Stories Rising to the Surface: Engagement with the Apna Heritage and Punjabi Workers Archives

档案对所有相关人员来说都是智力和情感上的难题。当涉及到创建一个摄影社区档案时，有扫描、标签、解释和展示的劳动。识别照片中的人物和这些被继承物品的保管人需要共同努力。“阿普纳遗产和旁遮普工人”摄影档案馆扩大了其存在范围，不仅展示了当地的家庭相册，还与当地的图书馆、学院、艺术画廊和宗教场所建立了联系。资料馆规模庞大，内容全面，在社区内展出，并向社区成员和当地文化部门传播图像。生活档案中有丰富的切入点和如何将照片内外的故事拼凑在一起的问题。这个方案试图从不同的角度进入档案。对照片和物品的初步阅读将通过描述和解释实现有机联系，重点关注物质性和意义。之后，该项目寻求与社区成员联系，与当地档案合作，并围绕这一系列20世纪60年代至80年代及以后的照片建立历史背景。通过与当代社区成员的联系，将努力通过社区参与档案来描绘散居空间的复杂性。代际讲故事将使社区能够分享他们对自己在散居空间中的位置的理解。他们的问题将导致对家的调查，将家作为“社区或家乡所经历的空间的社会和心理地理”来审问。这是一个在很大程度上通过日常接触“想象”出来的社区。这个“家”是一个我们即使在与它强烈疏远的时刻也保持亲密的地方。这是一种“宾至如归”的感觉（Brah1996）。

Archives can serve as intellectual and emotional puzzles for all those involved. When it comes to creating a photographic community archive, there is the labour of scanning, labelling, interpreting, and exhibiting. It takes collaborative effort to identify the people within the photographs and keepers of those objects inherited. The Apna Heritage and Punjabi Workers photographic archive has expanded its presence by not only uncovering vernacular family photo albums, but making connections with local libraries, colleges, art galleries, and places of faith. The archive, expansive and thorough, has been exhibited in the community and disseminated images to community members and local cultural sectors. The living archive is rich with entry points and questions on how to piece together the stories within and beyond the photograph. This proposal seeks to enter the archive from various perspectives. An initial reading of the photographs and objects will allow for organic connections through description and interpretation, focusing on materiality and meaning. Afterwards, the project seeks to connect with community members, engage with local archives, and build the historical context that surrounds this series of photographs from the 1960s-1980sand beyond. Through connection with contemporary community members, an effort will be made to depict the complexity of diasporic space through community engagement with the archive. Intergenerational storytelling will allow the community to share their understanding of their positionality within a diasporic space. Their questions will lead to investigations of home, interrogating home as ''the social and psychic geography of space that is experienced in terms of a neighbourhood or a home town. That is a community' imagined' in most part through daily encounters. This 'home' is a place which we remain intimate even in moments of intense alienation from it. It is a sense of 'feeling at home' (Brah1996).