The word “archive” may usually conjure images of dusty boxes, white gloves and hushed silences. But a growing number of artists are finding that underneath the layers of protective paper there’s rich source material.
“Archives are like time travel,” says Désirée Reynolds, an artist in residence at Sheffield City Archives, who has been burrowing into the thousands of items in the northern city’s annals in search of black history since 2021.
She’s made headlines as the figurehead of Dig Where You Stand, a project in which forgotten histories are brought to life in exhibitions around the city. Reynolds discovered the “fake news” reports that surrounded Malcolm X’s visit in 1964, when a local newspaper claimed he was booed by students (he wasn’t), and dug up information on Thomas Pompey, a 14-year-old from Guinea who was baptised in Rotherham in 1725.
Dig Where You Stand’s latest iteration sees 14 artists of colour access the Sheffield archive, unearthing hidden histories and using them as the inspiration for artworks.
The artists have created shadow puppet shows about a Jamaican steelworker who tried to build his own ship out of scrap metal, tapestries that reference the now demolished Tinsley Towers, and investigations into the Sikh presence in Sheffield, which will be revealed to the public when the project launches across Sheffield on 20 July.
Reynolds insists this is only the tip of the iceberg in Sheffield, and it is part of a much wider embrace of archival practice.
Anarchist clubs in Bradford are delving into their past, collections of South Asian vinyl records in Digbeth have attracted national lottery funding, while Reynolds says every event they’ve done in the archive is wildly over-subscribed. “I still it find bizarre,” says Reynolds. “There must be so many more history nerds than I think.”
Reynolds thinks there is a wider boom in history at the moment, highlighted by everything from the cultural dominance of the Regency-era drama Bridgerton to the popularity of the Rest is History podcast, and archives – once the preserve of historians – are appealing to a wider audience.
“I think it’s never gone away but suddenly it’s been ratcheted up by all these other cultural forces that are saying archives are really, really interesting and no matter where you’re from, you are in there,” Reynolds says. “You just have to go and dig.”
While archives may becoming more attractive, they can be expensive to maintain. Some archives are struggling financially as the pressure of the cost of living crisis combines with increased rental costs and the expense of running a bricks and mortar operation with many thousands of items to store and care for.
The George Padmore Institute (named after the Trinidadian pan-Africanist and adviser to Kwame Nkrumah’s post-colonial administration in Ghana) started a fundraiser last year to fix its leaky building in north London. The artist Peter Doig donated limited-edition Linton Kwesi Johnson prints, as did the photographer Vanley Burke, as the institution aimed to raise £35,000.
Roxy Harris, a trustee at the institute, which opened in 1991, said the response was positive and now the maintenance work was about to begin. “We have always been really clear that our operation isn’t populist,” he said. “It’s aimed at people who want to do the hard work. We’ve never been able to do razzmatazz stuff.”
The radical archiving movement isn’t just confined to existing collections. There’s a growing push for contemporary moments to be captured.
On the eve of the opening of Beyond the Bassline, the British Library’s 500-year survey of Black British music, its curator, Dr Aleema Gray, called for there to be greater access to archives, while the DJ and writer Elijah recently appealed to people to keep their own physical archives of online material after companies including Vice started to delete their websites, taking thousands of articles with them.
Gray’s calls echoed others such as the author Emma Warren, who created a “manual” for people involved in cultural scenes to document their own history (and in effect create their own archive), while the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton has put on courses that seek to address Eurocentric bias in archiving.
Reynolds believes fighting to keep physical archives is crucial. “We might be in a computer age but we don’t have everything digitised. I’ve been looking at records from 1720s with my hands on the records, turning those pages, looking at people’s signatures,” she said. “You can’t do that digitally.”
