as they're perceived by those who are in power and it's important to recognize that kind of official logic of the state, whatever kind of history you write but it's particularly important if you're writing histories of regions that have been under European domination, European colonialism. Post-colonial theorists and historians have played a prominent role in critiquing that idea of the archive but so too of people working outside of the academy, people working in the real world who've been involved in activism and in building collections that don't just critique the archive but do so in a way that produces a different kind of archive that actually collects evidence, experiences and feelings of people who are marginalized by that dominant archive and so that work is important I feel not just in critiquing academic arguments about the archive but actually producing a different idea of the archive. The archive is a space of activism and a space of challenge to dominant narratives. So it's that engagement with the archive that led me to think about how we remember COVID and to ask our participants in the panel to be part of this conversation. I'm going to introduce our speakers briefly now because I've actually asked them to do that work of introducing themselves in just a moment and I'll explain that. But we've got three and very lucky to be joined by three people today. We have Linda Chernis who is the activist at Gala Queer Archives in Johannesburg which is an archive connected to the Gala Center for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex and Queer Culture and Education in South Africa. We also have Siva Sajeevanandam who is a graduate of the National Institute of Design in India. So Siva's a photographer and journalist who's based in Chennai but who's been working most recently in Indian occupied Kashmir and who wrote a brilliant piece in the wire several months ago about his work that inspired me to set up this panel so I recommend reading it. And our third speaker is Adira Thakurthil who is also a graduate of the National Institute of Design in India. Adira is based in Kolkata but with strong roots to Kerala and Adira is a photographer, curator and exhibition designer. So the idea behind these webinars is that they are informal conversations, they're not academic presentations even though I'm talking to you at length now. And so the idea is that we the four of us will talk for about 45 minutes and then we'll open up to our audience and we'll invite you to ask questions but also contribute to the discussion too. We are going to ask you to do that via text because that's the most efficient way to bring in information and to kind of keep the conversation flowing. On the right hand side of your screen there'll be a chat function which will open up and about just as we're beginning to round up our discussion and open space for you. And so do please start by seeing where you are in the world because we know that we're being joined by people from all over and then use that to put your question to members of the panel. So we are going to move now into a conversation but as you can already see I like to organize and dominate things. So we have got a bit of a structure for this conversation just to explain that. I'm going to ask all my co-conversationalists to introduce themselves and say a little bit about the work that they've done so far and we'll use that as a base to talk about this idea of critical archiving or activist archiving, what that means, what it entails, the kind of impact it can have. And then we'll move on to talk about how everybody's lives have been affected in their work by COVID before we open up this bigger question about how could we build a critical archive of COVID and that's definitely where we want your input to from the audience because we know that's not a question we can answer. We're just being daring in asking it and would like your views on that too. So I'm going to start by handing over to Linda. Do you want to take over Linda? Should I open up your slides for you and explain your work so far and talk us through that? Sure. I'm going to try and keep it brief because I can't give you the whole history of Gala and Gala is the acronym and what we call ourselves. Originally the gate and there's been archives and now we just call ourselves Gala queer archive. We're based in Johannesburg in South Africa and I've been the archivist at Gala for the last five years. Gala acts as a traditional archive in the sense that we have documents and records and a lot of paper based stuff which people come and use research but we also do a lot of other work. We do book publishing exhibitions. We do training and education and youth work. So we do a lot of stuff and so we try and find a balance between queer activism and being an archive and we haven't always gotten that balance right. We're trying to get better at it and we also act as a safe space. We're based on the university campus, the university of the Witmarthes Runs bits in Johannesburg. So although we're an independent NPO we are based on the university campus which is nice and our library is used a lot not only by researchers but also by youth using it as a queer safe space. We hold weekly youth forum meetings there yeah and it's obviously now it's closed and that's one of or we'll get to that later but it's it's part of the impact that we have with that safe space now closed. So just briefly to tell you I mean we have over 200 collections. They range from one file to two boxes. They include LGBTI organizations in South Africa, event type marches, personal collections, press clippings. There's a really a wide variety and I'll just want to briefly just show you as an example of one of our recent projects which was an exhibition called QP Daughter of District 6 and this is based on one of our largest photographic collection of Daughter. QP was a hairdresser and performer based in District 6 in Cape Town in the 60s and 70s. This was a very turbulent time in South African history when the apartheid government was forcibly removing people from areas like District 6 which were mixed race areas and forcibly removing them out of the city centers and declaring those white areas. So although that history is pretty well known in South Africa, the history of forced removals but we wanted to tell a lesser known aspect of that story which was the queer community in District 6 on these photographs to show that really beautifully. Yeah I think I'll leave the rest to when we start talking about our work during the time of COVID. I think that's enough of an intro for now. Thanks. Thanks Linda. Siva do you want to speak a bit about your work too? Let me get your slides up. Do you want me to go through them? Can you can you do the slides or shall I do them? What would be? I think I'll do that. That's okay. Sure. Cool. Hi everyone. I'm Siva Sajju Anandu. I just completed my master's in photography design from the National Institute of Design. So I've been practicing photography since 2012 and my area of inquiry is to look at the conflict, human conflict, more of a personal conflict as well. So my inquiry is the idea of good and bad in the society and the moral questions that we usually impose on ourselves to think about what is good and what is bad. So I work with different mediums, majorly documentary, journalistic as well as archives. So I just started archiving recently for my project about Kashmir. So otherwise I used to photograph social issues in and around India in that I relate to more. So these are four important projects that I've worked for the past four years. So if you see the major core of all these project ideas is conflict, the idea of good and bad starting from upside down, which talks about Indian education system and how it works on a flawed idea of success. And if you see Indian education system, most of our parents, Indian parents, they have a set of formulas for success. That is, you have to complete your high school and then you have to get into engineering or science, technological related studies and then you have to go from there. While the second project is based in Kashmir, Kashmir project is it sort of evolved from my interest and my life throughout. So I'm not a Kashmiri. I'm not a local. So I'm an outsider for Kashmir. So the ways I chose to talk about Kashmir was influenced from other people in Kashmir. So I'll explain it briefly when I'm talking about the project in depth. So my last two projects are avant-garde politics, which talks about the political issue with Thawarnadu where the political parties are giving free goodies. They promise free goodies like kitchen appliances, laptops and cycles to win elections. And my very first project back in 2017 was Animals in Love. It's a moral question of human-animal relationship. So I photographed a set of five zoofiles in the western part of the world. Zoofiles are people who have emotional, sexual or platonic relationship with their domesticated animals. So most of us, when we are talking about animals and human relationship, we always see them as pet and anything beyond that is a cruel and humane hack. But for these people, the pet that they're living with, they're also in love with their pet, like as in wife, husband relationship between them. So these are certain things that I used to question through my projects or through my work. Yeah. So that's a short introduction about me. Do you want to talk through any of your pictures, Sivar? Do you want to show some of the work? Yeah, sure. Can I do it now? