RESOLVE: NURTURING ECOLOGIES [2023]
Passport session - Archiving under a Surveillance State
This workshop was set to challenge ideas around how archives can both operate within a dichotomous relationship; both institutional and family lines simultaneously blurred in visual depictions. Aiming to take back ownership in the formality of the passport image, this session acted as both a creative workshop and group discussion around portraiture, nostalgia, and family archiving, together with dialogue about what is community in 2023 and how do we best archive community?
The idea of family archives for some people within the Black diaspora is limited due to the nature of economic and social pressures of moving to a new country. Taking from personal experience, the lack of visual archives from my Jamaican family, their immigration and passport images become the only reference of their past selves. The passport, being a fundamental institutional and surveillance document, led to being the foundation of my family archive. This workshop aimed to combine the theme of documentation and its rigidness to curate a new archive for the practitioners and the photographers in question.[WORDS BY ELLA TEMITAYO BARRET]
This series of portraits was collaboratively shot on the roof of SADDACA in Sheffield, U.K. with Jana and Jashan as a part of Ella’s Passports workshop session.This session took place as a part of the RESOLVE’collectives Nurturing Ecologies Residency, which took place in August 2023. Bringing together a maverick group of artists and practitioners, this week will forever live on in my memories as one of the greatest times dedicated to solidarity, heart work and community. I was truly honoured to contribute to the documentation of this experience.
In Ella’s passport photographs session she examined the importance, memories and politics surrounding passport photographs using her own archive of familial and passport photographs. In response to this sharing, myself, Jana and Jashan set up a stool and small photograph backdrop and made a series of passport-styled portraits with Ella’s session attendees. The summer sun slowly graced Sheffield’s hills on this day. Mad love to this city, it’s people and all the homies who I will forever pay homage to.[SHOUTOUTS TO THE DOCUMENTATION GANG]
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Location:
https://sadacca.co.uk/about/