Contact Zones: Why Bother With Arts Archives?

Fasyali Fadzly (FF): My name is Fasyali Fadzly, and I would like to welcome all our friends here, and also the students from Singapore Management University. I believe all of you have seen their presentations outside;  the posters and everything. To give you some context, Su Fern will introduce more about that. Thank you.

Hoe Su Fern (SF): Hi everyone, and good evening, and welcome to tonight's dialogue. I'm Su Fern, and I'm the Lead Programme Coordinator of the Arts and Culture Management Programme at the Singapore Management University. Since I took over the programme, I think one key desire that I've always had was to bring my students on immersive experiential study trips, and after seven years, I've managed to - after years of planning and organizing and budgeting, here we are in KL today. Together with 20 students, we're here on a 12-day industry study trip. And thanks to our industry partners, Centre 42 and Five Arts Centre - this trip would not have been possible without them.

To give you some context, we started the course in Singapore. To help them to start to broaden their horizons outside of Singapore, but to also think alongside this topic of arts archives, they were assigned a project to do. So they worked in groups of threes to develop a project where they were asked to develop a full archival entry on a case study that, for them, represented meaningful collaboration between the Singapore and Malaysia theatre art worlds. Out of seven project teams, four produced impressive archival entries - you can hear more about their presentations and their projects outside through their posters. You can spend some time after tonight's dialogue to get to see them if you have not managed to see them, and also to speak to the students as well. 

These were the four projects. Out of the four, we have also invited one of the project teams to share with you their own sharing and also their own thinking behind how they have developed their own archival entry, and we hope that their sharing will also help to prompt you to think about tonight's topics - to think about some of the key ideas, thematics, and challenges concerning arts archives today in Southeast Asia, and the future of arts archives. And with that, I hand over the floor to my students, Chloe, Cherize, and Ranen. Could we give them a warm round of applause?

Chloe Lye (CL): Good evening, everyone. My name is Chloe, and this is Cherize, and this is Ranen. We are Arts and Culture Management students from Singapore Management University, and like my prof mentioned, we're here on a 12-day trip. Personally, I just wanted to share that I've learned a lot - from the diversity, to the resilient spirit of the people here, and the art world that they empower. As an aspiring arts manager, I've been inspired to really think differently and beyond my conventions back in Singapore. I just wanted to also share that the care that I've witnessed and received firsthand has really motivated me to extend that same care to others too. And for that, we're really, really thankful.

Today, we're here to present on creating an archival entry on Atomic Jaya as a meaningful cross border collaboration. Let me just take you through what that means. Before we began, we really didn't know much about Malaysia - we didn't know much about theatre archives. In the beginning, Cherize shared with us that she thought of theatre archives as a library, as a record. But things have changed - I think it also reflects in some of our sharings here. We see it as a transformative tool for the present and the future. Ranen also shared that it's a very important frame in understanding our theatre history, past and present. And for me personally, I see now that archives are anything but static, right? And history is so, so relevant to our present day today. 

Beginning this project was really, really difficult. This idea of a meaningful cross-border collaboration - we struggled to find a case study to really fit this definition. And as we were digging through Centre 42's theatre archive, we came across this postcard - it's from Atomic Jaya (2003). And we just loved Claire Wong's astonished face with the blue wig. I think it was just this visual collateral that really helped us to realize - wow, this is something that happened, and it's so amazing! And we wanted to find out more. It was a touchpoint for us to access something that happened before our time. So, for those who are familiar with Atomic Jaya, welcome back. If you're new, Atomic Jaya was written by Huzir Sulaiman, writing in response to this prompt, "what would happen if Malaysia builds an atomic bomb?" 

This is a quote from whatever we could find online that I feel really captures the tone of the script. It's humorous, it's witty, and it's satirical, and it gave us a little insight into what the staging could be. Here's a timeline of the different stagings that's happened over time - the first one in 1998 with Jo Kukathas, and the most recent one in 2013, restaged with Karen Tan and Claire Wong. Now we'll be taking you through our archive entry. 

Cherize: Atomic Jaya’s current archival entry is actually situated on Centre 42’s Archive. The current archive looks like this. If you search Atomic Jaya on the Archive, this is what you'll get. It's a little bit blur, but it's basically all the different stagings as well as the different collaterals, and they present productions more singularly, so it's a bit difficult to visualize collaborations, and it's also currently production-specific. So it's hard to see that Atomic Jaya actually has a longer life cycle outside of the current staging that you are viewing. If you click into 2003 Atomic Jaya, you will be able to see all the different information, but what you'll see is things like cast, synopsis credits, other stagings, etc, and all these are very production-specific - once again, without relating it to its wider context, things like relationships, etc. 

Like all other archives, the C42 Archive needs to have a more general template to fit all the different kinds of archive entries in theatre. This means that it's not customizable to Atomic Jaya or to a specific production. We found this a limitation in showing the movement of value for Atomic Jaya, so that's why we proposed for our archive entry to be in the form of a microsite. It will be embedded in the C42 Archive, and it allows us to add interactive elements, and viewers can actually see the collaboration at a glance. We wanted a way to visualize it that was visually impactful, and it also needs to reflect the content of our archive entry. 

This is in the early stages of how we conceptualized how we could feature all the different elements of collaboration. We were thinking in the form of an atom structure, because Atomic Jaya - and this is how it evolved. In the next slide, you'll see that it became sort of - now I'll take you to our actual microsite so you'll see the final product. This is what it looks like now. We start out with a short synopsis of what a meaningful cross-border collaboration means, just to conceptualize the whole site. Scrolling down, you'll be able to see a short introduction on how to navigate the site, as well as a legend on what the different colors mean. 

This is our final atom structure. In its core is Atomic Jaya, and surrounding this is Checkpoint Theatre, and the three rings represent the different dimensions of value - Chloe will be taking you through this later on what they mean - but basically, each of these electrons that you see here, by hovering over them, you will be able to see what are the different elements that contribute to it being a meaningful cross-border collaboration.

Let's zoom in to the core, which is Atomic Jaya. Clicking on this will take you to the history of Atomic Jaya. Viewers will be able to see the context behind it, how it's inceptualized. This is the timeline of Atomic Jaya, and we included some programme booklets for them to look through.

Going back to our main site, clicking on elements of, for example, cross-cultural predictability, will bring you to expand more on what that element means. We also included external resources to enhance viewers' understanding - it will bring you to things like interviews or reviews, etc that will be useful. So this shows the whole value optimization of Atomic Jaya. Now Chloe will take you through why it's a meaningful cross-border collaboration. 

CL: So, where does the archive entry fall in this whole ecosystem of Atomic Jaya? Firstly, we wanted to show our belief that the archive entry is able to extend and add value to the core product - that's Atomic Jaya's script - and by creating multiple touchpoints to sustain the relationships with the script - between audiences, artists, collaborators - we really wanted to show that the archive entry is not just an information dump. It is a critical space in its own right. It is a place where meaning can be made for audiences who have not been able to encounter the actual work itself, and in itself has a lot of value. 

