See my earlier post about the faces in these circles in my local newspaper. Not so much has changed yet after all, it seems.
Archives of anger – all change is slow
Wrapping and unwrapping a USB-cable: pleasure and pain
This day last week was International Women’s Day. This week, I received from my employer, very generously, a piece of equipment on loan. Unwrapping it sparked a happy feeling, but immediately afterwards also a very sad one.
The equipment came with the following:
The ends of this cable were snugly fitted in their little pre-shaped beds at the bottom, and, at the top, folded elegantly towards the back of the packaging, where they met each other in an equally neatly wrapped coil that again fitted perfectly in the plastic mould.
It gave me great pleasure to see these shapes and how they worked together; to click the cable from its position, and back again in order to take the photo. I suspect that the enjoyment we can get from such shapes is to do partly with seeing and feeling that something fits well – works well. And partly with feeling a little bit like we ourselves are inside a well-tucked bed.
This was the happy feeling.
The sad feeling followed immediately after that. Because, as my fingers took the cable from its bed, I imagined the fingers that, perhaps a few months ago, must have placed the cable into its bed.* And how these fingers must be putting, not one cable, but perhaps several thousands of cables into their boxes every single day. And I imagined the owner of these fingers. Perhaps you who read this are this person. Or perhaps you have another repetitive job. The kind of job where your hands perform the same movement every few seconds for hours on end, and most of the rest of your body has to keep still.
Globally, it has for a long time often been people gendered female who get and keep such repetitive jobs, in electronics, textiles, data entry, food processing and, most of all, agriculture. The proportion of women in these sectors has been declining, and they may be overtaken by men soon: see the ILO report Women at Work (p. 24). Still, however, research using the ‘routine task intensity index’ (RTI index) suggests that women globally currently perform more routine work: see the report Quantum Leap (p. 49). So, if you have a high-routine job, likely you are woman, perhaps man, perhaps neither or both. Whichever way, you probably share a lot of experiences with others engaged in routine-intensive work.
I myself have had jobs like this, though only for very brief periods. The feeling associated with such tasks, for me at least, was not pleasure at all, but pain. The satisfaction of perfectly fitting components was absent, and the dominant sensation was pain. Literal, physical pain, in fingers, arms, eyes… and also what I can only describe as pain in the brain. I quit these jobs as soon as I could.
My unwrapping pleasures only put the wrapping-up pain that I imagine to have been there into starker relief. No one should have to do such fast and repetitive work as factories across the world force people to do. The alternative, of course, should not be automation and job loss, as is now often the threat, but healthier work.
I am doing my best not to be unwrapping new equipment from pleasant boxes many times in my life any more. Plenty of other nicely-fitting-things in the world!
* For my story, it does not matter whether mechanisation has developed far enough already for a machine to be able to put this cable into this particular box or not. There will be people employed in similar actions for a while to come.
Archives of anger
Why would someone collect things they don’t like? Things, even, that make them angry? Such collections have been drawing my attention in my work as an historian, activist and writer. What are these things that I am calling ‘Archives of Anger’?
What is an archive? An archive is a collection of documents or other things that we keep because we might need to refer to them again in the future. States keep archives, as do businesses and clubs. Private individuals keep archives, too: we may keep an archive of our tax correspondence; or of interesting pictures that we clip from magazines. Lately, I have been noticing that many people also keep a different kind of archive. I started calling these ‘Archives of Anger’. In this post, I want to show what I mean, starting with an example from my own home.
A writer’s Archive of Anger cut short
In my home, we kept an Archive of Anger that was recently cut short, forming the cause for this post. It was made up of newspaper clippings. Our weekly local newspaper always prints four portraits on the cover: portraits of people who, according to the newspaper designers, played an important role in the news that week. Usually, these four portraits looked rather alike. Four older white males. At first, my housemate and I marvelled over the interesting demographic makeup of our new home town. There were also weeks, it is true, when only three out of the four photos would be of an older white man: in such weeks, the editors had chosen a dog, cat, or rabbit to complement the gallery. The main feat of these dogs, cats and rabbits always turned out, in the articles written about them, that they were cute – a thing that did not always distinguish the others portrayed. Naturally, we started wondering what were the selection criteria of this gallery.
