The past walks beside us
Archival research and publication around historic forms of anti-colonial infrastructural resistance at the International Institute for Social History (IISG), in collaboration with Omar Jabary Salamanca, Miriyam Aourgh and Sofia Boschat-Thorez for The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest (TITiPI).
role: archival research, publication design and production
- International Institute for Social History (IISG)
- The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest (TITiPI)
In 2024, TITiPI commissioned us to search the historic archives of the IISG for visual evidence of creative strategies, community organising, publishing and concepts for and of infrastructural resistance.
Infrastructural resistance is the abolitionist work of breaking down oppressive infrastructures and imagining, organising and building up new structures. But what does this look like? What visual grammars and aesthetics emerge from historic struggles that could transform affective relations to infrastructures?
Our first visit to the archives involved meeting with an expert archivist who gave us a tour and showed us around the inner-workings of the IISG. After this initial visit, we spent time in the archives themselves. This entails the tedious process of searching the online catalogues of the IISG, making requests for entries and fetching them at different intervals during the day.
We came across a folder of pamphlets, flyers and handouts related to Palestinian unions, resistance and labour movements.
Our main findings in the archive ended up being posters, newspaper clippings and photographs revolving around the pluri-vocal efforts in the South African anti-apartheid liberation struggle. We think this has to do with the location of the archive in the Netherlands (and the important presence of Dutch resistance to apartheid through the Komitee Zuidelijk Afrika) as well as the nature of the contents of the IISG's acquisitions: usually focused on international social and political histories and struggles rather than standard national histories.
We published and circulated our findings in the form of a stack of postcards and a short essay about anti-colonial infra-resistance and the paradoxical process of digging through colonial archival infrastructures to find them.
Navigating the archive through its own colonial digital interfaces brought up many questions around historical legacy and opacity in archival processes.
For example, we came across a poster titled "Mandela fights Apartheid, Shell fuels Apartheid", designed by Grapus in 1898 and acquired by the IISG from the Dutch Komitee Zuidelijk Afrika. Looking further into this poster revealed that it was never printed or published, as the African National Congress rejected it. Yet a physical copy exists in the archives of IISG. What was the story behind this poster? What brought the ANC to reject it? More importantly, why was it kept and archived? We didn’t have answers to any of these questions but we did want a copy of this poster.
To further complicate things, the IISG’s infrastructures have artificial technical limitations to prevent reproduction and redistribution of material.
So I wrote a script that fetches the poster chunk by chunk through the IISG’s online content viewer, fragmenting the poster and leaving us with individual blocks. We printed the blocks and "restitched" them into the original full-sized poster.
We published and circulated our findings in the form of a stack of postcards and a short essay about anti-colonial infra-resistance and the paradoxical process of digging through colonial archival infrastructures to find them.
Note: The material on this page and in the psotcards is part of the resistant energies project and has been reproduced in solidarity with liberation struggles, past and present. Rights remain with the copyright holders.