We come back again to our assignment topic of what a meaningful cross-border collaboration is. We felt that Atomic Jaya was meaningful because of its cultural relations. What are cultural relations? Cultural relations refer to the reciprocal transnational interactions between two or more cultures. So in this case, it's between Singapore and Malaysia, and that reciprocity between the people and place and everything else. 

And Atomic Jaya, I mentioned earlier, is a core product. So, what is a core product? We're referring to the script - the script itself has that core benefit and symbolic value that it's been able to transmit to different audiences, as I mentioned before. It manifests physically in a physical product, which is also what we can understand as Atomic Jaya's restagings - the presentations and the different iterations of the work. With each iteration there were new perspectives and developments - whether it's a different director or different cast, all these developed Atomic Jaya’s value. 

Throughout all this, Atomic Jaya’s value was also sustained through the formation of Checkpoint Theatre. This experience of collaboration between Huzir, Claire, and Casey led to the creation of a major company in Singapore which is situated in and responsive to both Singapore and Malaysia's theatre art worlds. They have sustained their commitment to strategic planning and management - when it comes to their relationships across the Causeway, within both sides of the Causeway as well - and the resources that are shared is also a dedicated space for exchange and cross-border collaboration. So the cultural value of Atomic Jaya, we felt, was really in the sustained movement of cultural value. There's this movement across different places and spheres, and we wanted to visualize that through the atom structure concept. 

Just now you all saw the final product and a bit of our brainstorming. Here's a little bit more of what it means. It is meant to illustrate the optimization of the movement of cultural value through three different dimensions, the first being the extension of value - the creation of new value, as well as the sustainability of value - and each electron, or little circle, represents an element of collaboration that we have managed to derive from our research for this project. For the first dimension, we're looking at the extended value - this covers audience reviews, audience experiences, as well as the shared experiences of the founders of Checkpoint, and the extended symbolic value of Atomic Jaya and how Huzir also wrote a sequel called Nuclear Family.

The second dimension looks at the cross-cultural predictability of Atomic Jaya, as well as its cultural sensitivity, and how that has translated not only in its restagings, but to Checkpoint’s other productions and programmes as well. Our last dimension is the sustainability of value - we're looking at the sustained support for Singaporean artists, sustained support for Singapore and Malaysia's theatre, the cultural relations, and also broadening that support beyond theatre into inter- and multi-disciplinary works and explorations, as well as the relational networks across different collaborators and different people involved or experiencing the work. Now I'll pass time to Ranen. 

Ranen: As Chloe shared, we believe that archives could and should be critical spaces in their own right. After creating an archival entry, we believe that the information within should not be stagnant, but should be activated, and should be used meaningfully to generate new value for the artwork situated within. But before delving into how we plan to activate our archival entry, we would like to preface this section by saying that we focus our suggestions mostly on Singapore's context because that was what we were familiar with, but we hope that through the exploration of our suggestions, it'll give you more ideas on how you could meaningfully activate your own archives to generate new value for the art worlds you're in.

Before we came up with solutions, we identified our target audiences. The reason we did this is because we believe archives need to be intentional and purpose-led. You need to know who you're doing this for. We identified our primary target audience to be arts workers and collectives who are considering to start an arts organization of their own - reason being, as Chloe mentioned, that we believe a key component of value that Atomic Jaya created was how it led to the formation of a major company, which was Checkpoint Theatre. Following that, our secondary target audiences - we looked at arts workers who might want to know more about how cross-border collaborations are done, as well as existing supporters and audiences of Checkpoint Theatre who would like to know more about the history and legacy of Checkpoint Theatre.

We were inspired by Checkpoint Theatre’s incorporation of this concept, which is a living text. Atomic Jaya was a text that managed to evolve and adapt to different times and contexts, and managed to retain and generate value throughout its life cycle. We wanted this idea to be showcased in our archives as well - that our archive should be a living archive, like a living text, where it's able to optimize its value and constantly sustain and generate new values towards the art worlds. 

So the next few solutions are more catered towards using the archival entry as a capability development tool. as something which people can use to visualize key concepts such as the movement of value. This can be visualized and conceptualized through the way we use the atomic structure and show the movement of value outwards. One way in which it could be done is via an arts accelerator programme - for example, Objectifs, a major company in Singapore, plans to kickstart their own arts accelerator programme, and we could use our archival entry as supplementary information for them. Another place we could partner with another arts organization is with the Arts Resource Hub, which was started by the National Arts Council in Singapore, which uses the Arts Resource Hub as a platform to help their freelancers. And Producers SG, an independent network of producers that could use our archival entry to visualize how collaborations with regional counterparts are done. 

Here, for our secondary target audience - for supporters and audiences of Checkpoint Theatre - we think that we can leverage upon Checkpoint Theatre's already existing social networks, such as their mailing lists or their social media, and their supporters can then get more of an idea of the history and legacy of Checkpoint Theatre and grow to appreciate the company a bit more.

To wrap up this session, we would like to look at the opportunities and limitations that we have identified with our current archival entry. Firstly, opportunities - we think that the model we've created is rather adaptable. It's flexible, and you can use it to envision other cross-border collaborations in the same format. We also think that we can expand upon the UI and UX that we have right now. We hope that we can further develop what it has to be even more interactive, even more intuitive, for its users. 

However, we identified some limitations with our current archival entry, one being that the way in which we visualize value does not encompass more than one dimension of value, and does not show the interconnections. One archival entry which managed to capture this, which we did not, was Nadirah, which you can take a look at outside. Our friends from SMU managed to create this linear timeline where they showed how dimensions of value managed to develop over time. And finally, creation of value - the ones that we identified were more towards the internal art world, but it does not take into account things beyond the art world that we identified. Here are our references. Thank you so much for listening.

FF: Thank you. Without further ado, I would like to invite the three panelists that we have tonight to discuss about their archives and the initiatives that they lead. I would like to invite Kathy Rowland, Janet Pillai, and Yanling to come on stage. 

Hi everybody, thank you for coming, and maybe all of you got some context about why we're discussing about arts archives today, and the students presenting their ideas about how can archives be useful for people out there, for artists, for researchers, and to try to understand our past. Thank you - I think it was a great presentation. To continue, I would like to ask - maybe each of you can explain your archive project - Kathy and Yanling and Janet, why did you do that initiative, and how it started? 

Kathy Rowland (KR): Hi everyone, and thanks - it's lovely to see so many people. I'm actually going to just plug in my computer so you can see the - we've got a beta site, and the website that I want to talk to you all about is called My Art Memory Project. It's an old website - it's an archive that's been up since - I think it went live in 2014, but we're in the third iteration of it now, and we had hoped to show you the new website, but our developer got COVID last week so we're delayed. But I'll show you very quickly - that's the old site; some of you may be familiar with it. It's really very old, and not working - the plugins are not working - that's the old one. Here we've got the new one, and I'll very quickly just take you to the homepage and then I'll answer some of the questions that Fasyali has posed to me.

