Antidote to the River of Forgetting: Poetry as (Alternative) Archive

“The river of forgetting is a terrifying, silent current that pulls at our heels every single day … To write is to plant a stake in the muddy bank and refuse to be swept downstream.” – Nasser Anssari (Research Participant)

This interactive workshop explores poetry as a technology of remembering: a way of articulating parts of human experience that rarely enter official archives. From “the sound of a grandmother’s voice” to “the specific shade of blue at dusk” to “the intensity of a grief we swore would never fade”, poetry can capture the sensory, emotional and fleeting.

The notion of poetry as an alternative archive emerges from collaborative ethnographic research with Palestinian poets in Amman, Jordan, where the impulse to preserve and document everyday life is intensified by experiences of displacement, making the politics of the archive especially visible. The workshop draws on poems, creative practices and reflections from this research as prompts for new writing. Participants will experiment with poetry as a way of capturing everyday ephemera and awakening half-remembered or dormant memories. Through short generative exercises, participants will begin building their own “living archives” of fragments, sensations and moments.

The workshop will also discuss broader questions about the politics of archives and possibilities for preservation beyond institutional and Eurocentric models. Participants will experiment with collaborative counter-archiving through a tagging exercise that explores organising writing through sensation, emotion and unexpected keywords rather than rigid categories.

Participants will be invited to contribute their writing to a zine after the event.

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Host or Publisher ASA People Fest