Second in the Inter-Archives Conversations series, this session brought archivists together to discuss how they “define, categorise, and preserve the slippery materials that are defined as ephemera, and how they enable alternative constructions of history.”

Speakers:

Elaine Lin, Head of Collections at AAA, Hong Kong, leads the Independent Initiatives Files (IIF) project, which is comprised of ephemera with a focus on independent initiatives, and covers both art spaces and happenings. It is premised on the understanding that many independent initiatives publish scarcely and with limited circulation.

Ritwika Misra, Assistant Archivist (2016–20) at the Visual Archive of Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC), which hosts a body of pictorial and photographic genres from Bengal from the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth century. The archive is a composite collection of texts and images that seeks to create a new repository of sources on the cultural history of modern Bengal. She was part of the archive team for the exhibition The Art of Painted Postcard: Nandalal Bose & His Contemporaries, hosted online in collaboration with Victoria Memorial Hall, Delhi Art Gallery, and Jadunath Bhavan Museum & Resource Centre in December 2020. She was also part of the curatorial team for the exhibitions Accessing the Archive (2016) and City in the Archive (2017). She has an MPhil in Social Sciences from CSSSC, and a BA and MA in history from Jadavpur University, Kolkata.

Siddarth S. Ganesh, a queer historian based in Bangalore. They have been involved with cataloguing, transcribing, and translating material at the Queer Archive of Memory, Reflection and Activism (QAMRA). 

The Museum of Ephemera, a digital archive of ephemeral forms from the city of Bombay. The project recognises the potential of transitory materials to unsettle received histories of the city and conventional approaches to recording and remembering. The primary “objects” in the museum are posters, pamphlets, manifestos, slogans, songs, and photographs. The museum takes two political moments as its focus—the mill workers’ strike between 1981 and 1983, and the anti-CAA protests of 2019. This exploration is structured in two sections—Archive and Literature—looking at not only the materials themselves but the larger conversation that these materials allow. By placing these moments alongside each other, the museum teases out parallels and resonances that illustrate the politics of these forms. The co-founders for the project are researchers Avani Tandon Vieira, Manasvini Rajan, and Sumedha Chakravarthy.

Moderator: Noopur Desai, Researcher, Asia Art Archive in India