The short answer to how this happened was - so I had boxes and boxes of old catalogues and programme books, which I had collected when I was doing research for my Masters, and they were sitting - and I had moved country, I had moved homes, many homes, many places, and I carried these boxes with me, and I wanted to do something with it. It really is these three principles of "to share, to order, and to keep safe", and it's very personal, but actually, when you think about why archives are created, the principles are the same - it's to keep safe, it's to share, and to order, right? So it was those three things that started it.

I started it as a WordPress - I got my cousin, I twisted his arm and said, "please help me", and he built a WordPress for me. It was really very basic - we started scanning and putting up the programme books, and that's the limit of it. When you try to do something on your own, you can have a good idea, but it stays at that level. What it needs then is institutional support. What happened, what took it to the next level was when Five Arts [Centre] then came on board and said that they would help to take on the project, and the minute that happened, from something that was just helping to declutter and order, it became something that had a much larger community significance. 

So Five Arts Centre then got involved - Ivy Josiah was our producer, and we worked with, in fact, Fasyali, and several other independent researchers. So the website really is a collection of, at the moment, dance and theatre productions that have been staged in Malaysia. The central spine of the work is programme books, but it can also be posters, and in some cases, press clippings. Whenever we have some recording of a work that's been staged, we scan it, we put it up, and the data that we collect is very specific - we collect a whole range of data for each production, which I will go into afterwards. That's why we set it up, and I feel I want to leave it at that before I talk about the mission, if that's okay.

Ma Yanling (YL): Hi, I'm Yanling from Centre 42, and I've had the privilege of allowing the students to share with you a bit more about what Centre 42 Archive looks like and a lot of its limitations as well, so I can do a little bit less introduction. We're based in Singapore, and Centre 42, we call ourselves a theatre development space. As you can see, this website actually is our website, and one large part of it contains the SG Theatre Archive - the archive itself is housed under the Centre 42 site.

I think maybe just linking from Kathy - we first started the archive when the company was established, so we were established with that mission in mind, to document Singapore theatre. It really remains a core pillar of a lot of the work that we do. We started back then in 2014, 2015, designing the archive - it was based on a WordPress system as well, so very rudimentary, but largely because we had an idea - we knew what we wanted to do, but we didn't really have the technical know-how. So it was a pilot; we just started with that. It required a lot of data collection to pull together things before we really learned, oh, this may not have been the right software to use. Like what Kathy said, we were lucky in that we had institutional support from the get-go. It was a team of - not many, at that time, two or three people, but it was also very much funded by the National Arts Council, and aligned with one of the policy structures to document performing arts in Singapore.

Similarly, we also started with just the collaterals, the booklets, the print materials that were the residual of ephemeral theatre productions. We started with that - we had collections of this printed stuff that we had to learn how to organize, we had to learn how to catalogue, and most importantly, digitize. Our archive is completely digital - we try not to store physical material, because there is no space, and we don't have that kind of know-how to file them and keep them safely, and hhonestly, we didn't want the responsibility of the destroying in our hands as well. We had a collection, we scanned them in hi-res, and we usually returned them to the owners, but if the owners said "I'm moving house, I've got no space, I want to throw, you decide what to do", oftentimes, we look at it, we're like, very heart pain to throw, so, it gets filed in our cupboards. Once in a while, we take them out. And when we get duplicates, we have to do the really hard thing to go, like, it's a duplicate, we really cannot afford to keep extra, let's recycle them, they go into some scrapbook workshops so you can actually use those materials. 

I guess the motivation was partly that, and I think, along the way, what we felt we needed to do was to be able to represent a slice of Singapore theatre history that is not usually accounted for in the larger state narrative. Our archive is specifically about theatre. It hopefully represents the different kind of organizations, from established to loose collectives, but also the independents, which are seldom represented in the larger archival through the libraries and through the individual organizations. I think that became very crystallized over the years when doing this - we wanted to make sure that we try our best to plug the gaps where the institutions don't, and that has always been quite clear from the get-go. You can see what the current archive is - we underwent a revamp in 2019 and 2020 to redo the archive, and it expanded beyond just the collaterals to now include reviews, pages of information on productions, some publications, and a repository of scripts that are not published. Yes, there's a lot of material in there. I think I'll leave it as that. 

FF: If I may ask, what year did the website go live? 

YL: This version of the website went live officially in 2021, January [ed. the new version of the C42 website actually went live in January 2022]. The very first one, in 2015. 

KR: For MAMP, the website went live in 2014 as a WordPress, but then we launched it again in 2016. 

Janet Pillai (JP): For those of you who know me, I'm actually in the area of arts education for young people, and I was a young people's theater director. [I] worked both in arts education and in production performance, theatre performance, and arts production by and for young people. So the motivation for me to start this archive was similar to Kathy - care and preservation of personal, as well as organizational, records. 

I am a member of Five Arts Centre, where I did a lot of children's theatre productions, as well as arts education programmes, and I'm also a member of Arts-ED Penang, an NGO that specializes in arts, culture, and heritage for young people. I had a lot of records from both these organizations, in relation to my work and work with collaborators - other artists who were also helping out or collaborating in the working with children. I also felt the need to create a repository for the records - firstly to save space, but I think there was also a kind of subconscious thing - that it will never get recorded officially in official archives which the public can access. There's no representation in official archives, so I wanted to create a kind of alternate organizational archive.

The content of the archive - it holds the records or collaterals of non-formal arts education programmes and performances, or even projects conducted by both the organizations, most of which I was involved in, or some other collaborators were involved in. So it spans 35 years. The archives came out [in] 2016, but the years that it spans is from 1978 to 2013. So what does it have? It has very detailed records of the programmes or the projects - and this is a bit crazy, because it actually contains administrative materials, curriculum, promotion materials, collateral from outputs like videos, programmes, etc, reviews, stuff like that, and also resource materials like research, publications or academic articles on non-formal arts education. So this is only to do with non-formal arts education outside of school, and also research articles on performance practice.

After I started collecting and arranging the materials, I realized that we needed a meta-timeline to give it a larger context, so I collaborated with Mark Teh to create a meta-timeline to frame the young people's theatre productions, and also the teaching of non-formal arts education within the larger context of the historical backdrop of Malaysia, both political as well as theatre backdrop. So there's quite an interesting timeline, and also an interpretation of this timeline by Mark Teh there. Also, for every entry, we selected what we thought were strong entries in relation to arts education or performance. For every entry, we also call it, like - what was the value that - because I'm a practitioner, and I'm an educator, so my main value was pedagogical, so there is a very long interpretation of the pedagogical practices used in those selected pieces and also the influences from people and from the politics of the time, and how this influenced - it’s trying to trace the provenance, or the how the works were nurtured, or how the practice was nurtured, and how it came into being, because it spans quite a long time, 35 years, so there are changes and evolution in the practice of arts education in Malaysia, but specifically our practice. The archive is both digital and physical - open access to digital records of the collaterals and the interpretations is open to everybody, but access to the digital records of administrative, funding, curriculum, the more detailed things, is only available upon request. I think I'll stop there for now. 

