For the past several years, much of our work through BlindianProject has involved collecting and preserving histories: conversations, family archives, photographs, community stories and the everyday things through which culture gets passed from one generation to another.

My experience with the Rita Keegan Foundation at the Warburg Institute earlier this year shifted how I think about this work. I came away thinking less about the archive as somewhere we store the past, and more about what it means to keep histories alive: to recover them, activate them and put them back into circulation.

That feels increasingly urgent. At a moment when histories are being contested, removed from classrooms, rewritten or simply allowed to disappear, I'm interested in forms of knowledge that survive outside the official record — in families, communities, objects, rituals and our bodies.

What about the things our bodies remember?

The way we eat. Which hand we use. Who serves whom. What we're taught is clean or unclean. The rules we inherit around food, faith, caste, race and family — sometimes long before we're old enough to question them.

These questions sit at the centre of my ongoing work, The Hands of Gods, and a wider methodology I've been developing through my practice, Reconstruction Studies — using archives, objects, embodied practices and everyday rituals to examine how systems of power, identity and belief are inherited, reproduced and interrupted.

→ See the research

Over the past year, I've been in conversation with the SAVVY Contemporary team in Berlin about developing this research. Those conversations have opened an opportunity to continue Reconstruction Studies through The Hands of Gods with SAVVY, exploring what food, embodied practice, conversation and collective reflection might reveal about the systems of power carried through everyday life.

There isn't currently a large production budget attached to this stage of the research. So, as this work grows out of the archive and community we've built together, I'm turning to that community to help make the next stage possible.

BlindianProject is now fiscally sponsored by Dream Big Youth Foundation, a registered US 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization (EIN: 39-4945347), meaning eligible US donations are tax-deductible. I'm hoping to raise £3,000–£3,500 to support travel to Berlin, accommodation, food and materials for the research, and documentation of what emerges.

This is also an attempt to expand what the archive can be: not only what we remember, but how memory lives in our bodies, how practices travel across generations and geographies, and what becomes visible when we interrupt them.

The work doesn't end in Berlin. What emerges there will feed back into Reconstruction Studies and the Reconstruction Lab, where collective reading, annotation and conversation become another way of working through the research publicly. What is generated in one space can be tested in another, returned to the archive and circulated back through the community.

If you've contributed a story, joined us at a gathering, read or shared our work, or simply followed BlindianProject over the years, you've already been part of building this archive.

I'm asking our community to help us take the next step.

Help us test what an archive can be.

What Our Bodies Remember That Archives Don’t

Help Fund BlindianProject's New Research in Berlin

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