Do you remember the sandara? Yes, it is the storage space or attic that was often located between the upper edges of doors and the ceiling in Egyptian homes. You might remember it from your childhood in your grandparents' house. Have you recollected some childhood memories, when the sandara occupied your imagination? Have you ever marveled on this storage place as child, wondered about its contents, feared it and hid in it? Today, researchers, collectors and junk dealers all over Cairo, are preoccupied by the sandara. It became both a physical and symbolic site for memory and history. The worthiness of its contents as an alternative archive that could speak of histories and memories absent from traditional historical sources was a point of discussion on the second day of Townhouse gallery's “Speak, Memory” symposium. In its Friday session, the panels revolved around rethinking the archive. Historians Lucie Ryzova and Hussein Omar spoke of their new archiving initiative, called the Sandara Project. Their aim is to collect memory through oral histories and private collections stored in people's attics, making downtown Cairo their geographical focal point. The idea, explained Ryzova, “is to encourage people to come to us to share their private papers and junk from the sandara, as well as their memories.” The sense of urgency of this project stems from the latest gentrification process of downtown Cairo. Several months ago, as Al-Masry Al-Youm and other Egyptian media sources have reported, Al Ismaelia for Real Estate Investments consortium embarked on buying a significant number of the century-old buildings in the heart of downtown Cairo. The idea is to gentrify downtown, make it cleaner and revive its glory as a pristine residential neighborhood. Gentrification processes are violent as they displace, and abruptly interfere in, people's lives and memories. For one, in the case of downtown Cairo, gentrification entails the death of many stored memories and papers in the interiors of these buildings. The first aim of the Sandara Project, therefore, is to document these interiors visually, and collect any fragments of memory and papers that were once housed in these buildings. The Sandara Project is thus generally interested in informal ways of creating and finding alternative historical sources. Be it people's cherished private family collections or the vintage paper markets' “junk,” all are considered historical valuables that need to be collected to speak of the vernacular history of the public. This alternative take on historical sources challenges the traditional guidelines of the profession, which imposes strict rules on what is considered reliable archival material. Are we witnessing what Ryzova calls “an archival turn in history?” In many ways, the Sandara Project and similar other initiatives, most especially in the “independent” art scene, creatively find ways to surpass the hegemony of the national and public archival institutions; the latter being often inaccessible and highly politicized, if not restricting and conventionally boring. Nevertheless, are such initiatives really autonomous and free of institutional restrictions? The Sandara Project speaks to many other artistic initiatives exhibited at the symposium. Artists and curators spoke of new trends in archiving based on private collections and archival practices that shy away from institutional, especially governmental, affiliations. In the contemporary art scene, these initiatives are numerous, stretching out to the global South throughout Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. The problem, however, is not that these initiatives are rethinking the archive as a free, digital and accessible space that reactivates memory and preserves history. Rather, the problem lies, one could argue, in the illusion of freedom that these initiatives are imagining. How free are privately funded or privatized archival practices? Is there a need to engage with the problematic privatization of archives in our neo-liberal age? Or are we fishing for conspiracies that merely lurk in our imagination? At any rate, the stigma of privatization figures mostly in the Egyptian experience amid the recent neo-liberal economic practices by both the state and prominent businessmen. Funded by the same consortium that is instigating this violent gentrification process in Cairo's downtown district, the Sandara Project is bound to face criticism. This leads us to another important problem in the new archiving practices. Are private archives the future, and can we really dismiss the state-controlled national archives? To bring this debate closer to home, historian Khaled Fahmy stressed the importance of the public archives, and spoke of the need to lobby for the right to information in Egypt. Inaccessibility to public institutions, especially the Egyptian National Archives, continues to be a nightmare for researchers who wish to write the history of this region. In short, in Egypt, public institutions are closed to the public. Does this entail that researches should dismiss these institutions and go free, private, and independent? The answer is complex, but as Fahmy asserted, we can not overlook the importance of public institutions, and the associated collective access to knowledge. He spoke of the transforming effect that reading and researching in public libraries and archives has on people's lives--an experience that is very far from the private archival initiatives. Finally, the following years will continue to witness debates that rethink the dichotomies between public institutions and private archival initiatives, between the digital and the physical document, between the junk of the vintage paper market and the classified records of the pristine archive. Throughout this intellectual journey that rethinks the archive, the sandara will continue to reactivate childhood memories of Egyptian households and past lives. And some contents of these sandaras will continue to circulate in Cairo's vintage paper market, and might show up one day in a book, a video, a virtual collection or a physical archive. Other Digital and Online Archival Initiatives in Asia and the Middle East Presented in the Symposium: Asia Art Archive http://www.aaa.org.hk/ www.china1980s.org/en Indonesian Visual Art Archive(IVAA) http://www.ivaa-online.org/ CULTNAT's Photographic Memory of Egypt http://www.cultnat.org/Programs/Photographic%20Memory/News/Pages/News.aspx