FF: Thank you, Janet. I really want to know - you collect all this data, this archive, and present it the way it was presented in your website. How do you choose what kind of narrative you want to push to the audience, to the user, in your archive? I don't know - maybe from this data, it shows that - what, I'm not sure? Or maybe you find something that - the story that you really want to tell to the user or audience.

KR: I think I agree with what Janet and Yanling are saying - that a lot of times these archives that are independent or smaller really are quite mission-driven, right? The idea is that we all know that in most, in all, of our countries, there's always a national archive, and not only that, but you'll have different types of institutional archives. But it really is about understanding that national state-level archives have, often, a particular political agenda, they're driven by a particular collecting mindset, so definitely with ours it was the same - it was understanding that there are things in our collection that will just not be of value, either because they're too small and they're too unimportant, or they're seen as too small or unimportant, or they might challenge the national narrative. So that really was one. 

But I do have to say that when we created our archive, I think it was important for me to - okay, being neutral is a myth, but to be as neutral as possible, in the sense that - whatever programme books came into our hands, we included. There was never a choice, there was never a selection process. If we had access to it, we would include it. It's a very ecumenical kind of system of just taking and including. We don't do the selection process, because the idea is that the researcher or the viewer or the reader makes their choice when they select it. So it's up to them to read the work, to choose from the archive, and to build what narratives that they want from it, right?

But I do think that, having said that, I also want to broaden, a little bit, the idea of what kind of readings you can get from an archive, because we're all arts archives here, but I always think when you look at our archives, you can tell a story about the economy, you can tell a story about class, you can tell a story about language, education, geopolitical movements. So a very simple thing that we collect is we collect the ticket prices, where we have the ticket price of each show that's on. So if you want, you can actually trace how, from the 1950s, three dollars, or free - today, you know, tickets nowadays are what, 50, 60, 70 ringgit, right? So that tells you one story. 

Another story that you can actually pull from it is something as simple as the spelling. The spelling that was used then was different, the way that things were framed were different. I was reading this today, I was just going through some of the physical programme books, and what struck me was that there were a lot of fundraisers. There were a lot of theatre works and productions that were held in the 60s and in the 70s that were done really for a social charity model, right, and the language that - because they were to raise money for children with disabilities, for example, and even the terminology that's used when they talk about people with disabilities tells you one story about the country. 

Another two things I wanted to pick up on is when you read the bios of the performers. So it's another way, it's another entry point, to understand how the arts has become professionalized. And it's also class, right? So the early days, the performers were often lawyers, teachers, and this was something they did at night, this was not their day job. You come down to the early 2000s, and it tells you that, okay, the National Arts Academy, Aswara, is here, there's more money for students to go overseas to study theatre, so they come back with professional qualifications. Even the cast list, you know, from just wardrobe mistress to costume designer, right? So it's really a story of what the audience can take from what is in our archive. That's interesting to us.

FF: Yeah. Yanling, do you want to share what narrative do you want to...?

YL: I think I largely echo Kathy's one. Yes, the word neutral, it's hard, neutral. We collect as much as we can, and I think the plan is for users to make sense and make meaning out of it, like what the students did - they approached it with the lens of meaningful collaboration, which, obviously, in our archive wasn't the starting point, right? We could only present as much discrete material for you to then add on your research and do, and, yes, it really depends on the researcher. I think we then complement the existing archive in the other work that Centre 42 does is to then commission the different kind of ways of looking at it and making meaning, such as performance-response to an era of LGBTQ history in theatre. So that becomes a research piece that we can manufacture based on what's existing in the archive.

I think we are very conscious that the archive is not complete and what is not present in the archive also says certain things, right? So then how do we put in the effort to try to tackle these gaps? A little bit and a little bit. One thing that we do in activating the archive and to solicit more responses is to also offer an archival residency to artists or arts groups who may find a gap in this collection and say, "I'm not represented here, can I be? Maybe you didn't know, but we used to do a lot of work back in...", so on and so forth, and we encourage, we have a conversation with them, and then we work through with them what it means for them to have created work, what was the work that they created, and what's the story that they want to tell about their work, and create that as part of the contribution back into the archive. So I think there's this dual effort to one, remain neutral to collect the data, but then also reinforce the different narratives by providing these other opportunities and platforms to source and insert those narratives to it. Yeah. 

FF: Thank you. And maybe if I can add one more question, what do you think the the narrative that you find in your archive project, Centre 42? From all this data, what do you see in the overall picture of Singaporean theatre? 

YL: That’s a big question. Can I sit with it for a while?

JP: Contrary to the two speakers, we have a totally not-neutral archive. It's very personal to a practitioner's work and the collaborators that I work with, who had similar visions about the pedagogical aspect of arts education. If you look at the micro-project that was done just now with Atomic Jaya, it's like looking for the theme that this particular type of practice by these two organizations where I was like a centre post in both organizations for children's theater work. So definitely the narrative was educational, pedagogical - even the categories that we created were specifically to unfold the pedagogical aspect and the pedagogical movements and evolution that happened through a period of time.

We were interpreting our own archives when we set out to do it, hoping that other practitioners would do their own, but that's where we made the mistake. We didn't use software, so we created our own cataloging system, and other young people's practitioners, outside of these two organizations, even though we approached them, they were very reluctant when they looked at our categories. It's like, "crazy". And they didn't have collections like we had. Our cataloging system was also based on how we collected, right? But another group collects very differently. They might only keep programmes. They might only keep certain things. So in the end we did not achieve that base that could actually absorb other children's theatre practitioners, so they only appear in the timeline. Other productions by other companies appear in the timeline, but not in the actual archives. 

The other thing I wanted to mention was - I think there was confusion between - because we have no system. These two companies, when you ask "what were your previous projects", they just take out one file, you know, and everything is in that file, like, one proposal to a funder, and then one piece of paper saying "I went to five schools, these are the five schools, these were the actors, etc". It's crazy, I mean, this file just has a few things in it. And I think when we were doing it, we felt that actually there needs to be a filing system. There was a bit of grey area between creating a filing system for the two organizations. Five Arts Centre ceased after some time to do children's theatre, but Arts-ED, interestingly - the digital archive is controlled by Five Arts, but the physical archive is kept in Penang in Arts-ED, and interestingly Arts-ED as an organisation uses the cataloguing system now for all their continuing works, so they catalog everything according to the archival system. So that's another kind of use for the archives. 

