IAW2026 Online Case Study Session: Archives, Colonial Legacies, and Non-Sovereign Contexts / Archives for Future Justice

Sankofa: Marooning the Archive by Ana Laura Zavala Guillen and Yully Da Chaga Cabrera

Sankofa: Marooning the Archive is an artistic-research collective that operates at the intersection of visual arts and historical-geographical inquiry. Emerging from the research project Blackness in Resistance: Territory and Regime Violence in Uruguay, led by historical geographer Ana Laura Zavala Guillén, the initiative engages critically with colonial archives to examine histories of fugitivity among Afro-descendant women in the Río de la Plata region. The project draws on Zavala Guillen’s research conducted at the Archivo General de la Nación in Montevideo and the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, engaging with archival records that document both slavery and histories of resistance and re-existence through escapes.

This initial historical research process led to a collaborative encounter between the researcher and three Afro-Uruguayan artists, Karen Antunez, Yully Da Chaga, and Mary Porto Casas, giving rise to a collective practice that reinterprets these colonial archives through artistic methodologies. Through artistic intervention, embodied research, and processes of memory activation, archival documents narrating acts of escape and self-liberation are reworked, expanded, and re-signified.

The resulting artworks become affective archives of female fugitivity, connecting historical traces with the artists’ identities and lived experiences of marronage in their own linages. By engaging with these materials, the project challenges dominant narratives that have minimised or denied Black geographies of women’s resistance in the Río de la Plata, contributing to the resignification of history and to the visibility of forms of agency and collective survival.

The collective art exhibition, Women Marooning the Arts, inaugurated on 20 April in Montevideo, unfolds across painting, video performance, mural, and sound installation, supported by international organisations, such as UNESCO, contributing to the efforts to decolonise Diaspora heritage.

Co-curating descriptions of colonial photography (Katanga, DR Congo) by Jonas Van Mulder

KADOC is a cultural archive in Leuven (Belgium) that holds an extensive collection of personal and organizational archives that have emerged from the interplay between religion, culture and society in a Belgian, but also global context. Many of these of sources – records, photographs, films, etc. – document the interactions between Europe and Latin America, Asia and Africa that were intermediated by a variety of actors, such as missionaries, political movements, churches and NGOs. Among these collections are the archives of missionary congregations who were active in Belgian Congo.

This talk will discuss a recent project that focused on one of these collections: the visual archives of Katangese mission of the Flemish Franciscans, an extensive series of photos, glass plates, and photo albums created between 1920 and 1970 in various locations in the current provinces of Lualaba and Haut-Katanga in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In the framework of DE-BIAS, a project that aimed to promote a more inclusive approach to the description of colonial collections and the (hi)stories of minoritised communities, KADOC and its KU Leuven partners were able to set up an oral history project to connect these historical records with the communities that are represented therein in Congo today.

Together with Donatien Dibwe dia Mwembu (Université de Lubumbashi), a careful selection was made from the visual material related to five locations identified in the collection. Assigned project collaborators visited these locations, where they initiated conversations with elderly members of the respective communities departing from (reproductions of) the historical photographs. This talk will present the working process, the questions that informed it, and the challenges that were met. It will also expand on the exhibition Face/Surface (Antwerp and Leuven) that was co-curated with the Belgo-Congolese organization Congolese Kring in Belgium based on the collection and the project’s results.

Fractured, Fragmented and Ghosted: The Case of the West Indies Federal Fonds and the Challenge of Archival Justice in the Caribbean by Janelle Duke

Across the Caribbean, archival collections are marked by fragmentation—records are dispersed, incomplete, and often disconnected from the bodies to which they once belonged. These conditions are rooted in the region’s colonial past, where systems of governance, extraction, and control shaped both the creation and displacement of records. The archival legacy of the West Indies Federation (1958–1962) exemplifies this reality. As a short-lived political union without a singular successor state, its records exist as a fractured fonds, reflecting the very circumstances that led to the Federation’s collapse. Today, these records are scattered across regional institutions such as the West Indies Federal Archives Centre, former colonial repositories like The National Archives (UK), and private collections.

