Archival Care

The Archive of Forgetfulness is a pan-African digital exhibition and podcast series which ran from September 2020 and December 2021 in three phases: a podcast series, online exhibition, and six regionally curated projects. The project was led by Huda Tayob and Bongani Kona, with six regional curators, Ali Al Adawy, Eric Ngangare, Jumoke Sanwo, Omnia Shawkat, Princess Mhlongo, and Zoubida Mseffer.1 Drawing inspiration from Mahmoud Darwish’s prose length poem, Memory for Forgetfulness (1), the platform questions how we might engage with what exists in the failure of memory(2). In the project, practices of care extend from the labour of maintaining neighbourli- ness, to multiple, small acts of refusal. Collectively they speak to a multiplicity of border crossings, as geographic, temporal and disciplinary. In this article, I suggest that the attention to forgetfulness is grounded in “practices of peripheral care”.