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As a collecting institution, the CCA was conceived on the belief that archives and the researchers who explore them are essential to the cultivation of new forms of evidence and knowledge. We think of our collection as an ecosystem of things and ideas continuously built upon through further research, new acquisitions, varied perspectives, and timely interpretations. Among our recent efforts to encourage and support this reexamination, our program Find and Tell invites architect-researchers to engage with particular archives in our collection and to put forward arguments that suggest what those archives could offer to architectural and urban studies. The invitation comes with a requirement: researchers should substantiate their arguments with significant selections of objects from the collection, which we subsequently digitize and make available online. In this way, the program acts not only as a stimulus for the digitization of our collection, but also encourages new work that draws on the digitized materials.
Our collection is activated through relationships between objects, ideas, places, times, and topics both within the collection and outside of it. And we are particularly interested in research that develops these relationships, even if (or particularly when) they help to build connections and networks beyond our collection—connections that are of course made easier by digitization. Recent examples of this interest are the ongoing multidisciplinary research project Centring Africa: Postcolonial Perspectives on Architecture, which holds its final workshop in Dakar next week, and this year’s virtual fellowship program, which proposes post-custodial archives as means to support the collection and preservation of, as well as access to, architecture archives in Africa.
To complement and support these two initiatives, this week we are launching a pilot project we’re calling Find and Tell Elsewhere. The project aims to provide assistance in the digitization of significant archival resources across national, regional, and urban boundaries, and to facilitate access to these resources for future research.
Find and Tell Elsewhere began to be conceptualized with the Centring Africa research group. Shortly after, Esra Akcan pointed us to the relevance of the work of the Sudanese architect Abdel Moneim Mustafa in her recent book Abolish Human Bans: Intertwined Histories of Architecture as part of our CCA Singles series, and in the paper she presented at last year’s conference of the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) as part of a panel titled Building Non-Alignment: Cooperation in the Global South, 1950s–80s. We learned that this prominent modernist figure previously unknown to us played a central role in the process of Sudan’s nation-building following its independence in 1956 and made significant contributions to various mid-century architects’ incorporation of natural ventilation and sun control in their designs. There was a lot to learn from him and his work.
Our discussions with Akcan led to a collaboration with the custodians of the Abdel Moneim Mustafa archive in Khartoum in what is now the first iteration of Find and Tell Elsewhere: we helped digitize the material that is still housed in Abdel Moneim Mustafa’s office and aim to facilitate access to this material for as many researchers as possible. With this pilot project, we wanted to test new modes of providing access to resources and supporting research, to evaluate how the management and use of these records can be dissociated from their physical ownership, and to nurture connections between our collection, our research programs, and this material.
The results of this pilot project, developed together with and thanks to the generous dedication of Migdad Bannaga and Dina Yousif in Khartoum, are multiple, and today we make public two significant contributions: the digitized drawings and photographs of Abdel Moneim’s archive are now accessible on Wikimedia Commons, and an essay by Esra Akcan, titled “Decolonize or Redistribute? Abdel Moneim Mustafa and Mid-Century Modernism in Sudan,” that gives due acknowledgement to his work features on our website. A Wikipedia page on Abdel Moneim Mustafa will follow soon.
Looking beyond this particular project, we hope that a further result is that this project serves as a model for a more collaborative approach to transnational archival work both within our own programs and beyond. After all, our collection is an ecosystem not only in that it contains relationships, but in that it grows in relation to other collections around the world.
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