Arshia Fatima Haq: The Archive of the Unsung

The research of Arshia Fatima Haq in Αthens involves working with Urdu, Dari, and Farsi-speaking Afghani and Pakistani migrants within local refugee settlements in the city and in associated surrounding locations. The initial proposal was to gather conversational audio and video field recordings of early memories, folk tales, regional jokes and songs carried by migrants on their journeys. The intention of this documentation was to create an archive of cultural production, usually transmitted only orally, that would function as a site of resistance and redemption to current narratives of trauma, loss and displacement that reduce and dehumanize refugees’ identities and agencies.

In the intervening years since the original proposal, the worsening circumstances of living conditions and the intensifying secondary effects of displacement, as well as various failures of subsequent integration, have left migrant communities with compounded traumas and disillusionment. Due to these circumstances, during the initial phase of her research in the summer of 2021, Haq found only a few members of the communities she approached open to discussing their personal histories, and fewer still willing to be recorded. What began to emerge beyond the hesitations around often tender disclosures was a portrait of desire to forget what had been left behind.

In light of these emergences, rather than presenting discrete accounts or tales with beginnings and ends, Haq hopes to create a sonic assemblage of the fragments that have already been recorded in 2021 and will be gathered in the summer of 2023, a sort of exquisite corpse between various participants that catalogues both what is remembered and what is chosen to be unremembered. The final piece is envisioned as a sort of continuous 'musique concrète' or composition of fractured testimony, ambient recordings of spaces that carry traces of the migrants' lives such as the various public parks and squares of Αthens as well as community centers and spaces of gathering, and musical selections from popular archives that some of the participants refer to in their conversations. The piece will be presented digitally, along with "liner notes" including images and videos gathered during the recording process.