Reframing Archives – Individuals & Imaginative Inventories

Dharini Chand

We all tend to share a curated version of ourselves with the world. In doing so, the rest of us—our identity and our story, hardly gets shared. While life history interviews target this, they are often a chronological retelling of our life. What else can we know about the interviewee simply by changing the way of conducting such interviews? This study experiments with creating a potential prototype for a new method of conducting life history interviews. It incorporates the action of archiving in the interview process, wherein the interviewee performs the role of an archivist for their own life. This archive consists of anything that is significant to their life, and not just physical or storable items commonly seen in traditional archives. The attempt is not to capture the entirety of the interviewee’s life, but a representation of them that includes both, their significant and seemingly not so significant memories, thereby creating an oral archive of them.

Thesis_Dharini-Chand_Feb2023

Dharini Chand (she/her) is an archivist and an oral historian. Experimenting with combining and contrasting both these practices is the current focus of her work and her happy place. She hopes to continue doing work that reimagines and reframes narratives. She also hopes that dogs, free time, feminism and decolonisation will continue to be part of her life. Dharini is from Mumbai, and currently lives in Manhattan, on Munsee Lenape land.