The Archives in Action: Binding Memory, Nostalgia, and Experimentation
Refining Eritrean Archives has always been a continuous process, one that persists even during moments of digital stillness. To me, a pause is not an absence but a focused contemplation.
Both last year and now have been seasons of revisioning and realignment. In the wake of reflection and emergence, I want to share a moment from earlier this month that marked a beautiful juncture for Eritrean Archives.
I had the opportunity to contribute to the Eritrean Diaspora Innovators Summit (EDIS), a gathering hosted under the thoughtful leadership of Semhar Araia through The Diaspora Academy (TDA), a global advisory and leadership development firm committed to supporting diaspora innovators and leaders alike.
EDIS served as both an intimate gathering and a virtual summit celebrating the ingenuity of second-generation Eritrean creatives, professionals, and visionaries internationally.
Being among such powerful minds was inspiring, and being invited to curate a visionary piece was equally exhilarating.
For EDIS, I curated a 36-minute digital album titled, “A Digital Odyssey of Love and Longing: An Eritrean Diaspora Tale.”
“A Digital Odyssey of Love and Longing: An Eritrean Diaspora Tale, is a lyrical homage and digital symphony crafted to celebrate, capture, and transcribe the consciousness of second-gen Eritrean Americans. An architecture of memory and a site for nostalgia, ‘A Digital Odyssey of Love and Longing: An Eritrean Diaspora Tale’ is layered with intimate remembrances from home videos, traditional melodies, and archival material reflecting our collective reimaginings of belonging amidst dispersals.
Through analog sequences, abstract visuals, sonic textures, non-linear scores, and archival remixes, ‘A Digital Odyssey of Love and Longing: An Eritrean Diaspora Tale’ is a dynamic digital reading of our cultural legacies. It is a vessel of awakening, a pledge towards future remembrance, and a space to liberate our spatial boundaries and tensions through celebration.
A Digital Odyssey of Love and Longing: An Eritrean Diaspora Tale, champions the labyrinthine ways Eritrean Americans summon cultural memories through mosaic desires and emotional truth…”
- Eritrean Archives Curatorial Statement
Each music session served as a sega, a threshold, guiding viewers through intimate captures of Eritrean diasporic life from the 1980s to the early 2000s. I used split-screens and negative space to disrupt linear notions of time, conjoining cultural processions with archival material.
I used scenes from Eritrea: Land by the Sea (1982) filmed by Christina Björk, Bengt Danneborn, and Göran Aslund, alongside footage from the Liberation of Massawa (Operation Fenkil) set against maps that challenged Eritrea’s sovereignty, revealing the visual tension between defiance and emergence. These juxtapositions underscore how geopolitical frameworks, alongside an indifferent international community, attempted to silence our struggle. Amidst this sequence, Eritrean Freedom Fighters are shown resisting oppression while forging our path to liberation.
In merging surreal elements with sonic tunings of Funk, Soul, R&B, and Spoken Word, I wanted to affirm our historical solidarity and cultural interconnectedness between Eritrean diasporas and the broader Black Diasporic community, especially in our fight against colonial and imperialist structures.
To archive is to insist on presence, on innovation, and on the radical act of remembering together. My digital curation was an attempt to liberate our stories from confinement, to imagine the archive not as a static vault, but as a vessel of movement driven by our collective voices.
I share this reflection to encourage experimental expressions and intersectional thinking in how we build and engage with archives.
If you missed the EDIS summit, know that this is only one moment in a growing constellation of gatherings where we’ll come together to cherish and celebrate our shared heritage.
