Not just a collection of materials to be cared for by today’s dutiful descendants but also conversations and collectivity to imagine tomorrow’s ancestors.
We are an ongoing exploration of archives, alternatives, memory work, and community history. We believe that an archive is not just a collection of materials; rather, these mediums are forms of meaning, memory, and knowledge-making.
The context
The archives in our care hold material that came from the An Việt Foundation (AVF) which was founded in East London around the 1980s to support thousands of Vietnamese and Southeast Asian refugees. It provided home-cooked food, help with housing, English language support, health outreach, and mother-tongue classes for the refugees, many of whom were initially scattered across the country under the then-prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s flawed “dispersal” policy. But what also gets overlooked is that it also became a space for displaced people to gather, perhaps even to combat isolation.
Our mission as the An Việt Archives is to care for the collection and ensure it flourishes within the community across the generations it served and grew from – while making our own work accessible, inclusive, and influential for a modern age. However, in doing this work, we have understood that our mission lies beyond that. It should include rethinking what archiving means to us and who determines what gets “remembered”. Now that we have the means to create our own archive, we must ask: How do we counter the longstanding exclusion of our perspectives from mainstream museums and archives? And what does our version of an archive look like?
The steering committee
We meet as often as we can to make collective decisions and oversee the preservation and future development of the collection. All questions that arise at a meeting will be discussed openly and the meeting will seek to find a general agreement from all committee members. We operate on a horizontal structure with an elected chair of meetings on rotation. Those who are unable to attend a meeting may consult the minutes taken and have the opportunity to follow up with comments and queries. All members of the steering panel are unpaid. Head over to our Profile page to read more about us.
