Building a Living Archive
The significance of documenting the present.
We tend to archive too late, looking back instead of acknowledging the now, in hopes of understanding what got us to where we are. What happened, who mattered, what changed and what was lost. By the time something becomes history, most of the moment has disappeared. The dates, records and photos may remain, but we lose out on the conversations that were had and the ideas that hadn’t yet found a name or a place for themselves.
But what if we documented culture before knowing what it will become?
History preserves what’s considered significant after the fact — institutions give us exhibitions, spotlight established artists, tell the stories behind landmark buildings, significant publications and official events, but cultural change rarely announces itself that way.
A brand new collective can develop around a token café, a new aesthetic can emerge from young people experimenting online, and tradition may quietly change and adapt to the times. The traditional archive framework means that, by the time someone has finally decided these things matter, the original context may have faded.
This is where Qissah’s archive wants to be different — it’s not trying to predict what will become important, and is instead collecting aspects of the present in a way that lets future generations decide that.
A traditional archive is at a retrospective standstill, made up of the collected and catalogued, carefully preserved in a safe place. A living archive continuously grows as new contributions come in: conversations, unfinished ideas, photographs, films, essays, places, memories — it wants to be a record of culture in motion.
Our archive strives to be populated by people instead of institutions, acknowledging that people are where culture begins, and institutions are simply where it becomes visible. Cultural landscapes are made up of individual decisions: someone decides to make something, someone else decides to preserve it, someone creates a gathering place, or teaches someone, or changes an old idea. The people are a crucial part of the historical record, even the unrecognised young artists and the small, unnamed communities.
The Gulf is already represented through a narrow set of views: we hear about the architecture, economic and technological developments, heritage and futurism. The stories aren’t false, but they are incomplete.
There are countless shifts happening under the surface level stories that grace the headlines. The younger generation is negotiating a space that merges heritage and modernity, there is an influx of appreciation and artistry inspired by linguistic heritage, and various artistic mediums are merging traditional and contemporary creative practices in their newer work.
So, who decides what Gulf culture becomes? Whether it’s confined to simplified headlines or expanded on by delving beneath the surface?
An archive isn’t neutral: someone has to decide what gets documented, whose perspective is sought out, what gets preserved or how something is described. Qissah is not trying to claim that this is the story of contemporary Gulf culture; instead, we want to create various entry points into it. Singular projects don’t represent something as immense as culture, but as they expand, they may begin to reveal something far more complex.
People don’t know what will matter. No one knows what will remain or disappear, or which ordinary moments will become memories.
At QCL, we step into that uncertainty. The archive is created today, but it belongs to tomorrow. The real audience comes in years from now, as someone trying to understand what now felt like. Who was creating and where, what did they care about or hope to change, what were they afraid of… What did the culture look like before we knew what it could, and would, become?
At Qissah, we want to chronicle culture while it is still becoming — before today becomes “years ago” and before we forget what it felt like to be here.
