Archive as Ethics: Malaysia Design Archive Lim Sheau Yun In her book ‘Death of a Discipline’1, literary critic Gayatri Spivak makes a case for close reading as the starting point for a revolutionary politics. Close reading, she argues, creates an “experience of the impossible”, where readers intimately engage with an artefact, allowing them to suspend current socio-political realities and delve into the aesthetic world of the object. Spivak contends that the ethical is grounded in this act of making and exploring new worlds, a fulcrum to forge new possibilities for the future. The Malaysia Design Archive (MDA) was founded in 2008 by graphic designer Ezrena Marwan and activist Jac sm Kee with a similar aspiration. They were joined in 2017 by art historian Simon Soon, and in 2018 by archivist Nadia Nasaruddin. I came onboard in 2019. Tucked away in an upper floor of the Zhongshan Building in Kuala Lumpur, MDA is a library, a living room/event space, and an archive. Archival thinking at MDA serves a double function; it is both a method of historical thinking and a frame for political action. By collecting and preserving materials related to marginal stories such as material related to LGBTQ experiences, Pulau Bidong, New Villages, the Labour Party amongst others, we recognise experiences and hold community memories. We felt the urgency of our mission acutely in 2020. It was a year of estrangement, especially so for those inhabiting the worlds of Malaysia. The pandemic both underscored and exacerbated social inequality. Continued political crises have put civil society on edge and, combined with lockdown-justified police presence on the streets, have contributed to a growing climate of fear. It was also a year where we were acutely aware of history being in the making. We felt the need to cast a net on this historical moment, even as it continued to morph before our very eyes. To this end, we started a 2020 collection, archiving artworks, memes, protest posters and anti-racist imagery. Nasaruddin trawled Twitter and 'The Star' alike to reconstruct a visual history of events: from the pandemic and its Movement Control Orders to the mass arrests of migrants and refugees and the ensuing #MigranJugaManusia movement to the Selangor water crises. Our other initiative, ‘Projek 555’, goes a step further in opening this exercise in history-writing and the curation of the archive to
Sustainability Reports
103
