Southnord Artfest: Who Owns Black Nordic History?

Who decides what stories from the Black Nordic experience are worth preserving? Who has the authority to collect, interpret and narrate Black Nordic history? And what does it mean to build archives that centre Black voices, perspectives and epistemologies rather than simply adding them to existing structures?

This panel brings together Black archivists, scholars and community organisers from Sweden and Norway who are building new infrastructures for Black Nordic memory: Rosel Jackson Stern, co-editor of Black Archives Sweden’s publication The Family Archives; Yacouba Cisse, founder of the Afrikanere i Norge (AFRIN) archive; and Dr Michelle Tisdel, Research Librarian at the National Library of Norway. Their work challenges institutional logics that have excluded, marginalised or misrepresented Black lives in the Nordic region. They are building their own archives.

Curator Savannah Wood opens with her work on Afro Archives, a project documenting over 130 years of Black Afro-American visual history, and the politics, labour and ethics of building an archive at that scale - what gets preserved, what gets left out, and who decides. After the panel, artist Xaviera Simmons discusses her approaches to archival material and the questions that arise when historical documents enter contemporary discourse, including the risks and rewards of creating anew in the present.