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

对于所有参与其中的人来说，档案可以成为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、标记、翻译和展示的劳动。要识别照片中的人和继承文物的保管者，需要共同努力。阿普纳遗产和旁遮普工人摄影档案馆不仅发现了当地的家庭相册，而且还与当地图书馆、大学、美术馆和宗教场所建立了联系，从而扩大了自己的存在。该档案内容广泛而详尽，已在社区展出，并向社区成员和当地文化部门传播图像。活着的档案里有丰富的切入点和问题，关于如何拼凑照片内外的故事。这项建议寻求从不同的角度进入档案。对照片和物体的初步阅读将允许通过描述和解释将有机联系起来，重点放在实质性和意义上。之后，该项目寻求与社区成员建立联系，接触当地档案馆，并建立围绕这一系列20世纪60年代至80年代及以后的照片的历史背景。通过与当代社区成员的联系，将努力通过社区与档案的接触来描绘散居空间的复杂性。代际讲故事将允许社区分享他们对自己在散居空间中所处位置的理解。他们的问题将导致对家的调查，将家作为一个社区或家乡所体验到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来想象的社区。这个“家”是一个我们保持亲密的地方，即使在与它强烈疏远的时刻。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).