But when we looked at practitioners, we were also interested in practitioners as users. But this activating of the archives was something that was beyond us - although we called practitioners, and we had some forums, and we also wanted feedback from child actors who had now grown up, and we thought that they might be inspired by the archives to activate the archives, but it completely failed. So I'll say more about that when we come to management of the archives. 

FF: What happened to these broken artefacts that you found that is not complete? Do you have a different way to interpret it?

JP: No, I think for those that were very under-collateral - that means hardly any collateral - we didn't select. We kept it in the archives, physical archives, but we didn't put it on the digital archives. The more complete sets were put in the digital archives, and significant pieces were put in the digital archives. 

FF: I’ll add before we go to the second part of the session - then what happens to broken artefacts? Sometimes these historians, they [find] a broken vase, and that can also tell a story in the past. In your case, do you have a broken artefact that you still want to present and how? For MAMP, maybe you just put it there, put a title, and maybe years, but we still don't know... 

YL: We try to put it as is, however it is presented to us, then we add on text or captions below to explain what's missing or not. For example, there are some scripts that come in that are very lovely - they have actors' notes or director's remarks and all, we try, once we get permission to publish it, we will put it out, but if there are missing pages, oftentimes we just indicate that there are missing pages here and here, or the author of this script has only given us permission to display the first ten pages. We acknowledge it as is, and we leave it as is. We have a lot of incomplete material in there - they are mostly person's profiles because we're tracing all these names of people in the programme booklets and we just have their names, we have no idea their bios and all, yet we had to create entries in there so that it all links up in the backend and it all shows up. So we do placeholders - "we do not have information about this actor so-and-so, but if you have, and if this is you, write in to us to complete". So that's the best we can do, by putting default statements out to encourage people to fill it up.

KR: Yeah, very similar for us as well. Sometimes, actually, through just press clippings or through interviews with people, we know that there was this particular production and it was held in this particular year. We have the title, we have the year, and that's it. We don't have any physical image, we have nothing else, but we've verified that that production took place, so we just have it in the website, and the idea is hopefully someone might - other scholars might come and find the information and help us to fill it up, but that's it. But what it does do is that it maps out that these people existed, or these productions happened, but we just don't have the details. 

FF: The second part of this session is maybe - the good story, or maybe bad story, in working with these archives - maybe some people coming to you [saying] "hey, I found this, hey, your website is very inspiring," I don't know, maybe a researcher coming and saying, "hey, this is..." do you have a good, interesting story, backstory that you want to share? 

KR: We have had a couple of researchers - Ivy will remember. Do you remember, Ivy? You sent me some student from an Ivy League university who found our website and found it really useful. We've had a couple of times where researchers - it's usually academics who have written to us to say that they really love the website because it's really useful to them. The nice stories I have is actually going to older senior actors and actresses and directors' homes, right, and they're like, "oh, I don't have anything", then they'll open some big suitcase box and it's filled with treasure and it's amazing. 

YL: A lot of times we get people who come to us and say, "hey, I'm moving house and I'm clearing out my wardrobe." 

FF: Is that a good story or a bad story? 

YL: I don't know. I mean, sometimes there are gems - we have veteran actors who are saying, "I have these entire two boxes of all the scripts that I've worked on and acted in or directed in, and I don't have space, do you want them?" And for us it's a treasure trove, right, so we usually take them first and we are like, how do we document this? Can we get a researcher in, who's interested in this particular actor's or actress' life and their contributions to the theatre story in Singapore and make a piece out of it or make research, and at the same time, we can collate all these scripts. So there are these gems that do come to us, which we still haven't found time to do. And then there are gems where we have veteran lighting designers - I was just sharing this story with a lighting designer who just visited as well, Dorothy, she came to us and said, "hey, I have these materials, and these are scrolls of tracing paper that we used to do lighting design by hand, drawing these on tracing paper." It's so different from how the TMs do it these days with the design on CAD. Everything is software, and I've never seen it before. When she unfolded it, I'm like, "oh my god, this is treasure." So how do we then document? There are all these contributions that come, and I think it gets us very geeked out and very excited, but the challenge is also then how do we package them and make sure that they are accessible and relevant to the current generation, who may not have seen that before, and understand how things were done in the theatre back in the day. So it's both exciting but also horror stories, because we're very scared that it gets whopped and then we lose that. The responsibility is on the team. 

JP: I had a sister who was in the MU Literary Department, she was a literature student, so we have boxes of programmes, and when she was no longer interested in them, I just inherited all the boxes, so when I heard that they were going to do MAMP, I was so happy to pass the whole box of foreign plays, not Malaysian plays - I never checked whether they were in the archives or not. Very often I went [unclear] productions and I would keep the programme in that box as well. But I really felt relieved that somebody has an archive and I can pass that over. And I think a lot of people who gave materials - they keep it, and they really don't want to destroy it, so it's very - what's the word, relief, yeah, to be able to give something to an archive. 

But for me, for the Young People's Theatre Archive, Arts Education Archive, I think the more exciting moments was actually, Five Arts suggested that we have these roundtables to bring the collaborators, as well as the children who were in the productions, back to reflect on their experiences as child actors. And that was really amazing because we're talking about 35 years later. They're engineers or they're working in Pizza Hut, you know, and it was just amazing to have these roundtables with them and to have them recollect back on their experiences and what was the impact on them, regardless of whether they were still in the theatre. So that was something quite unexpected, and it's interesting. We videoed those sessions, and those sessions are also available on the archives, and I think that's important, because there's a live connection with the people we are archiving, right? 

FF: That goes to my question. Is there any - of course there's challenges, I think one of the main challenges is funding, but other than funding, how do you run, or what is the biggest challenge doing this project, other than funding, of course, it's a never-ending problem. 

YL: So we agree not to talk about funding, right? Because we know that's always a problem. I think when I was trying to prepare for today's session, I was looking through some of the documents that we had put together, and one of the things that we were conscientious in doing from the get-go is now a 100-page user guide for internal usage, to know how to maintain and keep the archive going, because it's always about the long run, right? You don't want to do an archive for two years and then all that setup effort goes to waste. But people change, things evolve, practices also change, terminologies, the technology, then how do we keep a consistency to that kind of work? So I have my colleague here, Adelyn, who really focuses - that's her work, that's, like, 80 percent of her work on archives and data management - so we have a running 100-page user guide manual for what does it mean, to do the archive of Centre 42, from the moment you get a piece of material - how do you sort it, categorize it, the technicality of uploading to the system. 