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do that. Sure. So this is my project upside down where I'm talking about kids and how parents are usually controlling each and every act of kids. Like in an Indian scenario, we always want our kids to be an engineer or some technology oriented person who can earn more and get a living. So anything out of this direction is a taboo in India. And we, the Indian culture always has this tradition of behaving. If you're not behaving, then you're, you know, your term, you're outcast. So it talks about kids who are not behaving basically. So the act of kids where I see the act of kids not behaving as a rebellion against the parents. So it's a performance between me as a photographer and the kids, where the kids performed me, the things that their parents won't accept or the society won't accept or the society deems as something, you know, that a kid is not supposed to do. Rather, the kid should be studying or doing something related to education. So I'll quickly go through the photographs. So for this project, I photographed kids from different economic and social backgrounds in and around Chennai. So the process goes in like, I have a conversation with the kids and they come up with ideas within their environment, whatever is feasible, they come up with ideas and then they perform it. These ideas are basically things that their parents won't allow them to do or the society things, you know, this is too naughty, they should be studying or things like that. It also takes us to the surrealist space and mind of a child have always been there. So yeah. And this is my Kashmir project where I'm working with archives, collected images from victims of enforced disappearances and other human rights violations. I seek Kashmir as a window to talk about the state oppression. And when I was a child, my parents were very much involved in the Tamil era movement. So that kind of provoked me to start looking at other places where the state oppression is being a major issue and a lot of human rights violation is committed in the name of nationality of patriotism. So that led me to Kashmir five years ago and archiving as a process came in later on after I started working on different projects in Kashmir. So these are photographs that I collected from victims of enforced disappearances. Enforced disappearances is when people have been abducted by the army without a proper arrest warrant and you can't find them. It's mostly custodial death, but the army does not acknowledge it as a custodial death. So the family is left out with idea of where the person is. Usually the army tells the family that the person crossed the border and went to Pakistan for military training to become a terrorist. So these photographs also talk about how memory is not the same when we're revisiting it. For example, this photo on the left of Bashir Salim Pareh was taken as a family portrait with his friend who is hidden in this and later on in his laughter, he disappeared. The same photo has become a mugshot for the missing person's report. So we don't have control over images and we don't have control over how the images are going to be used in the future, especially in a conflict zone like Kashmir. And these are more images of Abdul Rashid Parra who is abducted by the army and his wife, Zina Begum. These are very intimate family portraits of the couple. This is wedding portrait and this is Zina Begum and Abdul Rashid together during their first vacation after marriage, which is supposed to be a honeymoon. And these are the photo of Zina and Abdul. And behind the photo, we can see a lot of descriptions written by Zina after Abdul's abduction. And there is a small, I love you, written in this behind these photographs. When we think of Kashmir and Kashmiri women are children, the imagery that we often see is the hijab, clad woman or the child with a toy gun is a famous imagery or a child's pelting stones. But the archive that I was looking at brought opened up a new perspective to the Kashmiri imagery where I could see Zina wearing Abdul's shirt. When I asked Zina what is this photograph about and she started explaining how her husband wanted her to wear his shirt and his hat and take a very modern portrait. When we think of Kashmir, we always think of Islamic, you know, how Islam is oppressing women and children and sort of brainwashing them into militancy. While if we are looking at these photographs, it's actually not the same. And it's actually not true. It becomes a state-sponsored history that we're reading rather than the reality itself. So, yeah. Great. Thank you, Siva. That's a really full tour of your project. Adhira, do you want to speak a bit about your work too? Should we open that up? Okay. Hello, everybody. My name is Adhira Taqawidil and I am a photographer by training. I'm also a graduate of the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad in India, but a little before Sewer Sai. And since I graduated, I've been working as a researcher, as a curator, as an exhibition designer, but I also do personal projects based on photography. And the project that I'm going to talk about at length for this panel is going to be focused around a collaborative project that I've been working on with a team of people called the Anglo-Indian Archives. So, before that, I'll just briefly take you to some of some of the other work that I've also been doing. So in recent, in the last three years, I've also been based out of Calcutta, where I've been thinking about what it means to have a metropolis like Calcutta and thinking about the role of various people within that. So one of the things is that a large part of my family is also from Calcutta. So over the last three, four years, I've been working on a project sort of thinking about what family relationships mean and what also the role of the city and the metropolis plays within that, which is also connected to another project looking at the urban landscape itself. So these are slightly sort of connected projects, but they are somewhat separate as well. But this is my photographic work. The project that I was talking about earlier is called the Anglo-Indian Archives. And so what we have been doing around that project has been to, it's a team project. So my slides are going a bit off. But so this is a project which I've been working on with a team of people. As you can see, we're a core team of three people, which is composed of Vinay Prakash, who is a photographer and a curator based in Delhi, who has worked extensively around the Anglo-Indian community and has made a lot of work, photographic work around the Anglo-Indian community. And we are also working with another graduate of the National Institute of Design, Sheikh Mohammed Ishak, who is also a part of our process in the way in which we collect the archive and manage it and compose it. And since none of us, all three of us are not from the Anglo-Indian community. We also rely very heavily on mentors from the community and the two mentors who we have been working with the last two years have been Haria Mathur, who is a Chennai best writer, a book illustrator, playwright and screenwriter who has been publishing and editing a magazine called Anglos in the Wind, which is a very, very important magazine which comes out of Chennai and is one of the few sort of literary publications available for exclusively talking about the Anglo-Indian community in India. He also runs a publishing house called Anglo-Indian Books. And we've also been working with the acclaimed Anglo-Indian writer, Irwin Allen Sealy, who