Our confusion did not abate when we discovered that the articles inside the newspaper did contain plenty of (other) persons who had been doing important things for the city. Not for nothing, the newspaper’s slogan is: ‘made for you and by you’: copy is provided by local citizens. Yet the copy about (and for and by?) most groups of citizens only rarely made it into the gallery on the front. When this became the cause for some brief kitchen-table vexation, my housemate suggested cutting the galleries out each week and at some point in the future subjecting the entire collection to a thorough analysis. They would write what in their hands would no doubt have become a terribly a-cute article.
More recently, it looks like the newspaper editors have been changing their habits. With an estimated average of one femaled or racialised face per cover page, this page now reaches towards certain political aims in a less sidesplitting fashion. Therefore, the projected article will probably never be. Fortunately, or unfortunately – fortunately only if the current small change is the prelude to a more thorough change.
Evidence of violence
This little example reminds us of the rather more serious collections kept by activists, lawyers and journalists who cut out evidence of acts of violence or aggression. An up-to-date archive is helpful for them when they analyse these problems, but also when they need to whip out a fresh stock of shocking examples to the press or in a speech, where general stories and counts of anonymous victims need to be supported by concrete cases that appeal to the imagination and lend the numbers a greater sense of urgency.
Why this is important
Another archive of anger – a less urgent one in many but not all cases – is built by the scientist or scholar who wants to show their audience and their funders that their research is important. They collect research articles that incite their fury for being patently wrong, or newspaper clippings that show that the problem they address in their research has still not been solved in practice.
Local angers
A final collection of people that may construct Archives of Anger are the community-minded and spatially aware people who gather information about their local environment. They are, for instance, those who resist the cutting down of cherished trees in their street. They may be those who count the lanterns in the park and the number of nights a lightbulb breaks down and is not repaired. And they can be those who photograph the dog mess across their doorstep. They are the local citizens, concerned about their own or others’ well-being, who collect the evidence that they need to campaign on social media or write to the city council. For change, or to keep things the same.
These form four different reasons for collecting an Archive of Anger.* But they all have one thing in common. In notable contrast to the usual archive, which assembles things of beauty or things of use, in these Archives of Anger we find the despicable and despised, the dangerous and the horrible, the rejectable and the ridiculous. Their purposes may be specific and pragmatic, but they are all born from a common emotion, sometimes small, sometimes big: from anger.
* The four reasons overlap. In particular, our own homely newspaper archive had features in common with the three other types.
The diary that changed my week
As a professional historian, I research everyday experiences of time and space, usually of people living in the nineteenth century. But this January 2024, something from my own life struck me. I noticed how a tiny change in the space around me was affecting my sense of time. It was affecting my sense of time on a daily basis, and will probably continue to affect it for the entire year to come.
What had happened?
I use a paper diary, or calendar. My diaries present one week across a spread of two pages, starting with Monday on the left-hand side and ending with Sunday on the right-hand side. For the past fifteen years or so, my diaries printed Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday on the left-hand page, plus space for notes; and Thursday to Sunday on the right-hand page:
This year, I bought a diary from a different publisher’s. This one prints Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday on the left-hand page; and Friday to Sunday plus the space for notes on the right-hand page. So, the new situation shows more days on the left-hand side than the old one. Another change is that the pages are almost twice as big now:
It is 31 January, we are a few weeks into the new year, and I am noticing quite a change. I am actually experiencing my weeks differently. Partly, this is because my diary prompts me to behave differently. I will describe both.
Space
The larger pages make me add tasks to the diary with less hesitation and more peace of mind. The tasks fit more easily on the page, which makes it feel as if they would fit more easily into my real week as well. This, incidentally, presents one very good reason not to use a digital diary: there, the time one has may feel endless, because the space is endless.
