Ep. 50 - Family archives, multilingual perks and mansplaining w/ Naïma Ben Ayed

And actually one of the questions we had while we're looking through your work and your kind of process is your work with archives.

And particularly you mentioned at the conference designer having issues with access to Armenian type and those resources.

And we were curious about your relationship both as a researcher and designer, with the archives that you've been investigating, and possibly the hurdles that archives present at large, like politically, like who gets access, what gets archived, and how those encounters have informed your work?

Yeah, that's a great question.

I work with different kind of archives.

Recently, I have got access to my family archives that is very documented somehow, especially my Tunisian family that came to France.

We have a lot of correspondence and all the paperwork of my grandfather.

He, for some reason, kept everything.

And so I am able to look at his handwriting things like that.

And like digging into those stories, like the moment, this moment in time where like this transition from France to, from Tunisia to France, sorry.

And that I didn't get to talk with my grandfather about that happened in the mid sixties.

So this is one kind of archives that I cherish.

Then, In my workshop in particular, I quite like to look at different graphic Arabic archives to show with the students, because often the students don't necessarily have access to this material.

Also now there is a few websites that document, for example, posters in solidarity for Palestine or some movie posters, things like that, but there is not necessarily a direct link between the public as the students who study Arabic graphic design and And this archive material, there is not a lot of publications on this topic also.

So online is always an option, but it can also be limiting.

And then sometimes in my work, I design looking at specific topics.

specific graphic material or specific like manuscript material as well.

And Yeah, so those are kind of like the different material that I work with.

Then from more like a research viewpoint, for example, the Leila publication, I was looking at it online through the Library of Tunis.

But yeah, I think what I can say about those archives is that also often the conversations I have with other designers or students is some of those archives are also not yet archived, basically.

So like the material has been, you know, dispatched or lost or like, you know, we know it exists, but it's not yet shared.

It can be for political reasons, you know, like it can be So I think, yeah, one thing I want to add on this is that also working with archives for me is also often creating an archive.

I'm interesting, for example, which is one of the module in the imaginary program that I wrote that is published on Futurist Letters, Words and Stories.

The first module is to create an archive of multiscript letter forms that is really a hybrid mix of personal artifacts, packaging.

It can be also more specifically graphic archives, but the idea of Yeah, putting all of those things together, like the story of the history of Arabic graphic design hasn't been necessarily written the same way than the Western graphic design.