#UjimaWednesdays | Memory & Archives with Claudia Friedel | 6.11.25

Month Description:

Memory is not passive. It is an inheritance, a method, a tool. The stories we choose to carry or recover shape the ground we walk on and the futures we dare to imagine. June’s workshop series, Receipts: Remembering as Collective Power, invites us to reflect on the quiet, patient labor of remembering. Together, we will explore how communities are building archives for themselves, not only through formal collections but through sustained acts of repetition, ritual, and care.

Through community archiving practices, oral histories, and creative documentation, we will ask: What does it mean to hold the historical record on our own terms? How do we honor what survives our time? How do we tend to the materials of the past and present, not as gestures of nostalgia but as strategies for building power, so that we might create something lasting?

This series will remind us that remembering is miracle work, a deeply relational act that helps us strengthen our foundations and build the kind of power that carries us forward.

Event Description:

This exploratory discussion invites participants to examine how power is constructed and maintained through the language of archives and libraries. By reflecting on the roles of democracy and autonomy in these institutions, we’ll draw from archival science to deconstruct dominant frameworks and create alternative taxonomies. Together, we’ll surface models of collective authority that position communities as the authors and stewards of their own histories.

Facilitator Bio:

Claudia M. Friedel |she|hers| is an Information Scientist, archivist, artist, activist, and professor. Her practice demystifies archival methods and their applications to personal and professional practice. As a multidisciplinary change agent Claudia has worked for over a decade with emerging artists, community organizations, as well as, private, public, and institutional art and archival collections around the globe. Her current practice is driven by a curiosity in how data can promote intersectionality and deeper connections between communities and to dismantle structures that treat knowledge as intuition rather than privilege as systems built on privilege play an active role in systemic oppression.