This paper conceptualizes the West Indies Federal fonds as fractured, fragmented, and “ghosted”—not only physically dispersed but also partially obscured within archival systems that privilege territorial and colonial frameworks of custody and description. It argues that this condition poses a fundamental challenge to archival justice, particularly in postcolonial and non-sovereign contexts where ownership, access, and responsibility remain unresolved.

Engaging with emerging discourse on displaced archives and shared heritage, the paper interrogates tensions between legal custody and the information rights of Caribbean peoples. It proposes rethinking archival practice through shared custodianship, regional collaboration, and digital reunification to reshape narratives of Caribbean fracture, displacement, and memory loss. In doing so, it contributes to broader conversations on colonial legacies, archival restitution, and more just archival futures.

Offline-First Memory Commons: Manifest as Justice Infrastructure for Archival Access, Preservation, and Community Control in Asia-Pacific by Razali Samsudin

Across the Asia-Pacific, connectivity is often intermittent, monitored, or shut down, and when networks fail, communities can lose the ability to document harm, coordinate response, and preserve memory. This case study presents Manifest as an emerging justice infrastructure for archival access, preservation, and community control. Its objective is to help people create and protect public record in high-risk, low-bandwidth contexts while reducing the risks of misrepresentation, loss of trust, or unintended exposure. Manifest’s mission is to provide civic tech infrastructure for creating, translating, and preserving public record, and to give community members a secure channel to upload firsthand testimonies. This proposal focuses on a pilot grounded in practical use rather than abstract speculation. Methodologically, Manifest uses an offline-first, community-governed workflow: testimony or documentation is captured securely on device, stored locally, and synchronised only when it is safe to do so. Community partners shape the rules for access, verification, description, and preservation, so that archival authority is shared rather than imposed. The Amnesty International APAC pilot will test this workflow through lightweight local deployment, co-designed governance, and training for community operators, with the longer-term aim of connecting local documentation to durable archival preservation pathways. This method reflects Manifest’s emphasis on personal, grounded commitments to human rights, durable relationships with values-driven communities across Asia-Pacific and beyond, and public record as a living resource. The expected impact is threefold: first, stronger documentation capacity in environments where connectivity is unstable or unsafe; second, greater trust and agency for communities whose records are often vulnerable to loss or distortion; and third, a replicable model for archives that seek to combine ethical stewardship and accessibility.

Lii Lozh di Kaastor: The Two-Spirit Atlas by Andrew Wiebe

Lii Lozh di Kaastor is a community co-created archival project and digital, geographic platform that gathers fragmented historical records of Two-Spirit life while building an interactive space for the ongoing creation of contemporary memory. Rather than a static repository, the Atlas functions as a living archive—one that users can visit, navigate, and contribute to—where records are re-situated within Indigenous and community-defined relationships across time and place.

This talk argues that archival practice has many opportunities to shift the standards of description to address the ongoing colonial conditions that have misrepresented, fragmented, and erased Two-Spirit histories. The case study, Lii Lozh di Kaastor developed an Indigenous archival framework that overlays a relational, community-driven palimpsest onto existing records, transforming the archive into a site of repair, accountability, and futurity.

The talk focuses on three interrelated ethical and political outcomes. First, it examines how Indigenous data sovereignty is enacted through technical infrastructure, where decisions about hosting, access, and permissions become expressions of governance rather than neutral design. Second, it positions archival practice as ceremony, grounding methods in community engagement, reciprocity, and long-term responsibility that extend beyond the lifespan of the project. Third, it asks how archival description can operate as a reparative practice when communities are actively grieving the annihilation of memory through colonial processes, proposing approaches that rework rather than erase harmful records.

Lii Lozh di Kaastor models how Indigenous, community-led archives—both digital and spatial—can transform archival practice into a relational, living system that supports Two-Spirit survivance and future-making.