is a novelist and a poet. So you can see that the team is quite diverse in that sense. And one of the key things that we were concerned about, especially with regards to the Anglo-Indian community, was that a lot of, when we think of photography, especially the archive, there is a sense of sort of, you know, it being a historical collection of things which have frozen in time in a way. So the collection almost becomes slightly, you know, already in the process of collecting itself, there's a datedness to it and it becomes very stifled in the way that it is thought about as well. So this is one of the things that we were also thinking about when we began thinking about the project itself as to how we can rethink or reconsider the way an archive is looked at and can we then think of ways in which we can sort of challenge that. And the, yeah, so one of the things that is also very prominent about representation of the Anglo-Indian community post independence in India is that there has been a lot of misrepresentation of the community. Now the Anglo-Indian community is also has a fraught place in Indian history because of the impacts of colonialism. And because this community sort of came in between, you know, came in between both the Indian side and the British side. And so there was a lot of post independence. There was a lot of sort of, especially in media, there was a lot of misrepresentation about this community and considering the ways in which they were stereotyped, especially in cinema, in music, and in a lot of other sort of mass media. So that is something that, especially when looking at a visual archive and collecting photographs, you are sort of directly in conflict sometimes with this established stereotype. And one also has to think about ways in which one can think about that. So we, of course, went through a lot of rounds of making a proposal that would actually make some meaning to the fact of why we wanted to do this archive, why we wanted to collect these images, and why we wanted it to be accessible to a larger audience. And all of these questions were sort of racked through the months that we spent in actually creating a proposal before we even began the project or before we even actually went out into the field. So a lot of the questions that we were considering were asked and were sort of thought over before we went on to the field. And this is us on the field when we actually went into homes of Anglican community members in and around Chennai. So this leg of it was done in 2018, in late 2018 when we did our first field visit, where we visited around 10 Anglican families and actually sort of began the process of asking them if they would be, you know, if they would be willing to be a part of this collection, and if they would be, if they would agree to share their family photographs with us. And that is another thing that is something that is often sort of a tricky area is the family archive is also very intimate and very personal. And when one hands that over to quote unquote an organization of any sort, and at this point, we are still not an organization. And so there's a lot of questions that we have to go back and forth with these families as to why we need these photographs, what are we going to do with them, how are we going to use them, and what does that mean for a larger audience as well. So a lot of our field visits was also in doing oral history interviews and collecting stories from the families about the photographs themselves. And as you can see here, we were in very varied environments and we were collecting this, these very digitizing these. So we were in all sorts of environments. And so we also had to think of ways in which we could work quickly in the field. And that's shake there, who's photographing the albums for us with a cat. So once we did have this material sort of gathered for the first round of our of our archiving process in Chennai, we actually then have to go through all of these photographs and then think about ways in which to make sense of what we were actually looking at. Now, this is another process that we are still reconsidering over and over again, as we go through the archive, because there are this is the thing about photography that there are 100,000 ways in which one can think about any image of a photograph of a person's wedding could could means is obviously meaning something else to the family to whom that photograph belongs and to their children and grandchildren, but means something very different when we look at it in context with five other wedding albums or you know, or five other photographs of different people in different situations in different times. So all of this had to also be considered. And this is a process that I think that, you know, as archivists or as people involved in thinking about the archive, one needs to constantly go over again and again as to how the various meanings come together and also challenge each other. So you know, so this is a process that we're still doing that after Chennai, we did another leg of the Unlunan project, archive project where we also did a short field visit to Gohati in Assam, where an intern of ours, Pranami Rajwangshi, who you can see standing and doing an interview with the family is was another leg of the project that we did, but also then collected more family albums from families in Chennai and digitize those, I mean, in Gohati and digitize those. So again, like there's a difference in family albums, of course, of the community living in Gohati Assam as compared to Chennai. So that is another process that we're also sort of going through in the in the way as to how we sort of map all of this together. I'll just quickly jump to another slide. So you can see that this is the map of India and we have close to 15 locations where we would ideally want to go and do these field visits and gather this data, I mean, this digitize these family albums, because the Unlunan community was also so spread out all across the country. And they have a long history of the manner in which specifically they were living in specific areas of the country based on their profession, especially many Unlunan community members were based in areas which had strong links to the railway lines to post telegraph to the armed forces. So that also has been stored in thinking about geography and about land and also thinking about what those histories then how that connects back into thinking about the country itself. So one of our objectives going forward, which is of course that this archive is important to first to make the archive to actually collect all of this information, but then it has to be accessible. And our core idea is that it has to be accessible to people of the Unlunan community and not just the Unlunan community in India, but a large part of the Unlunan community has also become part of the larger diaspora around the globe, especially in places like in Europe, in the Americas, in Australia, New Zealand. So it's sort of very important for us also to connect with people from those geographies as well and have a conversation with people from various parts of the globe who may also be thinking not just of their own histories, but also maybe scholars and other people who would be interested in working around the Unlunan community. So at this juncture in the last few months post-COVID, we have actually intensified our sort of our efforts in actually getting this archive online and creating a space for that because it is now more than ever, it is most important that you know, archives are actually having an online space because we aren't able to actually connect to people physically anymore. And although we have done a few exhibitions, these are some press clippings from some of the exhibitions that we've done in Chennai, and we've also got some physical catalogues and other things from these exhibitions. So the thing is that, you know, it's important that we have the archive as a space in which these, not just the photographs, but also these oral histories can rest and can then be thought about later, but also that they have to be constantly accessible and then we can get those questions from people from the community because, you know, most of the people who are on the core team right now are not the unknown communities. That is very important for us to question our own role within this archive as well. So that's it. That's great. And moves us into this conversation about what happens with COVID too. And I would like to get to that, but before we do, I mean, you've talked us through