| 7 Mar 2024 | 17:00 - 19:00 | Room S3, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, Cambridge | |
- Description
Description
An event by the Ambivalent Archives research network.
Tickets for this event are limited, please register to reserve a place.
Speaker
Lamya Sadiq (Archivist at the Mayday Rooms in London)
Abstract
In this talk, Lamya Sadiq will attempt to trace some of the characteristics and contours of ancestral wounds, using the experience and material of being ‘haunted’ as a means through which to make real the intergenerational and shared dimensions of trauma and loss.
Below is a description of the event provided by the speaker:
In the winter of 1978, artist Syed Raisul Haq was brutally murdered in Cologne at the age of 23. The investigation ceased after a year with no perpetrator or explanation. His family lived on with the horror and regret of letting their youngest go to a place where his life held a very different meaning. Raisul was my mother’s youngest Chaccha*, we call him Siraj.
What little I know about Siraj comes from the sketches he left behind and a few inherited stories – and yet – the specter of his life and specifically his terrible end lies latent within me. I am certain his ghost has haunted me before, however it was only in December of last year that I began to pin this feeling down, the feeling of being wounded. Haunting is never accidental; in Bangladesh, when ghosts appear to us we summon the courage to pay attention.
As people of the diaspora bear witness to the genocide of Palestinian people, it breaks open a specific, unnameable and historic wound. That I am being visited by Siraj now is no accident.
In always occupying a state of being in-between, how can ghosts – of people, land, culture & future – help orient our relation to the tangle of dread and hope so conspicuous in this moment?
About the speaker
Lamya Sadiq works across social histories, sonic and visual worlds and psychoanalytic theory to locate tools for other-world making. Her enquiries attempt to highlight the ambivalences of the present, searching for ruptures, portals and spectral hauntings that tells us these other worlds always exist/are possible. Lamya is from Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Lamya works at MayDay Rooms Archive and is a wellbeing worker for Hopscotch Women’s Center. She is also a member of Red Therapy, an abolitionist collective attempting to think beyond existing psychiatric and psychotherapeutic systems and practices.
Please feel free to get in touch at ambivalentarchives@gmail.com if you have any questions.
For general enquiries please contact the Research Networks Programme Manager.