I also have more space now to write the smaller tasks in my diary as well: those tasks that, last year, I expected simply to remember. These are now noted down, so that my head-space (!) feels less like it is taken up with loose ends and juggled balls.
Equally, when checking my diary for things I need to do, my days seem less crammed now, with less barely-legible handwriting filling up the box for each day, and I maintain a sense of calm more easily.
Yet what is the flip-side to this coin? It is starting to look like I am scheduling more of the bigger tasks per week, too, especially in the more spacious notes section that each spread now contains.
Structure
Shifts have also taken place in my experience of the structure of the week. I still often think that Thursday is Wednesday. That is, when I try to write down or look something up in my diary for Wednesday, I still look at the bottom of the left-hand page, and it still takes a while every time before I notice that this is actually Thursday. Risky business.
A second structural change is having an even greater impact on my experience and use of time. When I now check my diary on a Thursday evening – and manage successfully to look at the bottom left – my diary makes it feel as if most of the week is still to come. After all, I have a whole page left, which amounted to four entire days in the old situation. For a brief moment, there is the happy relief that I have already done quite a few of my tasks. A second later, the relief shatters as I realise there is only a single workday left for my duties to my employer – formally even zero days because I don’t get paid on Fridays – and only two days left – Saturday and Sunday – for everything else.
Two conclusions
One conclusion we can draw is that a small thing like the break between the leaves of a diary can have a profound influence on how someone plans and experiences their week. The location of what designers call the gutter, the unwritable space on the margins between two pages of text, where the leaves of the diary disappear into the binding, is no longer ‘just’ a design decision. The gutter can be an almost tangible thing in someone’s week. When the gutter fell between Wednesday and Thursday, it was a breathing space halfway my workweek. A moment to take stock of the work done and to be done. Now that it falls between Thursday and Friday, it becomes a moment – an almost touchable, real moment in time – between my workweek and my weekend. Enjoying the benefits and warding off the dangers of this new lay-out situation takes some adjusting, apparently.
Yet some readers will have been drawing a rather different conclusion. For if you take a step back from the nitty-gritty of this one person’s week and look at the bigger picture, you notice a host of unspoken circumstances, tendencies and values behind my behaviour and my experiences. For instance, the fact that I have a series of tasks to perform during the week, that these tasks differ from week to week, that receiving these tasks can cause stress, that accomplishing them is nevertheless important to me, and that I use a diary to help me in managing both the stress and the tasks: all these circumstances, tendencies and values are specific to the time and place in which this one person finds themself – my culture, time period, job, training, personality and the economic system with which I try to live. There will be some people who recognise my ‘predicaments’, but also many people who do not.
The nitty-gritty of the influence of our space over our sense of time is important to understand, but so are the cultural differences that make up the bigger picture. What feels like a normal way of dealing with time in one place or period of human existence can be outrageous in a different place or time. Here is a difference that I hope to examine further the coming year – during my days on the left-hand side as well as my days on the right-hand side.
Specialist art spaces: independence at an intersectional-feminist bookshop, a Black archive and a hiphop platform
Together with Adil Boughlala, I hosted the most recent Creative Culture Talk at theatre LUX, Nijmegen, titled When Art Offers Space for Community. In it, we talked with researcher Nikita Krouwel of The Black Archives, musician k.Chi” and dancer Neema Souare of hip-hop platform The Mansion, and cultural producer Marischka Verbeek, owner of the first Dutch feminist bookshop Savannah Bay. These people organise some of the most important art and heritage spaces for/by/about marginalised groups in the Netherlands. After the talk, Adil and I reflected on the question: Do they aspire for their art or collections to be mainstreamed?
