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 the public, asking them to move from consumer to maker. We launched an open call for participants and mailed each person a blank 555 notebook, to be filled with drawings, musings, and observations, and returned in two months. The project is a play on the 555 notebooks which are traditionally used like a ledger, journal, or convenient scrapbook by Malaysians from all walks of life; for many, the little notebooks are representative of the little details in quotidian life that, when accrued, make up meaningful memories.

We also founded a Wawasan 2020 collection, which gathers the fragments of Malaysia’s national vision to achieve developed nation status by 2020, first articulated by Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad in 1991. The circularity of 2020 was not lost on us: in March, Mahathir, having emerged from retirement to lead the opposition to victory, was ousted in a backroom coup. To make an archive of Wawasan was to begin constructing a counter-narrative of a time dominated by government narratives: how do we tell the story of the shadows cast by glitzy skyscrapers?

There is one image in the archive I come back to, time and time again. It was donated in 2019 by KS Yuen, a now-retired graphic designer. These materials sat in our ‘To Be Filed’ waiting room for a time until we found them a home in our Wawasan 2020 box. The image is from a series of photographs taken on the opening of the 1994 exhibition ‘Warbox, Lalang, Killing Tools’, staged at Balai Seni Negara when it was still at Majestic Hotel. The photograph is undated, but it is safe to assume that it pictures the punk rock band Carburetor Dung’s concert that night: the white walls of Majestic Hotel are in the background of another image in the series, as are the Indo-Saracenic arches of the Malayan Railway Administration Building. It is a dark night, and the lights from the stage shine on the faded blue jeans of punk rockers huddled in small circles. Legs are in motion; arms are tightly wrapped on shoulders; boys cling to one another as if holding on for their lives.

A Twitter meme in response to Anwar Ibrahim’s 23 September 2020 announcement that he had a “strong, formidable, convincing majority” in Parliament to form a government. Image courtesy of Malaysia Design Archive.

Like 2020, the 1990s were a time of rising inequality; the boom of the Asian Tigers had minted millionaires but also entrenched urban poverty. Activists and artists were still reeling from the mass arrests of Ops Lalang in 1987, to which Wong Hoy Cheong’s work ‘Lalang’ (1994) makes a direct reference. There was a sense that Kuala Lumpur was changing with each bell ringing the stock market open and with each property deal signed in a private room of a restaurant.

In 2020, while police sirens were ringing, signalling people to stay indoors, I used to sit at home and stare at this image of Carburetor Dung’s concert on my laptop screen. It is a microcosm of the archival project: to bear witness to stories of resistance, large and small. When the world is burning, sometimes, all you can do is dance. In 2020, it felt like a taste of the impossible.

‘Untitled (Carburetor Dung Concert on Opening Night of ‘Warbox, Lalang, Killing Tools’)’, October 21 1994. Image courtesy of Malaysia Design Archive.

Note

1. Gayatri Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York : Columbia University Press, Chichester, 2005).