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

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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).