Artefacts of Resistance
Artefacts of Resistance: Creating Archives of Transnational Protest Movements, by Dr Srilata Sircar, Lecturer in the King’s India Institute (Faculty of Social Science & Public Policy) and Manu Luksch, Somerset House Studios Resident, proposes the development and performative presentation of a digital media archive documenting contemporary protest movements that builds on transnational solidarity networks.
The key question this project seeks to explore is ‘how can archives become a place of solidarity for local(ised) acts of resistance against global(ised) forms of oppression?’
Archival materials will be drawn from Srilata Sircar’s ongoing project funded by the Antipode Right to the Discipline grant. Artists Manu Luksch & Makul Patel will develop the archive architecture and interface to accommodate rich, searchable metadata, suggest new relationships within the material, and balance user anonymity and visibility. The artistic partners will draw from their experience in building collaborative platforms (e.g.,an international archive collecting the ‘sounds of democracy’ for IWM (Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, Vienna) to deliver an accessible, dynamic portal for protestors, researchers, artists, and students.
The archive will be a means of securely documenting resistance movements and a repository of narratives. An audio-visual performance at a live launch will demonstrate the project’s capacity to communicate, inspire, and unite.
Project team
Dr Srilata Sircar is Lecturer in India and Global Affairs at the King's India Institute. She received her PhD in Human Geography from Lund University, Sweden in 2017. Her research focuses on the politics of caste and gender in postcolonial South Asia across urban and agrarian settings. She is the convener of the Confronting Caste podcast and webinar series. Her work has been published in leading academic journals such as Geoforum and Gender, Place and Culture. She has contributed to publications like The Conversation, The Hindu, and Feminism in India.
Manu is Roberta Denning Visiting Artist at Stanford University (2021), a Resident Artist at Somerset House, Artist in Residence at Birkbeck’s School of Law, and formerly Open Society Fellow 2018/19. She is founding member of ambientTV.NET (Ambient Information Systems), a long-time collaboration with composer-mathematician Mukul Patel.