there very coherently, the process of curating for your exhibition, which other, which both Siva and Linda have also talked about briefly in their presentations too. And in different ways, all three of you have talked about kind of the insider-outsider relationship in your work. I think that, you know, that there is an act of observation that's going on in building the archive that you're putting forward and thinking about kind of communicating to a number of different audiences. And I'd like to ask all to think a bit more of that and perhaps kind of starting with Linda, who you began the conversation and was very restrained. You were very restrained in your timing. But thinking about, I guess, the ethics of archiving here too. You talked about Linda in your presentation about the sort of tension between activism and archiving. And so, I guess, how have you found this relationship as being a kind of the insider and outsider community? Is an archivist always looking in or what's the difference about archivism that comes from within a community out? I think it's different with every project. You know, Gali used to call itself a community archive and we sort of rethought that and we no longer have that as our sort of tagline because what is the community? I mean, you know, saying that the queer community in South Africa is just too broad and there are too many subgroups and I don't think it's a use of groups. So yeah, I mean, we struggled with that a bit. Are we an activist archive? Yes, I think so. It's, you know, every project is different. The exhibition that I spoke about briefly, the QP exhibition, we did that in partnership with the District Six Museum in Cape Town. And that was very important. And we did a lot of public programming and workshops with former residents and to really get the buy-in from the community and their support and their participation. So yeah, everyone's different. You know, currently we're working on an oral history project in Mozambique. And that's something we've wanted to do for a while but we needed to find somebody who had a network there who could speak Portuguese. You know, so every project has its own set of difficulties and ways in which we need to connect with the people involved. Yeah, so I don't think there's one answer to that question. Everyone's different. No, that's it. But so multiple relationships about the kind of the community that you're working with but also thinking about audience there too. And Siva, you talked about that a little bit with your work on Kashmir about producing, you know, the same image being used for different audiences. What has, how have you thought about that question of audience as you've worked on your Kashmir project in particular? Well, actually when I started this project, when I went to all the families and met them, the family had a different idea of the photograph. Like for them, the photograph and the documents itself is an archive. They see the filebag and the boxes that they save these photographs in and they talk about how the person would have grown just like how these archives are growing and these files and other documents in their houses are growing. So when you talk about, it's a community of people who still hold on to those memories and they want to reach take this out to many audiences. While I work with APDP Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons who have been working on this for a long time and they have collected a lot of documents while my project is just an extension of theirs where I'm collecting family photographs and looking at, when I saw the family photograph being cut out and made into a document in their file, that shows how we don't have control over the photographs and the meaning of the photograph also keeps changing with the family, the photograph of, there was a photo of a militant with a gun and for them it was a very proud movement back in 1990s and the wife talks about how that photograph, how she was fine and how she was proud about her husband going, getting into militancy but now when she goes and looks back to that photograph it's not the same feeling. Now she's worried about her own thoughts and she's feeling like I should have stopped him at that time so that, you know, he would have stayed back for a while but yet she's still proud of her husband getting into and fighting taking the rebel. So yeah, the images are keep on, we take images for a certain reason but it's not the same when we are revisiting it again and especially in a conflict zone that it's a big difference that makes. How we have never thought about a birthday photograph of my family, I would have never thought that my birthday photograph would become a document, a mugshot for a missing report of myself so that made me understand how we don't have control over the images. And Adhira, you talked to the end of your presentation about kind of embracing online space which of course we're all desperately trying to do right now. How, in what sense is that expansion onto online space a democratising of the archive that you're building, you know, you're talking about reaching out to different communities across the world and in what sense does it, is it complicating this experience that Siva's talking about that actually fixing meaning becomes even more complicated with this online space too. So through your Anglo-Indian project in particular, do you see the move online to be about expanding audiences or complicating who has, who makes meaning from these images? Yeah, I mean, I think one also takes the role of the archivist very seriously, especially in academic spaces and even as us, we spend so much time with this archive, but we also take ourselves very seriously and sort of imagine a sense of control over it, which is a which is a fallacy, I think, because one can never actually have any control, especially over photography, it's one of the most, you know, it's one of those mediums in which the spectator has as much of a right to determine what the image means as the subject, as the photographer, and that is always going to be the case. So for us, one of the things that is so important for us to in order to make this archive very accessible and democratise it on the online space is so that we also challenge in our own understandings about this because we are the ones who are doing the collecting, so we're also the ones who are deciding which photographs to digitise, which ones do we need, which ones, which families do we even have access to. And so a lot of that, who are we leaving behind in that process when we are collecting things is a very crucial question that I think that, you know, we online sphere allows for a lot of other people to come into that conversation. Definitely people from the Angular community for sure, but also others who might have been scholars working on it, just regular people who might be interested in photography, regular people who might be interested in history and just people in the world, you know, and I think we need to be able to open that up because the archive also should not have this imperial idea about collecting, keeping and labeling and, you know, and that's it also becoming a study that way. Thank you. Linda, can we come back? You cut your presentation off short because actually of everyone involved in the conversation, you are still, I mean, I'll talk to Edina and Siva about how COVID has impacted their work, but you are, Gala is still working, right? And you've got some projects there, so maybe you could talk about how this move to online has impacted the work that you're doing. Would you like me to open up the slides again? Yes, please. Just to say briefly as well, just before, you know, we went into lockdown in South Africa at the end of March, we actually, as two-year digitization project that we've been working on with Gail in the US was finalized, and so 25 of our collections were put online through the Archives of Gender and Sexuality series, so that was very good timing for us. It meant that researchers could access at least those 25 collections, so that was great. So as you'll see in the slide here, I mentioned briefly before the major archive project for this year was meant to be our oral history project in Mozambique, mostly around Maputo, documenting stories of queer people in and around Maputo. And a lot of those interviews have been done already at the end of last year, in the beginning of this year, luckily. So we're kind of carrying on with transcribing and translating from Portuguese. Unfortunately, our conference and