Archiving the Past to Build the Future
This blog was taken from an excerpt of TFTT Podcast Episode 6
With Tools for Time Traveling, we’re always thinking of ways that creatives can think more like futurists– which has me thinking a lot about archiving. It’s a little bit weird because archiving sounds like something of the past. But I've been thinking about how archivists are futurists.
My own archiving experience
In 2022, I took a family trip to Louisiana for my 30th birthday. It was great spending time with grandma and the rest of my family, but I was really down there to document and archive my history and my family's history. The inspiration came from that old adage that you can't know where you're going if you don't know where you've been. So in that way I think archiving is a really important tool for the future. Creatives can curate archival content as a way to tell rich new stories and derive new meaning for their families and audiences. With just this trip, I created a documentary film, a series of collages and photographs, and collected dozens of archival images and video.
Octavia E. Butler’s Example
There’s a book that I have on my coffee table called Black Futures, edited by Kimberly Drew and Jenna Wortham. In it, there's a piece by Ayana Jameson called Far Beyond the Stars, where she talks about the Octavia E. Butler Collection of literary manuscripts that's housed at the Huntington Library. But this collection of manuscripts, is a vast archive comprising of more than 8000 individually cataloged items that span Butler's four-decade-long career. “[Octavia] kept everything from grade school report cards, personal journals, letters, brochures, notes, drafts, unpublished writings, grocery lists, photographs, library call slips, research and much more.” And now it's this collection at the Huntington Library where people now–which is her future, can go and look and be inspired by what she did and be motivated to make something of their own. Or as Jameson puts it, “Her imperative to deliberately and consciously shape her own legacy was driven by the facts of her life and identity, a nexus where Black experience, womanism, and history intersected. Her collection reminds us what we have, what we've lost, and what can be gained by leaving behind self-curated libraries.”
Strategies for Building your own Archive for the Future
This shows how archiving isn't just for now. It's so that we can have richer futures for our people and our families to inherit. Luckily for us Ayana Jameson also included a few strategies that can start to help us start building an archive for eht future.
Keep a physical record like a journal, a memory planner, a bulleted list of tasks– whatever can help you reflect in words/images that come from everyday life.
Save ordinary artifacts: Ticket stubs, gallery guides, receipts, school assignments, canceled checks for paid bills, diplomas, greeting cards, thank-you notes, and other things we collect through life are artifacts of our particular time, interests, existence, and experiences. We don't need to be published authors, artists, or famous to have historically relevant possessions.
Curate your life beyond (and in addition to) the algorithms of social media and digital existence: These social media and storage platforms that hold your content can be hacked, go out of business, or change their rules causing you to lose access to your content. So regularly print out photos and playlists, and transcribe recordings stored or shared electronically in a way that does not require technology.
We can all be futurists. You don't have to be a futurist as a day job. You don't have to be a strategic foresight thinker. You don't have to have a fancy degree. Just by being creative, there are lots of ways that we can be futurists as well. Everyone has that relative with a closet full of old photos, video tapes, and magazines. Or maybe you’ve been holding onto old tangible memories from the past and you don’t know why. Hopefully archiving could be the beginning to your futurist journey.