“We wanted to visibilize invisible histories,” says Ishita Shah, the co-curator of Constructing Personal Archives (CPA), a six-month-long incubation programme for developing and pursuing archiving projects of all scales, including personal records, family archives and community narratives. According to her, CPA, which will kick start its third edition on September 14, explores the need for personal histories to become a part of archives, institutions and the popular narrative.
Ishita Shah.
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SPECIAL ARRAGEMENT
History, she points out, has been written mainly from a patriarchal, elitist, western perspective, so it marginalises many voices. “We are talking about bringing these marginal histories to the forefront,” says the Bengaluru-based Shah, also the founder of Curating for Culture, the collective behind CPA.
Pandemic Baby
CPA is a pandemic baby, one of the many novel ideas that emerged during COVID-19. As an archivist, researcher, and curator, Shah says she began wondering how her cultural practice could help in times of crisis. So, she began offering small online workshops on documenting personal and family histories, testing the waters to see if people were interested in something like this.
“We did three short workshops on family archiving because we saw so much interest,” she says, recounting how, as part of these workshops, she would take participants through her own journey as an archivist, the basics of archiving, alternative methods of collecting history, how to assemble a proposal, and so on. In their feedback, many participants felt that they wanted more time and space to incubate their work. “Slowness and immersion have been very important to this practice,” says Shah, who decided that a more prolonged engagement was necessary and launched the first edition of CPA in partnership with Vallabhi Jalan around June 2020.
To ensure inclusiveness, the eligibility criteria for applying to CPA have been kept as minimal as possible; the only prerequisite is that there should be enough material to build an archive. “Only if your project has the material can we guide you,” says Shah, who has helped incubate around 36 archival projects across South Asia over two editions of CPA.
CPA 2024 is being co-curated with Past Perfect: Heritage Management Company (Mumbai), The Northeast India AV Archive (Shillong) and The Citizen Archive of Pakistan (Karachi), along with many other co-facilitators and presenters from South Asia and beyond.
It will be divided into three components: weekend workshops co-facilitated by professionals from the field, internal mentoring sessions, and public dialogues on larger themes emerging from the participants’ archiving projects. “Based on the project requirements, the programme’s pedagogy is curated in response to the selected participant projects,” says Shah.
Participants of CPA 2022 are seen engaging with audiences in varied forms at the public showcase in Goethe-Institute/ Max Mueller Bhavan Bengaluru.
| Photo Credit:
Adil Hamza & Bijoy Joseph
Looking into family history
Radhika Hegde, curator at the S.L. Bhatia History of Medicine Museum, St. John’s Medical College, who participated in the first edition of CPA, says that her introduction to personal archiving started with her simply attending a workshop on family history. “I saw this post on Facebook and was intrigued,” she says. “We were all sitting at home because of COVID-19, and — just out of curiosity — I wanted to see what this was all about.”
Fascinated by what she had learnt, she thought it was time to look into her own family history and went on to register for the larger incubation programme. This decision, she says, has had a very positive effect on her practice at the museum as well. “I was always someone who used the archives for research but was never the person who curated them,” says Hegde, who began cataloguing the resources available at St. John’s after completing the programme.
Hegde is also actively working on bringing oral histories and micro-histories into the larger dialogue around the history of medicine, something she believes is essential in a post-colonial world. “I have successfully brought that entire training to my institution,” she states.
Visitors engaging with personal histories of migration from different neighbourhoods of Bengaluru at The Cloakroom Archive (2022), an exhibition at the Sandal Soap Factory Metro
Station.
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Curating for Culture
Refining history
Shah grew up in Ahmedabad, a city studded with both marvellous historical buildings and iconic modern ones designed by people such as Louis Kahn, Le Corbusier, and B.V. Doshi. She remembers being fascinated by Ahmedabad’s built environment even as a child and this early exposure informed her aesthetic sense “passively but definitely.”
She went on to study interior design at CEPT University in Ahmedabad before pursuing a master’s in architectural history and theory at The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London (UCL). Her stint there, she believes, further opened up her worldview. “We were looking at the city as a much larger organism… the social life, cultural development and politics of it,” she says. “All that reading and researching (taught me) how to look at subjects from a transdisciplinary point of view.”
When she returned to India in 2013, she joined her alma mater, CEPT University, where she went on to set up India’s first architectural archive, CEPT Archives. Around this time, she started introducing personal histories into her practice, primarily through conducting oral history recordings. “Essentially, one doesn’t just study the building itself but the people who created it—their life, ethnicity and social situations,” explains Shah. “What one is trying to do over here is try to move the way architectural and design histories are read, studied and documented; not just subvert the narrative but also, in the process, redefine it,” she says.
Announcement of the first cohort of Constructing Personal Archives in 2020, selected from over 40 applications from across the globe.
| Photo Credit:
Vallabhi Jalan
A fluid collective
In 2016, she moved to Bengaluru, joining the Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology, where she worked as an educator and the coordinator to the UNESCO Chair in Culture, Habitat and Sustainable Development. “The focus was to work with heritage towns,” says Shah, who helped build community archiving projects in Hampi and Kalaburagi (formerly Gulbarga) in her stint here. “In a landscape like Karnataka, which is so diverse and understudied, the process of visibilizing invisible histories and taking it into heritage practice became very real,” she says. “This approach to documentation and collecting histories will help how we see heritage preservation and conservation practices.”
In 2019, she chose to go independent, collaborating on projects with Biome Environmental Solutions Pvt. Ltd., the National Centre for Biological Sciences, and INTACH Bengaluru. She was also co-curating Design-ed Dialogues with Rahul Bisht, a monthly public engagement platform at the Courtyard, Shanti Nagar. “I was able to bring cultural and creative practitioners from the city together to talk about very important critical processes in cultural projects,” says Shah, who then set up Curating for Culture (C4C) in 2020.
She thinks of C4C as a “fluid collective” comprising a diverse range of practitioners who are designers, video editors, filmmakers, public space designers and researchers who come together for the sole intent of making cultural preservation more accessible and inclusive. This collective, which is not restricted by geographical boundaries, essentially focuses on independent research, capacity building (education and mentoring) and consultation.
Highlighting unseen stories
At its core, C4C highlights people’s unseen stories and histories, which tend to be neglected, ignored, or overshadowed in mainstream narratives. “There is a political intent for me in this practice,” she says, pointing out that it is being built when many histories aren’t just being eclipsed or excluded but outright erased and rewritten. “These micro-histories, as we call them, will have political power against the authority, against the system, against the institution,” she believes. “I’m not saying the institution needs to fall; it needs to be challenged to have a healthy living environment.”
She also believes that these alternative methods powerfully move people. “History is often written in very sterile ways,” says Shah, who believes that the personal context offers emotion, brings in the ephemeral, and delves into the livingness of history. More importantly, it inculcates a sort of cultural responsibility, making people more aware of and sensitive to lives unlike their own. “It could alter how we understand and tolerate each other.”
Interested participants may write to CPA by September 7, 2024, at info@curatingforculture.com