exhibition that were meant to happen last month in Maputo obviously had to be put on hold indefinitely. But in terms of the day-to-day of the archive, unfortunately physical visits to the archive obviously had to stop. We closed up, we're all working from home, and so we had to find a way of carrying on working and keeping people engaged. So mostly we've been doing that through social media. We've been doing weekly stories from, stories from lockdown where I've chosen various collections in the archive and try to highlight them visually and with text, both on Facebook and Instagram. Other ways in which we've tried to engage is that we've tried to start an oral history project documenting or hearing from queer people in South Africa and their experiences of lockdown, of COVID, of everything that's happening. Just try and make sure that queer experiences aren't lost in the overall narrative. So we're still going through those. We didn't get much of a response in the beginning, so we actually formulated a Google form, which had worked better. It seems people like structure. We initially said, please just send us poems, videos, anything like that, that describes your experience, and I think people were daunted. They sent out a series of questions, and then we've also tried to document what all LGBTI organisations in South Africa are doing. What online events are they hosting? What fundraising are they doing? Anything that's happening? So we're really just gathering, gathering, gathering at the moment. We're also trying to host a few online events. We had one a few weeks ago called Let's Gale, and as you'll see in the second image of Let's Gale, we are apologising because it didn't happen, because Zoom went down worldwide at the time that we were meant to be hosting this. So I just wanted to include this to show that as much as we try and shift things online, there are always going to be problems, and that's awkward for us to speak to that. The difficulty is in trying to engage online, and obviously it has very obvious problems of exclusivity, who has data, who has access, all those kinds of things. And as I mentioned before, we really feel very sad that we've lost our safe space, our library space, which was always an open door policy, and even when we reopen hopefully next week, in some capacity, we won't be able to have that kind of just open door policy for a while still, and that's sad for us. And then one last thing. In terms of our activism, we weren't quite sure what to do in the beginning because we're not an organisation that gives out funds and food and things, but we just realised that there was such a large need that we have started to apply for emergency funding, and we have gotten two of those to provide food parcels and hygiene parcels to the queer community, particularly the migrant community, because the South African government, although it's giving out grants to South Africans in practice, any migrants from neighbouring countries like Zimbabwe, in particular, so we are trying to figure out how to do that. It's first for us that we will physically be distributing food and things like that. Thank you. That brings us, I'm conscious of time, but that does bring us into the here and now and the very real, really, really well, and what we might say is, if we begin to open up the question and answer chat session and we begin to collect some questions there. But I think just to continue the conversation, I mean, actually that point about space feels so important. And Adira, you had nice pictures of people going into homes and doing oral interviews, which, of course, through social distancing now is impossible and puts both the archivist and the people being taught to a huge risk. But I think it also reveals the point about the kind of the home as being a supposed safe space in the lockdown, the space where you retreat and stay well. And that is premised on the idea that you have access to online data and you can communicate to other people that you can continue your life in so many ways. And Linda, so your experience about trying to collect data from that experience is itself interesting. It's the structured form that people like. I wonder if you could all reflect a little bit, while we have a powerful narrative about what to do around COVID, about the lockdown rules, about the way to behave, how, using your experience, how could we think about and record the less structured parts of life right now, the ways in which those experiences that don't fit into the communicative world, we can't reach out through a Google form or we haven't got access through Zoom. What about the people who are left off the grid through the way in which the world is now working through COVID? Are there any ways that you can think of through your work so far that we could capture some memory of that or create a space for people to recall that experience? Or history project, Linda is obviously doing a bit of that, but even so, you know, the networks that we use? Well, we're also documenting like our weekly youth forum that used to happen in the library is no longer happening, but they have continued that conversation via WhatsApp. And so WhatsApp is something that is actually quite accessible in South Africa, even to those who maybe don't have computers and fancy phones. So we're archiving those conversations as well amongst the youth forum. So that's one way. But you know, we have to be careful about issues of privacy and things like that and discuss exactly how there's a shame. Deira, do you want to say something about, I mean, you've been working with family albums there and that idea about family space in your work has been crucial. Do you think that the impact of COVID will impact on the spaces, the domestic spaces in the communities you've been looking at, do you think? And how will that shape your project going forward? Yeah, so it's hard because certainly a lot of the work that I was doing with my personal work as well as with the Anglican project going forward for all of us is going to be a lot harder to actually go into family spaces and handle archives physically, because that is a thing in itself which becomes difficult now. And we have to think of many days in which we can first sort of, you know, a thousand precautions because before one can even ask to enter something home. So that itself is something that we have to rethink completely. And I don't know, I think yes, definitely it is a question in which one's access to the English becomes crucial when one thinks about any kind of, you know, work at this juncture, which itself is a flawed thing, because a lot of the communities we've been working with with the Anglican project, they're all elderly people and they don't have that awareness or the access to the online space in which they can upload files or send things to us. And so it's not something that is accessible to us either to even think about that as an option. We're already thinking of a younger audience who would be interested and who would contribute. So it's a strange space that way. I think what a lot of us are also working with at some point down the line, things would, you know, slowly get back to normal and we could then go back and access. So that's also a sort of a vague hope, right? Because we don't know if that's ever going to really be the case for the next, I don't know how many months or perhaps years that we can actually go back to that. So it's a strange situation that way. I don't have the answer to actually what to do about that. At this point, we can try to, you know, be in spaces which are accessible online, but then, you know, like, I really don't know. It's a tough situation that way. And I think all museums, archives and institutions, everybody is struggling through that right now. Yeah. Siva, do you want to, I mean, I know that your Kashmir project, I mean, that's, you've ended up putting that on hold quite considerably because of COVID. Do you want to say a little bit more about how COVID has impacted that project? I think it's just added on to the issue. But working in lockdown is not something new for me or Kashmiris, I guess. Kashmir has always been down for most of the time. So people have been helping me through this archive and collecting photographs. They have already ways, you know, through work around the internet ban or the lockdowns. So when I started this project in the beginning of this year, I had people who used to bring documents, print in documents to Delhi. And from there, I used to travel from Taneo to Delhi to collect it. So we have