Workshop Honour Thy – Archiving to Remember Cassia Clarke

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“Had her name been scribbled on the back of the albumen print, there would be at least one fact I could convey with a measure of certainty, one detail I would not have to guess, one less obstacle in retracing the girl’s path through the streets of the city.” – Saidiya Hartman; Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2021); A Minor Figure, pg. 13-14

Join us at iniva for a session with facilitator Cassia Clarke as we explore the value of personal photographic archives and learn how to care for and preserve them.   

This workshop draws on Cassia’s project, ‘Take My Word For It’, which aims to confront a gap in the knowledge and material exchange between GLAM institutions (Gallery, Library, Archive, Museum) and the community to assist the preservation of physical photographic archives within the home.  

‘Take My Word For It’ explores retelling of cultural and family history in African-Caribbean communities are predominantly dependent on word of mouth. Our ‘relatives–cum–archivists’, coined by Abondance Matanda in her 2017 ‘The First Galleries I Knew Were Black Homes’ essay, were simply point-and-shoot photographers who documented intimate and historical moments that captured everything but sometimes nothing at the same time.  

While Cassia was conversing with her grandmother, Joyce, about her collated archive she unveiled her regret of relying too heavily on oral history. Cassia noted that Joyce could only remember moments in her mind’s eye but struggled to share them with her.  

Facilitator

Cassia Clarke is a Luton-born British-Caribbean self-taught archivist, researcher and facilitator. She uses an autoethnographic and co-curatorial approach to engage greater knowledge democracy and collective intervention to better our accessibility to institutionally held knowledge. 

Image: Self Portrait of Cassia Clarke. Courtesy of The Artist