Written with Adil Boughlala
When someone starts a small art or heritage organisation, others may think that their aim is to grow bigger and more well-known. They are expected to start off by selling one kind of book, staging one kind of music, or collecting objects created by one group of people, only in order to become mainstream in the future. They are expected to want to have more stages and welcome more guests. To want their initiative to be included in more widely known festivals. To want their minority art to be recognised as important by mainstream media, and, next, to be acquired by national museums or archives.
But perhaps this is only what the mainstream thinks?
Specialised spaces
Recently, we – a student and teacher interested in sustainable art and spatiality – led a public conversation among a small group of people working at three very different art and heritage organisations in the Netherlands. This group included the owner of a bookshop, a researcher at an archive, and a dancer and a musician at a hip-hop centre. As diverse as this group was, they also had something important in common. Each of their spaces was founded with the intention of offering a place for heritage and art objects originating in a specific marginalised group and is run by people of the same group, following the logic “for us, by us, about us” – even if others are very welcome, too.
Savannah Bay started as a women’s bookshop, selling books by and about women – with attention to other, intersecting oppressed groups – and was directed and staffed by women as well. While the shop has become more gender-inclusive over the years, it remains true to its intersectional-feminist origins.
The Black Archives builds on the space and collections of Vereniging Ons Suriname: Society Our Suriname. It houses books, letters, research papers, and other objects collected by Black intellectuals and families in the Netherlands, and is run by Black archivists, curators, and organisers, with their primary target groups being Black school children and Black citizens in the Netherlands.
Hip-hop platform The Mansion was founded to encourage talented young people in the east of the Netherlands, coach them and keep them “off the street”. They are coached mostly by people who are young themselves, and active in the hip-hop scene. The coaches and organisers support each other as well so that in effect, there are no strict role demarcations. Everyone can help anyone, and anyone can start a new initiative.
In the conversation that these three organisations had, and in the lead-up when we visited them in their different locations across the country, we learnt many things about the significance of art and heritage for oppressed groups. For instance, how art and heritage can teach and comfort us, and make change possible. We learnt about the importance of having a place of our own. And, most pertinent to this article, we learnt about the internal and external struggles in the face of that eternal question: why did you create a special place for your art? Why are you separating yourself from the rest? Why are you not part of “general” art and of the “national” collections? All three places taught us something about this struggle.
Savannah Bay
In one sense, Savannah Bay did take a leap towards the mainstream in 1997, when it formally turned from a “women’s bookshop” into a “bookshop”. When this happened, some of its most loyal customers were afraid it had lost its special character. However, it kept its intersectional-feminist spirit. When entering the store, the first things Adil expected were women’s literature and trans and queer literature. Yet, right at the entrance, he was met with climate literature and books on Black and indigenous culture (the latter of which are not new, by the way). While including an ever-widening selection of works by, for, and about different groups, the shop still works hard to spotlight marginalised authors and themes to its audiences. It still sells books that you wouldn’t find in most physical bookshops.
There is another way in which Savannah Bay embraces its special position. During the evening at LUX, owner Marischka Verbeek was opposed to franchising: the bookshop works because of its rich history within the city and its close connection with its visitors. Black Archives researcher Nikita Krouwel chimed in on this, pointing out that each city has its own culture. Whether you run an archive, a bookshop, or a hip-hop platform, each city has its wants and needs, and a formula that works in Utrecht does not automatically work in Amsterdam or Nijmegen.
Finally, many heritage and art organisations depend on subsidies from municipalities and other government organisations. Without their financial support, these spaces would have to close, something which the bookshop has also almost experienced before. Despite that, Marischka Verbeek is a firm believer that the bookshop – and art and heritage organisations by/for/about marginalised groups in general – should be able to persevere without this financial support. This has everything to do with Dutch political history of the past few decades. After a period of governmental interest in gender emancipation, fuelled by the 1975 UN Women’s Year, funding for emancipatory non-profit organisations all but disappeared. Marischka Verbeek called this “the feminist winter”. She saw first-hand how women’s organisations in Utrecht that received funding from non- and anti-feminist administrators were nudged into a shared building, which was then used as a reason to decrease their funding and which, eventually, led to the disappearance of most of these organisations. While Savannah Bay remained in its place, it, too, was impacted negatively because of its dependence on these organisations as customers. In order to become and remain a physical space for individuals to connect, therefore, it is important to guard your financial independence. And so, the activities organised by the bookshop are not aimed at selling more books, but rather the other way around: books are sold so that these activities can be organised.
