“If you are working with archives irrespective of the format or the medium, for me the inspiration or the encouragement is always about how can we breathe better. What is it about this thing that you are doing with these archives that helps you expand your lungs, your breath?”
–Nombuso Mathibela
While preparing for this fourth edition of our public history talks, we really wanted to stretch and play with the definition and notion of what working with archives entails. This aim was executed beautifully by our guest Nombuso Mathibela. Our session, which opened with a powerful sonic offering by Nombuso, brought us to a space of understanding memory work through archiving as healing breath, medicine, and intimacy.
The soundscape or sound piece started with the flautist and saxophonist, composer and teacher, Zimasile ‘Zim’ Ngqawana decidedly challenging the Western framework of understanding music in its social and cultural contexts. He went on to expound upon music being an experience, a way of being transported beyond the physical. The piece then moved through touching words on the deep feelings and tender intimacy borne out of time spent with an instrument, the flow of passing on this knowledge across generations, and the nature of grief found within cultural memory and archives.
In defining the role of a cultural worker and archivist, Nombuso stated that for her, it was in the context of understanding, “what the role of culture is in the production of human life.” That it was in giving attention to, “who we are, who we have been, and who we want to be.”
“For me culture is an ethic, it is an instinct, and it is value systems, [and] behaviours that inform the practice of art and the practice of how we are.”
From this, the conversation moved towards what it means to hold both the joys and griefs of an archive. Nombuso described three “organising principles” that she keeps militantly in mind in this liminal dance between the beauty and the heaviness of working with memory.
These are, archives as:
- Extension of us and others
- Inscription of self and others
- Reinvention of self and others
In honouring these kinds of contradictions in this work, Nombuso expounded on the importance of not being a prisoner to nostalgia and how the organising principle of reinvention moves her away from operating solely from a place of nostalgia. Reinvention for her means looking at the archive for what it is – engaging with its troubling, nuanced, complexities with honesty. It means refraining from the desire to sanitise and gloss over these heavy aspects of history. Reinvention creates the capacity for us to move from a problematic hagiographic (excessively flattering) gaze of the past, to one where we are reminded of what it means to be human, challenging us to learn and forge a more healing way of existing in our present.
“I think a lot of us who work with archives, who work with difficult archives….archives that demand you to be human i.e. to see people for who they are in their humanness that in spite of the political, the social, and all these other contexts that are so pronounced in there…in the archive itself [means that] to reinvent [is] not to make things look good but [to ask], what is it about this moment that has allowed us to be who we are?”
As multifaceted beings, our interests span across different mediums, and so the rest of the conversation moved towards the different creative channels in which Nombuso engages with an archive and what that journey is.
Concluding the session, two apt questions were asked by members of our community in attendance:
- I am curious about your experience of meeting things that you didn’t know you didn’t know.
- Who are your favourite African artists? Especially the ones who tell or told stories through their music
In answering these questions, Nombuso ended our sacred time together with a befitting reminder of the importance of archival work being rooted in healing and with some brilliant music suggestions that we definitely added to our playlists!
“I ask myself, how do I honour this moment, how do I honour this feeling…and part of that is allowing it to take its place in the archive.”