The system that we use, we've evolved from WordPress. This system that our tech developers recommended to us is called Drupal, and even that changes every few years - I've just gotten a text two weeks ago from the development team saying "the Drupal system has now upgraded, so we will need to talk with you to spend X number of man-hours to upgrade the system", and of course that means cost. That continual upkeeping with digital technologies on doing that - I think that's one of the ongoing challenges, if you will, just keeping up with that, besides the day-to-day keeping up with all the new material that's being churned. In Singapore, every year - I think the last couple of years we've been tracking, there are at least 160 local theatre productions that are being produced in Singapore a year. Even through COVID, there were digital productions, so it's 200 upwards a year. That means 200+ entries a year, so we're always playing catch-up. I think our archive right now, our last collection is up to 2021, because that was when we relaunched, so we have two years of backlog. It's just never fast enough to keep populating it, so that is a big challenge. We're always racing against time.

JP: I won't go over the digitalization issues and keeping up with software - when you use a certain software, and suddenly they tell you, oh, we've decided to have licensing, you have to pay now, and then we have to think, do we want to switch to another software? I mean, there's just endless problems where software is concerned. But I have other challenges with archiving. First thing is - I think, actually, we don't really understand archives. We don't have access to professional archiving, so we start on our own and then we run into problems. I feel that there is now a real need to discern the roles between acquisition, creation of an archive, maintenance, and the use or activation of an archive, and you really need different expertise for this. One little organization cannot do it all without professional help. 

I also question whether we need a big - I mean, we talk about alternate archives, but actually, we are now producing national archives for the arts, you know, and we cannot handle it. So whether it should be a decentralized system - I'm starting to think about that. Also, the cataloging system is very questionable, whether you go to the - I mean, the posters outside are a very good example of micro-cataloguing, or putting value on work that is already - the collaterals have already been archived, and you breathe value into the works. So how does that go with the standard collateral-type of archiving, where you leave it open to interpretation? Of course, the worst thing is the management and sustainability of archives. How do we actually do this long-term management and sustainability and activation of the archives? 

I think the other major challenge that I have is the use and uses of the archives, and I feel that my solution to it would have been, we should have looked at partners from the very beginning. Because we don't look at serious partnerships with institutions, with communities or practitioners, or whoever else, universities or even arts organizations. I feel that the investment in the archives comes as an afterthought - who is going to use it - rather than building the stakeholder relationships first with the people that can possibly continue to contribute, and continue to get their students or their practitioners to use the archives. So doing a mapping prior to starting - who are possible partners, institutions, etc, and how we can create synergy with potential users of the archives should be done prior to, rather than after. So I think our user focus is a bit unclear. So my two main issues are really about, as I said, the mapping and the preparation period before we do archives, and the other is the expertise - I mean, nobody teaches archiving, right, anywhere in this region. 

KR: Yeah, everything that Yanling and Janet said I completely endorse. I think it's the idea of expertise, the idea that it's really a DIY industry; we're just doing it ourselves and making it up. We're discovering and writing the SOPs as we're doing it, and therefore we're also making all the mistakes, which can be quite costly because we're also so small. 

I wanted to maybe add a couple of things. For us, there has been some understanding that some of the problems we've had is just our blind spots - we're all very middle-class, we're very urban, we're very English-language focused. So two examples would be that our archive doesn't have any Tamil or Indian language theatre programs at all. We've included Malay language, we've got English language, and we've got Chinese language, Mandarin and Cantonese and so on, but not that. We don't have anything from East Malaysia. I didn't show you the whole website, but we actually have got a censorship slider of collections as well, and the only time that we actually realised that we did not include East Malaysia - Sabah and Sarawak - was when we actually got in a researcher who's originally from East Malaysia... so, you know, it's also important to understand exclusion, right, what's left out, what you were saying about what's left out. Some things are left out for practical reasons, but some things are left out because we just don't see it, we're seeing it from our point of view. So that's, I think, really important. 

The other thing is, we're the victim of the problem that we're trying to solve, because archives are about the past, and how they serve the present and the future needs, right, and people don't really care, often, enough about the past, because we're too busy with the now and the future. If people cared more about what the past was about, I think the archives would have a bit more value. But I think that's changing, you know, this is a full room... there are archive movements all over Southeast Asia, it's really a larger kind of zeitgeist, right, how do we value things, right? And I'm pretty sure that if you actually spoke to some of your friends who are not in the arts, and you talk to them about history and archives, a lot of times, their mind will go straight to European civilization, because that's what seems to be valuable, right?

Two things I wanted to just talk about. I was trying to look at it and I couldn't load it, but there's something called Safe Havens Freedom Talks, which I listened to - I can't remember whether it was Belarus or - it's one of those Eastern Bloc countries that had been persecuted, trying to build up their history through black-and-white family archive photographs, because that history's been wiped out. And of course we know what's happening in Gaza, right? So there's a very important electronic Palestinian archive which actually provides material proof that it existed before 1948. So archives actually are really, really powerful because they provide alternative views, but we just need to get people to care more. 

JP: I just want to add something, because when I talked about the need for establishing partnerships with organizations before we start the archives, sussing out potential users, I feel that we don't have that atomic... you know, looking at other cultural fields or sociological fields and partners that we can partner with. We are always thinking only of the arts groups, that's why the archives don't seem to - you know, it's like we're stuck within - I'm sure there's a physics word for it - when you're stuck in one circle only. 

FF: Maybe we'll open questions to the floor. 

Su-feh: I'm hearing that - and this resonates with me - an archiving process often comes as a form of resistance, or maybe as a response to not being seen by a dominant archiving process that exists already. And I'm hearing at the end that there are blindspots, because as you make this archive as a counter-narrative, and you start to tell a story, you're missing part of that story, and I'm wondering something about what you're saying, Janet - I'm quite inspired by how the students are showing the relationality of things - and if your archive was just about underlining or activating those relations, what would it look like, as opposed to making a snapshot of something that happened in the past? I don't know, I'm not sure if I'm making sense. 

FF: Do you want to respond to it?

KR: Okay, so I think I come back to my original thing, that really, we are about gathering primary data, and the stories that people tell is open to them to tell. But even in the act of collecting primary data, we are also - I said we don't make choices, we take everything, but then neither did we go out of our way to include Tamil theatre, for example. I think your identity sometimes gives you an idea of what's complete, so my identity and my class and my professional experience gave me an idea of what was complete, and I thought, well, I'm so alternative, of course I've already got everything - I mean, we thought, right? But we didn't. So it's just acknowledging that even when you're trying to be the alternative, you might also be leaving people out. But for us, we're very clear that it's really not about - we have talked, and we have asked, we would like to invite other people in a more structured way to come and engage with the archive and create stories or create readings of it, like the students have done. But for us at this point, it's really about primary data.

Audience member: I have a question about fact-checking. You were talking about filling the gaps for archives. At what point, where do you decide to stop? Because Janet was mentioning the video interviews with former child actors, and Yanling was talking about how users could, if they want to submit "do you know this person, send us more info" - sounds a bit Wikipedia-ish. I'm wondering where do you stop the research and what do you decide where to fill in the gaps or not?