reduced the use of technology. So we have to travel. But since the COVID, we can't travel to the houses, the places where you call safe places where you can get into people's house and discuss about the family photograph. Now you can't get into the houses as well. But we have always found a way of working in Kashmir because either the families will bring the photographs or the documents or they'll courier it to you and you give it back. So this is how I used to work in the beginning when there was internet shutdown in Kashmir. Lockdown is new for the world, but it's not new for Kashmir. There have always found ways to work around it. So what you're describing is almost, you know, a flip side. So that, I mean, that actually when, in other cases, it's the mobility that people have lost and have moved online. But in Kashmir, it was losing the online mobility, but you had physical mobility. That's also shut down too. To our guests and listeners, please do feel free to enter a question on the chat function here. I think Sunil has set up a message so that you can find that. But so we're, as is so often the case, it's very easy to find all the really huge negative impacts that COVID has had on our lives. Do any of you see any kind of positive opportunities about archiving and reaching different communities and mechanisms for questioning different structures that have come out of COVID? I suppose one positive that's come out for us is that the LGBTI sort of network of organisations in South Africa, which often didn't communicate as much as they should and work together as much as they should, have come together quite a lot. And there's weekly meetings between all these organisations and campaigns and fundraisers to try and get money and supplies to clear people in need. It's kind of brought different organisations together in a way that hasn't happened in quite some time, so yeah. If you do, Yadziva and Adira, if you want to come in on that too, but we've also got a question which is from Sahaba. Thank you. I address primarily Adira, but opening up responses from others too. Adira, you mentioned that older segments of the community are somewhat excluded from the pandemic work around, so all the move online, the technology emphasis. What about their stories in terms of the memorialisation of COVID-19? How might we make space for elderly people? I guess that's a section of the community that we don't often think about in terms of activism, really, elderly sections of society. What are the ways that you think we could bring those communities in a little more? So I'll just sort of quickly reflect on that and everybody please feel free to also come in with your thoughts. I think one of the ways in which, I mean, the thing about COVID is also that it has disproportionately affected the LZD community around the world also. So the threat is also more to access them also because of the pandemic. So that is another sort of thing that one has to always deal with when thinking about how does one access a section of the community which is much more a threat from us, even going into their spaces. And I think one of the ways that we can think about that is not about getting the younger people to translate their stories but to have a sense of community in which people within family groups, people within community networks are talking to each other who do have access to each other. Like I have access to my grandmother so I can talk to her and get maybe some way in a way in which to get her on a phone conversation. So I think that has to happen on an individual level where we have to figure out these problems individually with each person that we are or each person that we're trying to access or talks to. I think that we have to build these networks and that is it's a harder thing because it's much harder than walking into someone's house and saying we want access to your archives and talk to us and they're willing to talk to us. Here we have to go through a lot many more networks but I think one needs to make that effort and that's one of the things that one needs to do now in order to and that's I think one of the ways we can think about that. So it kind of connects back to Linda's point too about you know actually it's not just about how we remember that has to shift how we communicate right now has to shift in the kind of the ways in which we connect with people you can't take some you know previous practices for granted. Other people want to come in on that question too but we have had another question from Keval Hari Khasiva in particular about the way in which the increase of surveillance of journalists in India and the co-opting of mainstream journalism is the government's mouthpiece so the tensions around the state in India how has that impacted the way that your work in Kashmir has been received and I would say here also that this connects to a theme that was dealt with in one of the other conversations held as part of this kind of curated group which was looking in particular at the way in COVID relates to the rise of state authoritarianism and more fascistic tendencies across the world too but but Siva yeah I mean do you want to talk about how well would you like to respond to Keval's question really about state surveillance in this too I mean this isn't just your translating of a story there's various increased layers of power and translation that you need to address as you bring things forward. To answer Keval's question I my work has been polarized in India there are many who supported many who wants to know about the history the photograph while many who are still in denial don't want to talk about the issue while there's a lot of what about tree going on when I whenever I talk about Kashmiri Islam community there's question about Kashmiri funded community and the politics behind it so yes it's it's not received very well with everyone in India but it's good some are actually willing to at least hear about it listen to the you know they are the Kashmiri side of the story I'm happy for that and for the the other part of the question is about surveillance while I don't know whether I'm under surveillance or not yet and more importantly I'm not I'm not reporting issues in Kashmir so I'm sort of in the background as an activist trying to visit for human rights so yeah the problem with the Indian Indian state is that journalists you know when you're reporting hard news then it becomes a problem for them because more people consume it. Could you say a bit Siva about what's happened to the project since lockdown I mean you were you were working in Kashmir and left well I mean you were asked to leave right yeah but I completed most of the work from there so it was not a big deal because when I said the people were helping me around they constantly kept me aware that anything can happen here or any day that's what every Kashmiri tells you so you're not dependent on time so whenever you have time you have to act so that's how it worked there throughout every day every single day so we always knew something is going to come up the next day so we were always prepared so in that way it made me easier yeah thank you um so yes this is Kevles added another question which was it is about um balancing the safety of your participants alongside I mean your your own safety too which we've talked about um so I mean I think that that we talked about that a little bit now in terms of kind of entering houses and exposing yourself sorry that sounds awful um putting people that you're involved with at risk that wasn't what I meant there at all but um the I think this kind of goes back in one sense to those broader questions of ethics that we were discussing at the beginning about sort of um one's role and responsibility as an archivist as an insider and as an outsider um and and maybe I mean Siva please do think about you know you've had direct issues around protecting the people that you're working with but I imagine Linda that's also a part of the work at Gala and there and in some extent with your project too so um you know maybe if you could all reflect a little more about your kind of the role of the archivist and the power that you have over the people that you're archiving and how how you exercise that responsibly I think the people who are helping me they're actually helping me and I'm not helping them so whoever is taking me on the field visits they know the players and they know when to take me so that none of the families or anyone gets into trouble and if a particular place is very under surveillance