Huda Tayob
The Archive of Forgetfulness is a pan-African digital exhibition and podcast series which ran from September 2020 and December 2021. The project is a space for interrogating the archival gesture, from the bodily and spoken, to the written and performed. As a collection of work centered on the African continent, the various contributors raise questions on personal and political histories that emerge through borders and infrastructures, and resurface forgotten conversations. It interrogates how thinking through deep and recent histories across water or through the skies, might reveal alternative ways of living. It also ponders how dreams of other worlds that might have been possible continue to haunt our present and suggest possible futures. In these works, archival labour and memory-work are understood as deeply political, personal and speculative.
Huda Tayob is a South African architectural historian. She is currently a lecturer at the University of Manchester, and has previously taught at the University of Cape Town, the University of Johannesburg and the Bartlett School of Architecture. Her research focuses on minor, migrant and subaltern architectures, centred on the African continent. She is co-curator of the open access curriculum Racespacearchitecture.org, and co-curator of the digital exhibition, Archive of Forgetfulness.