YL: Fact-checking... so our archive is completely moderated or handled internally. It's not an open content creation where you can create your user profile. We do everything backend - you submit to us, we verify, and we put it up. The material that we create - and we do that - are usually cited with the source material. So we try to do that as best as we can, and if it's not, then we will put a disclaimer. 

In terms of where to stop, we generally don't stop, but it's just how fast can we go, and I guess it's always picking the battles - like, which gap do we identify we need to create? I think that comes along with the regular work and looking at what opportunities are. For example, if it's the 50th year of this particular play in the existence next year, we know that's on the horizon, we might want to then commission a response to that, and then using that as a way of relooking history and creating new materials, and at the same time, gathering all the materials that we don't have existing on the archive. So we look for these kinds of programming opportunities, if you will, to scaffold the work, to fill in those gaps. I think that's the best that we can do, because we don't have - although we have a one full-time staff that does it, we don't have enough resources and manpower to do everything in a very limited period of time.

FF: And maybe from that question, I want to ask, how do you [do] crowdsourcing, ask a user to add the data to your website? Have you considered any of that, and if so, how then do you do it? And if you don't, what's the challenge with crowdsourcing the data?

YL: The challenge is... I don't know whether people don't care, or they're just too busy. We do put out calls for artists to respond maybe a couple of times a year. We also actively decide, say, we are lacking in young companies in this period of time, so that will be the focus of our work that year to then say, let's do a direct outreach to these companies, like a literal roadshow - have that face time with them, explain to them, so that they can see the value of being part of it, so that's the regular work we do. 

The other thing that we do is, when we work with artists on residencies or programmes or events, etc, we always ask them to, "hey, you realise that you have a profile on our website, it's now empty, could you please submit your information updated to this link", so then they see, ah, it's actually usable for them to give you that bio, and when they click on that bio, they see, oh, actually, back in 2000, I actually did this work, oh, that collateral is on the archive. We do have artist profile pages that actually show you the track record, so for example, when you type Ivan Heng, he has his bio there, and it also has his volume of work over the years back until, I think, the 80s, and it shows you that he was, back then, an actor, then he went on to director, so you can see his transformation over the years. Hopefully through that regular engagement with artists, where they can see one small little value of being part of this, then the word of mouth gets around. I think that's how we integrate the usage a little bit more. 

Ray: I spend a lot of time thinking about archives, and I've created an archive of video and performance; it goes back for 40 years now. But as I was driving over here, I was asking myself the question: what is not an archive? And actually, I couldn't find anything in my experience of life and objects and art that was not an archive, you know - a genome is an archive; this stool is an archive of the processes that produced it; every object is an archive of those active processes that bring it into being. And that's the case with us, all of us, and our brains and everything. So then we have different categories - there are silicon-based archives and there are carbon-based archives. We are carbon based archives. And all those questions began to open up the possibility that absolutely everything - the car I was driving was an archive of all the processes that produced it, and all the different machines that went into it. And I was thinking about the archive that I make of performance art on video, and how it isn't for me. It's actually for people after me, it's for machines and machine learning, for AI that will come after and will gather in all the archives together into its archive. It was just this interesting question, so I just want to throw out the question: what is not an archive to us? 

Zikri: Hello. I really appreciate that you actually included the unpublished manuscripts into the website because [in] theatre, the staged manuscript and the published manuscript is totally different things altogether. But then again, how do you actually negotiate different kinds of - because manuscripts, once it's there on the stage and whatnot, it might be totally different things, right? Is there anything you can share with us more on censorship, the challenges with such archives, within your archives?

Another thing would be - because we are talking about the arts, right? How can you actually classify different forms of disciplines, because we try to identify different forms of performance arts, experimental arts and whatnot - can you share with with us more on how you actually identify or classify certain forms of arts performance? 

KR: So I'll take the classified question, because we're having those issues as well. When we first started off, it was so clear, you know, theatre and dance, right, and then eventually, it would be visual arts, music. And also, the other thing was language, right? You know, it's either English, or it's Malay or it's, you know - but those things are actually quite meaningless now. It holds very clearly that artists themselves classify this is a dance performance, this is a theatre performance, right through until, maybe, in the 80s. Already in the 70s, it's breaking down. And of course, when you think about traditional theatre, that's completely alien to our indigenous forms. We're having, nowadays, problems, because as we move towards cataloguing and archiving works more recent, from the past 30 years, it's really performance rather than dance or theatre. So we're having those issues, and multi-language is another issue.

You mentioned censorship. I will tell one story because it relates to the students and what they all did about Atomic Jaya. So Fasyali had asked me this question before we started, because he's doing his PhD and it's about what you talked about - what are the non-material things that are not in the archive, but it's a really simple thing. I was the tour manager of the Singapore production of Atomic Jaya at the Substation, and Krishen Jit was the director, and what's not archived is the fact that, actually - and you talked about diplomacy, and how it's great for cultural relations, but the show was almost banned by the Singapore government. It had been staged successfully - it was sold out in Malaysia, and there was no problem at all. We were bumping in, and Substation then got a call that PELU, which is the licensing department, had actually rejected the license process. Those days, you put it in, and you usually get it just before you open, but you've sold your tickets - they wouldn't, because they were afraid that Singapore staging this play would offend Malaysia, and would then cause a diplomatic row between Malaysia and Singapore. So we had to really - I think they had to go and - I believe Krishen actually had to speak to some person at PELU to explain, no, it's a Malaysian play, it's been, and so on. But those things are not recorded, right, and it should be, because it's not written about in the press, then it's not recorded.

FF: Maybe I'll add to that, beause I actually do research on theatre historiography, how theatre history is written in Malaysia, and one of the things, me and the panel, always look at for the archive is we only focus on the material that we can access - but theatre itself is a very intangible art; once it's done, it's done, and you cannot access it unless you watch it again, and it's a completely different experience every time it was performed. So to understand it, we should look at the event as an artefact, actually. I think the meta-timeline that Janet did is one kind of putting that as an artefact, the event as an artefact, so that we can understand why theatre is being performed in that way. 

JP: I actually want to address this question of classification, because the kind of arts education programmes that were run by both Five Arts and Arts-ED is impossible to classify, meaning, could be dance, could be multimedia, could be... so we just avoided the whole classification of the Western dance, theatre, and we used the words programmes and projects, so that took away that whole issue. 

The other thing is this examination of other views towards the piece. I think it's critical in archives. It's important to talk to the practitioner if they are alive, or people who had, because for the kind of work that we did - I was archiving our own work, right, but also I had collaborators, so I had to check all the time with them whether they shared the same view of the programme or the project. And because we are working with children and it's educative, so then the process is very important, as opposed to the product, where the collateral is just outcomes. For us, the major collateral was actually this intangible process. So I think every archive is limited by the practitioner's approach, or the collaborator's approach, and I think these intangibles are rarely documented in the archive. 