The Black Archives
As this suggests, one problem faced by small art spaces is their lack of resources, such as paid and trained staff, climate-controlled rooms, and digitisation facilities. This problem could be solved by merging with bigger institutions. However, merging always means submerging. In our conversations with The Black Archives, they explained that if they deposited their collections at a national archive, these would become harder to find for visitors interested in Black heritage. The collections would drown in the masses of material, not only because a national archive stores so many collections, but, more importantly, because those people managing European national archives have never been very good at constructing finding aids and key words relevant to Black cultures. Their visitors would moreover miss the guidance from collection specialists and the intellectual and emotional support that can only be offered by visitors or staff with similar experiences of racism and a history of (forced) migration. At the current Black Archives, archivists can sit down with a group of visitors, go through the items most relevant to them, and retrieve further histories through personal story-telling. In contrast, a national archive in a white-dominated country like the Netherlands may be a hostile environment where you rather not set foot at all. Lastly, part of the magic of this archive lies in what it has collected, literally. Different types of materials, such as books, posters, and music records, can be found together in one room because they used to belong to one person. This tells valuable things about the life of that person. In a national archive, those materials might become scattered and the collection as a collection may lose its meaning. All in all, a specialist archive that is mainstreamed does not only win a few things, but it also loses a lot.
The Mansion
The thriving of these organisations does not only depend on the safeguarding of a space of one’s own. At first, Anna thought, after browsing the online presence of The Mansion, that their wish was for hip-hop to be heard and seen primarily in club spaces, and that therefore they choose to organise their events on the floors of a skatepark, where the difference between performers and audience is blurred; where anyone can join the jam or a spontaneous battle; and where visitors are allowed to make noise, walk in and out, or bring a drink. Yet when Anna asked the organisers of The Mansion about this, a second story surfaced. There seemed to be a certain sadness or dismay at the idea that hip-hop “belongs” in the “street” and only in the street. After all, why wouldn’t hip-hop audiences, too, want to sit in plush chairs in a heated room, where the equipment is impeccable, you can hear every vibration, and see every blink of a performer’s eye?
Does this mean that hip-hop should merge with the mainstream, after all? Should its content, makers, and audiences become indistinguishable from other art forms? Not necessarily. Rather, it means that hip-hop should get access to the better-funded spaces that are currently run by people who are not so into hip-hop. And it means that in those spaces, hip-hop artists should not only be invited as guests (let alone as “the diverse guest”), but as programmers, producers, and managers who, through their expertise, will be able to present the full width of dance and music styles.
We hope that the evening at LUX and this subsequent article have inspired people to visit these three spaces. What’s more, we hope they encourage people to seek out other art and heritage spaces by, for, and about marginalised groups, or even create their own.
The people in the conversation were Marischka Verbeek of Savannah Bay, Nikita Krouwel of The Black Archives, and Kachi Yip (k.Chi”) and Neema Souare of The Mansion. We also learnt from their colleagues Roche Nieuwendam, Debora Heijne, Mich Fesenmeier, Deveney Eeltink, Mira Bruggeman, Steve Baptist, Isabelle Britto, Camille Parker, and Savitri van der Velden, and postgraduate researcher Merel Van Bommel, as well as from several of the books Marischka Verbeek listed here. The wording of the ideas in this article, however, including potential mistakes, is completely our own.
The evening was produced in collaboration with Pim van Dijk and Leoni Bolleboom of LUX. The Creative Culture Talks are a series by Helleke van den Braber of Radboud University’s Art and Culture Studies. Photos on this blog post are by APHG.
Historian at large 