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For Amani of still/moving, archiving doesn’t only refer to the act of documenting objects. Rather, objects are gathered as documents to honor the legacies that brought them into being. Asked how he defines an archive, Amani says, “It's on some memory tip. Memory, period. You've got your 3D archival, your physical, the material things that carry weight; and then the ideas — archiving books, people's stories, or just like old documentary-type stuff. Just some dude recording his neighbor walking his dog, you know?” His words trail, then he concludes: “Myths.”
In his Instagram bio, Amani identifies himself as “Distributor of Forbidden Myth and Proper Gander.” Forbidden Myth names the logic that threads his collected objects and memories together, while Proper Gander insists on duration; on being with something long enough to resist the all-too-easy immediacy of propaganda. Myth-making requires time, and a subject willing to cohabitate with its archetypes long enough for them to ferment: “It’s not like I get [an object] and then I’m like, ‘oh, I could do this!’ … Most of the time it’s like, ‘I feel something for this object,’ and I have it around long enough for me to make a connection to my work.” Amani began collecting seriously when he was in his late teens, while working at venues like Palisades, the short-lived club where I first met him in 2013. He began documenting events he organized there, first with his phone, then with an Olympus Stylus point-and-shoot camera, leading to the creation of his now defunct Instagram handle @data.archival, where many of those images were shared. Now, his archive spans digital and physical forms: hundreds of downloaded articles on religions and histories; antique and material relics of Black culture; documentation of his own artwork; flyers from programmed events. During a video call, he shows me a small selection arranged in a curiosity cabinet: a hand-crank music box with a glass top, an antique lighter that ignites when tilted, a weather-worn Tonka truck, a set of children’s dolls. “Mostly Black sh*t,” he offers. This satisfies the implicit notion that archives must contain objects, but the objects are not the point. They operate more like citations — elements that, placed in relation, begin to produce narrative. That narrative can take form across any medium: music, writing, performance, photography, drawing, events. Asked how he determines what he collects, Amani says with certainty: “The things that they’ve kept from us. The stuff that, for every time someone is asking you to cite your sources, the archive is the source.” What Amani describes is sometimes called speculative archiving, a practice deeply informed by Black cultural production and thinkers such as Saidiya Hartman and Theaster Gates. To engage the archive speculatively is not only to ascertain knowledge, but to assert it, treating its absence as a site of potential. The purpose is to name what cannot be verified, and to assemble what remains into new forms of evidence. Viewed through this lens, the curiosity cabinet becomes a set of propositions: each object asks what it once meant, when it was separated from its context, and why. Amani says he is always thinking about how to integrate objects into his live performances. A flyer for Sound of Reconstruction — a recent collaboration with Atlas B Complex — states that “during the T.S.O.R. gatherings we will collectively build an altar out of personal objects” to “build a fabric of collective memory, experience, and intention.” “Religious objects, images of specific people, and DEITIES [sic]” are expressly forbidden. He describes the series to me as “a rethinking of what a live set is allowed to be.” It’s an event wherein the act of creation in the moment becomes an opportunity to construct memory collectively. As I've been considering what it means to “activate” an archive, I am reminded of psychic mediums who connect with messages from the other side through objects belonging to the dead. In a similar way, each aged item in Amani's collection seems to transmit memory through time-based engagement and ongoing contextualization. Objects act as interfaces to a more spiritual realm, serving as keepers of that energy until they are activated through contact with one another. AC Diamond
— Still Moving Co is the curatorial identity of artist Amani—a rapper, writer, producer, and event organizer from Brooklyn, New York. Currently, he runs a Sunday series called Reading, Screening, and Talking, which is “exactly what it sounds like”—a reading and a screening, followed by a discussion. He has recently published a book of poems, prayer rug, created through a partnership between The School of Making Thinking and Eureka! Press. His music is available for streaming and purchase on Bandcamp. Follow @still.moving.co on Instagram for event announcements.
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