and then either they call the family to where I stay which is the office where they usually come because all the families are activists by themselves they are part of association of parents of disappeared person so they come to the office and then there in the office we have the discussion because me going to the uh their houses will not cause any trouble for me even if an army person spots me they'll just ask me to leave while the person the family will get tortured so there are different measures that I can't let you know exactly but we are managing it identity wise the identity is not out we always use a different name a pseudo name by their identity and place Linda do you want could you talk a bit about the kind of yes safety and power to yeah so I mean it's we give participants various options of using pseudonyms of also of having their their histories or their their contributions sort of embargoed for a period of five years or ten years or even until their death people those are quite tricky because trying to find people five ten years later is um yeah so the various ways um participants can also always look over there the transcripts of their of the interviews before we make them accessible it was it was very tricky putting a lot of this stuff online um as part of those 25 digitized collections because it's one thing you know a researcher going through a box of letters and seeing a name and you know checking with me personally if that's gonna be used but once things are online you know we had to redact so much stuff like every address and every letter every name every phone number every it was it was quite daunting and it still freaks me out because I couldn't think of something yeah we were pretty careful though it but it was a lot of work yeah and responsibility yeah and when in doubt we just didn't include it yeah I mean it's not like I mean in South Africa we we don't have you know it's not like it's we have political uh or legal issues I mean we have a constitution that protects the rights of queer people um but it's obviously on the ground that's not always the case that's yeah so it is it it is difficult yeah we have to be very careful there's there's two more questions that I think I think are distinct but I'm gonna kind of frame them together and then ask the three of you to comment on them as as you wish so Eljo asks Siva mentioned the idea of memory and resistance movements and and asks you to elaborate further but I think um actually all three of you can talk about the role of kind of memory in in in the present so sort of how one memorializes past events and identities and the importance of that in the present in the present or in present interactions and and Menakshi points to the importance of recording violence done to particular communities taking the migrant labour community in in India as a recovered lockdown but also kind of asks about uh you know what point does recording deaths and starvation become a kind of passive violence itself um and I think this brings us back to again that kind of the the tension that we started with in one sense about sort of the archive as a sort of structural account of society but also one which allows different voices to come through and and kind of using the archive to humanize memory as well as to dehumanize it in a way in which the state has you know official archives have so often worked um so I mean actually maybe those are more interrelated questions one about kind of memory and how memory forms a way of challenging some kind of more dominant narratives but also that that question about um how to archive in a way that keeps human experience live rather than numerical statistics or kind of more passive violence as Menakshi says um we're documenting more the the response so we're not really going out there and you know counting infections or deaths or um and honestly I mean it's I feel like while we're in it and gathering it's hard to reflect on it yet and know how much we're going to make available or how much yeah I mean it's it is very hard to tell in a moment we're just trying to gather as much as possible and then we'll figure it out um in a few months time exactly how we package this I suppose as a collection but which is what you're saying it's yeah how yeah the the actual packaging of the work we're doing now is yeah we'll have to think about it quite carefully depending on what comes up yeah there's always a gaze depending on where you're at you it can be the gaze of the state or it can be a gaze that's critical of the state but you need to know where you're standing hold that Adhira do you want to come in there you yeah we'll move around on my screen and you looked like you were going to speak and then your picture disappeared so yeah um I think I'm just briefly reflect on the idea of memory and memorializing and in the in the face of the archive that we've been working with on the an Indian question that is the Indian community has historically over the last 70 years especially since independence but even before that have been sort of stereotyped in various ways so they really haven't had a sort of a platform in which a lot of them could actually talk about their own histories apart from you know themselves talking about you know like there's not been a receiving end to that as much so I think one of the things is that you know when one also creates an archive you know we also as the three of us who are part of the core team of this project are all outsiders even though we've had varying interactions with an Indian people from the community we all have to be aware of our own internal biases and our own internal days from looking at work so you know when we look at photographs from the Indian community there are these stereotypical images that keep popping up like musicians and dancers and people in the cabaret and parties and you know these are the stereotypes but and if they also show up in the family albums and these are photographs taken by people from the community of their own celebrations so then it's a very different thing but it always matters in the way in which we present that because then we have the power if we put this up online also then the order in which these images appear will also determine the way in which it is seen and that is a huge power if one does think about it because it can it can be the difference between a stereotypical gaze and a gaze that is actually available for questioning and is accepting of a challenge to any gaze so we always have to think about that which is why it's so important for us also to have you know voices from the community constantly sort of giving us feedback on that and hopefully join us as well because that would be the ideal way in which we could actually start thinking about that and the violence of the gaze can be of course in situations like the crisis in India which is being reported in various ways whether that's from artist organizations or also from the state which is frankly not really reporting it and even if they are in a really terrible way so that violence can it's a it's a it's a difficult situation to even sort of even document and what are the rights of the people who are being documented is something that you know one somehow it is very hard to consider in the immediate situations when photographers out in the field of people are just recording things and putting them online as this is this is happening but you know things like informed consent things like the question of the gaze and things like if that person wanted to be photographed or if it was a threat to have been photographed which is another thing we're seeing with the global protests around Black Lives Matter as well like do you want as a protester to be photographed in a situation because that might be harmful for you even if it does become a very iconic and powerful image so those are some of the things I think that one keeps sort of challenging and questioning as people involved in looking at images and involved with images when thinking about memorializing also how to memorialize something and what are the biggest ways that one can do that? I just want to say like I'm glad that Adeora brought up Black Lives Matter because it's it's now become not only the time of COVID but the time of this movement so it's it's going to be something that we also need to think about in terms of our documenting and archiving is is how the queer community and queer activists are involved in that movement and the cross sections. Yeah, come back to them in a bit. Siva do you want to talk