I

t is common nowadays to think of NGOs as only fighting for the rights and interests of the underprivileged, the poor, women, or for the preservation of our environment.

But in the Middle East, the disappearance of cultural memory in times of war and conflict is a hot issue that has spurred intense activism to document realities of cultural importance, which also happens to be opposed to prevailing power holders.

Grave concern about the rise of alternative archival activities and increasing commercial interests have led to various conferences on the theme, of which the Memory Symposium, organized by the Townhouse Gallery in Cairo, Egypt, is the most recent.

Borrowing the title of a biography by the late Russian author Vladimir Nabokov, the symposium took place in the premises of the Townhouse Gallery from Oct. 28-30.

Presentations at the Symposium revealed that alternative documentation (meaning non-governmental) comes in many forms around the world.

However, in times of war or occupation, archiving documents takes immense compassion and courage.

Take award-winning photographer Susan Meiselas for instance, who was moved by the lot of the Kurds after she witnessed the anti-Kurd campaign, the destruction of their villages, and the excavation of mass graves in Iraq.

For six long years, she documented how Kurds ended up scattered across Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria, through interviews, personal photographs and other sources, and compiled the information in her seminal book Kurdistan, In the Shadow of History.

Yet, Meiselas confesses she’s worried her publication might have had negative political implications.

The same concerns prevented Yasmine Eid-Barragh from publishing the findings of her nine-year long research on camps in southern Lebanon. She had settled in one of the Palestinian refugee camps in Burj-al-Shamali to teach the youth photography as a means to give them a sense of self.

While she felt comfortable publishing the pictures taken by the children, she kept to herself the personal albums a woman in the camp entrusted her as political sensitivities still prevail.

With regard to the archives of multi-disciplinary artist Heba Farid’s personal collection, these ultimately found a place in Egypt’s Contemporary Image Collective, and the Center for Documentation of Cultural and Natural Heritage (CultNat), where Heba Farid is respectively co-founder and coordinator for the photographic heritage project.

The notion of freedom and independence ran through all the discussions on alternative archiving. But how independent can one actually be?

The archiving project in downtown Cairo, which started in the wake of gentrification plans, criticizes the rising commercialization of downtown artifacts.

However, it also raises suspicion as it is funded by the real estate company that instigated the gentrification of the old Cairo.

The model offered by Southern Conceptualism, a network of interdisciplinary researchers concerned with the preservation of critical cultural art archives, is more interesting.

They do not shy away from cooperating with established institutions like the Museum of Modern Art in Barcelona and the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, to strengthen their archival skills.

A unique feature of the network is also their insistence on keeping cultural heritage within the countries of origin.

Longstanding models of reliable alternative archiving of modern and contemporary art include the 15-year-old initiative of the Indonesian Art Archive, which is a continuation of the Cemetia Art Foundation some 15 years ago, and the 10-year-old Asian Art Archive Hong Kong, as well as Platform Garanti in Istanbul, Turkey.

Artistic initiatives, however follow their own path. Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, for instance, document realities of life through unrealistic images. They depict the Rwanda genocide through a row of ID photographs with clipped heads and shoulders.

By using clever techniques, they were able to recover obscured, scratched and even removed images in the archives of Belfast Exposed, a photography and art center.

“A lot of our work is not about making images but finding things that are normally not archived.”

A leaf found on the pavement in Tel Aviv hours after a young Palestinian bomber detonated himself Nov. 4, 2004, came from the explosion which blew the leaves from the branches of nearby trees.

Architect-cum-artist Celine Condorelli documents the changing face of Alexandria in a powerful presentation, poetically combining fact and fiction with images on screen and relevant quotations and text revealing the city’s once blooming cotton industry.

The primary owners of these cotton businesses left Egypt after the revolution in 1956 when the industry was nationalized.

After 50 years, there is nothing left, Il n’y a Plus Rien is the title of the piece which is also being screened at Manifesta, the European Biennale in Murcia.

Meanwhile Barnaby Drabble’s collection of curatorials, which he packed for a traveling exhibition, found interest in a creative design by Gavin Wade at the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, England.

Besides issues of independence and freedom that seem to proliferate in alternative initiatives — which
are ultimately trapped in a similar model of the convention they criticize — alternative archival initiatives may want to pay more attention to creative artistic strategies that can ultimately help define the alternative.

More information can be found at
www.thetownhousegallery.com
www.artscollaboratory.org