ABOUT US
We are a UK-based Pan-African project whose work centres the ‘living archive’. We facilitate heritage-based therapeutic interventions for people of African heritage rooted in our cultural principles and technologies.
OUR BEGINNINGS
Decolonising the Archive (DTA) was founded in 2011, beginning as a project leveraging theatre, community development and African heritage memory practices. Working with elders in the community, we drew heavily on our African and African Caribbean cultural inheritance to devise and deliver work which by its very nature was decolonial and anti-imperialist.
Since then, narrowing our focus on the definition, safeguarding and activation of our collective archives, we have worked with, supported and trained hundreds of people across the UK and internationally. Our artistic practice and lived experience of grounded work within our communities has been the foundation of our success, underpinning our methods and ways of working.
LEGACY BUILDING PROGRAMMES
For more than a decade, we have successfully built legacy through training programmes supporting community cohesion, narrative ownership, archival literacy and heritage-based therapy. Whilst our core focus remains grassroots communities, our work also involves collaboration with archives, museums and other types of heritage spaces where this can be achieved equitably.
Community Impact Team with Professor Patricia Rodney and Connie Bell at the UK launch of Walter Rodney’s Kofi Badu: Out of Africa & Lakshmi: Out of India (September 2023)
Our training programme Correcting Our Collecting has thus far trained 60 persons from the African heritage community in the UK. Currently some of our alumni are now part of our Community Impact Team. An extended network, who we can confidently refer to work within the community and support institutional collaborations.
Summer 2022 - Correcting Our Collecting cohort at the Black Cultural Archives
Under our University of Repair training programme we have facilitated over 700 community members in building resilience and best practice in the area of self repair, reparations and restitution.
Summer 2022 - Public Exhibition at BCA curated by Correcting Our Collecting graduates.
Summer 2022 - Correcting Our Collecting cohort of trainee Archivists at the Black Cultural Archives
Our Emotional Emancipation Community Healing programmes we have trained 20 community members to be able to host Emotional Emancipation circles within their communities.
ARCHIVE AND THEATRE PEDAGOGY
Decolonising the Archive has also worked at the intersection between theatre and archival practice as a means of safeguarding, activating and sharing our collective heritage whilst widening the conversations around ‘Black’ Theatre in Britain that includes its artists and community.
Most notably we have revived and staged Writer/ Feminist/Activist Una Marson's acclaimed and almost forgotten play, Pocomania, for the first time on British shores. This restaging is now featured the The National Theatre's Black Play Archives.