at all about kind of memory and Kashmir as well? Yeah, I'll just try to talk answer both the questions together. The first reason I started archiving Kashmir and the images in Kashmir is because when I initially started this project as a you know a reportage for a newspaper I was struggling to photograph Kashmir because at one point I knew that whatever I'm taking there's an ambiguity behind it like I know the history of mass graves in Kashmir and I couldn't go and shoot a mountain or a beautiful landscape there because I was always worried am I shooting a beautiful landscape or is it a bunch of dead bodies around there? So the idea of Kashmir is when you when you're looking at photographs which Indian photographers or the western photographers or whoever is covering Kashmir there's two extremes. One is that is very sympathetical where people are crying and the other one is very violent. There's no in between in these two images of Kashmir that I'm seeing or either it's it's very beautiful. So there are stages where people look at a child crying and say wow it's a beautiful photograph but it's not it's a child crying and when there's a stone belt or like frozen mid-air and then basically calling it a beautiful photograph what what do you mean by it's beautiful? It changes when it's when you're talking about a conflict zone. So that made me want to go and look at images that has not been you know looked in the popular popular medium or internet or whatever it is. So that's one reason I chose to sort of look at the personal photographs to humanize them. So when I brought back the photograph from the family albums to my house and when my mother saw it the first question she asked me was why are they not showing these in the television? Why are they showing only the the brutality that's been done and even if it's brutality why are they not showing police brutality or the military brutality that's happening in Kashmir? So the sort of intimate photograph from their houses created a conversation with me and my mother where she actually wanted to sit down and talk while if it was a violent image of Kashmir she would be like oh it's the same thing that I'm seeing in everyday news and she'll be more worried that I'm going there and working in such situations. And for the second question memory and resistance movement all the activists in Kashmir are the families of victims of that person. They want us to talk about their problems. There's a famous saying within the community within the organization which is kem che karan which means we have to continue the work. We have to keep talking about our pain. We have to keep telling the world what is happening out here. So whatever means they find they want to talk about the issue. They want to keep talking about the brutality that they're facing every day and memory is also the core for the state to keep altering to polarize people. When we're looking at Kashmir the history has completely been rewritten by the state of India and there's an alternate history when you talk to a Kashmiri there's an alternate history when you talk to an Indian. It's always a grave but people always take it as black and white. So I think that's why memory is very important in a resistance movement where you have to keep revisiting it and making sure that what happened in the past and how it's being changed by the power currently. Thanks Siva. I'm conscious I think we've got five more minutes and Ramla's question is about sort of what direction do you see the future of digital archiving and digital digitization taking post-pandemic but if we just kind of go back also to the point about Black Lives Matters which of course this panel has been a long time in the planning and then of course actually what's happened in the last sort of eight days I mean I think particularly that the long weekend has changed the conversation and it's almost you know I think Black Lives Matters the response to that movement in the last week or so has changed the global feeling about COVID on the one hand but it's also interesting you know how far is the COVID situation changed that movement to the George Floyd's words I can't breathe is obviously so potent in the COVID moment and people have made the point that you know that it was with that image that the video of George Floyd's last moments hadn't been taken you know the movement wouldn't happen that of course is true of Rodney King also some years ago so I mean more prevalence now of people with phones and videoing but I wonder if from the point of view of COVID but also from more recent events around Black Lives Matters if the panellists might want to just sort of reflect on yeah the role of digital technology taking us forward and how we remember COVID and this moment this global moment more broadly that's a tough one so what should we okay so let's I agree that's a bit of a but but what about what as people who are on Zoom who have WhatsApp who are involved in in this moment albeit from very different parts of society and impacted by it in very different ways are there things that we should be doing to help make a digital archive or kind of take that project forward in more critical ways yeah it's always difficult to know I mean as an archive we try as much as possible to be somewhat objective but it's obviously impossible but yeah so it's hard to know how much to gather I mean we try and gather news stories from the mainstream media as well as from queer media but now the question that's come up recently do we start you know saving screenshots of people's public Twitter accounts of what they're posting on Facebook and then if we do do that how do we choose who to follow who to document um and we don't quite have the answers yet in a state of activity yeah yeah I think sorry I'll just so one of the interesting things about having this digital space while so much is also going on is the fact that everybody you know a lot of people are online not everybody but a lot of people are online and so the fact the the power of the archivist is and must also get dissolved that way in the sense that there are people who are making archives on their own you know people are approaches people are documenting things so there are friend groups on Facebook and WhatsApp who have archives of their own of what's going on so I think that that is something that across a little bit more time will begin to emerge and there'll be a thousand more archives which is exactly what we want I think you know which would be the best thing because there shouldn't be one center of archiving because then of course you run into the problem of who do you leave out and who do you not because if other people are also documenting this and they are and and we know this because of Twitter because of Facebook because of spaces in which we can see what's going on also not just true COVID but also because of the Black Lives Matter protests and even in India when the anti-caid protests were going on in in January the flood of imagery of that because people were taking photographs and taking videos we didn't need journalists to be there all the time so I think that's crucial and that is an important step forward for you know for memorializing as well yeah I'm absolutely well said but we don't as an archive we don't I mean you know it's a bit different for my two co-panelists because they kind of work independently but you know as we are a sort of more traditional formal archive and and we don't have to archive it all anymore you know thanks to the digital age yeah with that pressure to keep a whole history is somewhat taken off our shoulders but we do have to at least follow trends and links and you know things also don't stay online forever which makes me also a bit nervous but yeah yeah Siva do you want to add to that great thank you we have hit our time we're we're we're at 4 30 in the UK that you know not that that means anything that's just one measure of time we've hit the end of the panel that's the important time and thank you so so much Linda Siva and Adira I really appreciate you taking the time to join us for this and thank you so much to our audience who've been participating and with questions too and Mohammed Ali thank you for your for your thoughtful comment there about the privilege that we have in these times we're so thank you all for joining us there'll be a recording of this that you can download online or watch online after this but we are going to have to close things off now but thanks very much and take care thank you thank you very much thank you thank you