Creative Fellowship (Archives & Special Collections)

About the Project

While exploring and uncovering often less visible objects from the V&A’s archives and library special collections, Creative Fellow Amina Jama reflects, through film, poetry, and collaborative making and thinking, on the complex, interwoven relationship between museum objects, body, space, and land.

Context

Supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, VARI Creative Fellowships bring together creative practitioners with curators, scholars, and diverse audiences to explore cross-disciplinary connections and strategies. Practitioners are invited to consider, see, and show the V&A’s collections in innovative ways by creating encounters with new constituencies and exploring new methodologies for disseminating and communicating research. The 2023/24 VARI Creative Fellowship focusses on objects from the archives and library special collections.

Aim

The Creative Fellowship is part of a portfolio of research projects to incubate new methods for interdisciplinary collections research within the Museums by inviting an external, independent voice to help develop new ways of engaging with members of the public. Within her practice of writing and curation, Creative Fellow Amina Jama creates approaches of engagement that do not shy away from the inherent colonial legacies within the special collections whilst creating safe spaces for members of the public to explore, challenge, and interpret the dis- and uncovered material.

Outcomes

While engaging with the archives and library special collections’ spaces, structures, and knowledge systems and the unique combination of text, image, and materiality they embody, Amina Jama shines a new light on these collections revealing their many layers of narratives. In her poetry film 'Unearthed', the artist weaves together items from the archival, poetry, body, space, voice, and interview, while looking at ‘archives as repositories of memories’. Her poetry writing workshop with Rohan Ayinde focused on Concrete Poetry sparking a creative dialogue with library and archives collections.