Which leads me to the question about what Ray brought up - I really feel that talking about these kinds of tangible archives is one thing, and interpretation, leaving it neutral and open to interpretation, but actually, the people who are performing - I mean, there's a lot of discussion about the body as archive, or objects as archives, costumes as archives, and what does that say, it's not just script. When it's a dancer, there's no script. I think we need to move away from this kind of very tangible and explore, although we don't know how we're going to do it, but I think we need to explore a more flexible idea of what is - I mean, oral history is a whole new area of archiving which you rarely find in a arts archive; you don't find those oral histories. I really feel we need that.

Beverly: I’m Beverly, and we're also working on a kind of index - not an archive project - but this talk about the archive and data - I know it's just terminology, but for me, it's everything that you keep alive, it's happened, it's content, or it's memory. So I think if we think in terms of memory, and why that is important, I think it's easier to understand, and think about it as something living.

Nabilah: Hi, I'm wondering about whether there's a value in not putting something into the archive. I was thinking about how with, maybe, the Singapore scene, you want to professionalise, you want to put people on the map, you want to document something, but some people maybe don't want to be made material in some ways, maybe for a certain strategic purpose, almost like a refusal to be documented as a strategy, and I'm wondering whether you have thoughts about that. 

YL: We have had artists and folks write in to say "could you remove me from this", because somehow, our SEO is very powerful; they Google their name and it appears as one of the top entries. For whatever reason - we don't usually ask unless they offer, and we just respect it, because it could be work-related, or they could be known under a different name now, so we usually respect the request and we will go with their wishes. Or we put a holding statement to then say "no longer available" so that the connections don't break, but this person is represented how he or she wants to be currently. 

Marion: I think, possibly, this kind of exchange and discussion is more interesting than the archive itself. Thank you.

Audience member: Hi, I'm just wondering, do archives actually speak from one archive to another? 

KR: We went on a dating app and then we got matched. No, we don't talk to each other enough at all.

JP: That's quite scary. We really don't talk to each other. 

KR: Janet's archive and mine started at the same time by Five Arts, under two different producers, but we don't - we also have a very different approach to it, though, because I think you're a practitioner that was involved in the work that you're archiving, and I'm a non-practitioner that's archiving work that I'm not involved in. So the approach was different, but yeah, I mean, we should be...

JP: We don't even have archival conversations. 

KR: The producers spoke to each other.

YL: We do it to a little extent. For example, Esplanade has their archives for the performing arts in Singapore, and sometimes we co-produce content that, say, looks at a certain theme, and we share - so we could either publish it on both sides and do a cross-link, or host it on one side and then share. Recently we did a documentation podcast, as well as an article looking at one of their stage productions, documenting the process of creating this Peranakan work, and the agreement was that it would be posted on one of our sites and they'll do a cross-share. I think there are companies that find it advantageous to have multiple entry points, and they share that way.

But then, there are also instances where companies are protective of their archive, and they don't necessarily want to, because they do need to drive foot traffic to their site for funding reasons, or whatever reason. There are different cases. I can share a bit on The Necessary Stage, which is a theatre company in Singapore that does really good management of their own work, very in-depth material from videos, documenting processes, they have a lot of material, and they have a very established online archive. What we do is, we have some of those entry point materials, the collaterals and all, and we give, maybe, a 10% teaser into that. And if they want to find out more, it links to the Necessary Stage archive. So they see the benefit of a symbiotic relationship, of talking that way. But it is rudimentary, and it is laborious, in trying to make conscientious effort to link, primarily because we use different databases, we use different software. We don't know how to create an API that necessarily links up automatically. That would be ideal, but a lot of work, and we all need to start from the same page.

FF: Maybe for the last part, I will invite Su Fern to give a response to our one-hour discussion. 

SF: Sorry to hold you back. Firstly, I would like to say thank you Fasyali, as well as Kathy, Yanling and also Janet, as well as everyone here, especially those who have asked questions. To be honest, I feel a bit out of place sitting here, mainly because I do not own an archive. So I will lend a more analytical and also reflective perspective to the discussion here. Firstly, as an arts researcher and educator, arts archives have been essential to the work that I do, because even in today's Internet and digital age, finding credible resources about the art worlds in Southeast Asia remains challenging. Resource materials and in-depth art historical research remains scarce or even difficult to access, and there is also a lack of proper supporting infrastructure, so I would really like to thank these archives. From the discussion and the Q&A, I think I would like to distill three very short points. 

Firstly, there is no question, I think, about the importance of arts archiving, but here I would also like to highlight the centrality of arts archives to understanding the relations between arts practice and the challenges in society. For instance, I think when each archive shared about the conditions of their own archive, they actually revealed each locale's access to resources, such as technological know-how. Apart from highlighting the need for different types and forms of archives, I think this discussion has also highlighted how non-institutional, ground-up initiated archives like these ones here, especially Janet's, highlight the power relations and also nodes in society, where I think here, unfortunately, the official state archives of this region predominantly still serve to protect and promote the institutional narratives of the state, as well as protect or shield certain records of history. 

Which brings me to my second point - archiving is a very privileged position. Here, if I recall, Kathy's reason in wanting to start an archive, which is also 'to order'. I think to be able to order an archive - this ordering is never a neutral decision-making process. I think this discussion has showed how the archivists or people that want to start archives should be conscious about questions such as, what does the archive tell? What does it tell about the institution and the owner? What does it reproduce - in particular, what power and social, political dynamics does it reproduce? And, importantly, as Kathy reminds us, what is missing from the archive? I think, here, we'll be thinking about archives and archiving as political acts. I'm reminded of the words of Pierre Nora, who wrote Between Memory and History in 1989, because for me, tonight's sharing highlights how the arts archive is actually a site of memory, one that resists history. Here, to demonstrate that, I'll share a relavant quote from Pierre Nora's writings. He says, "memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name. It remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived. History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer. Memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present; history is a representation of the past." 

And my last point is about the precarity of archives. I think this discussion, especially Janet's points on challenges, has highlighted the difficulties of how do we truly sustain archives, especially in terms of the technical and backend expertise, from maintaining to updating the content, to also activating the content, to also ensuring its longevity, consistency, and relevance. Here I recall Yanling's internal user guide. Also to borrow from my students' project, I think archives are not static. They should be activated so that they can be a transformative tool for the present and future. Those are their words. However, I think that's very easily said, and very hard to be done. Recall Yanling's points about always wanting and needing to play catch-up as well. 

I think in terms of activating archives, I would also challenge us here to ask, actually, how can we think of archives as active mediums, and also porous platforms as well, especially ones that enable us to catalyse new modes of engagement and expand affinities, especially relational ones, and recalling what Janet said, to the affinities outside of the arts as well. And here, also, how can the inherent incompleteness of archives inspire others to continue on the work, and to start their own initiatives as well. I think that's all I have. 

FF: With that we end our session. But please go to their websites and look at the posters outside!