Moving Narratives Fellowship Cycle 2 cohort, Amsterdam 2025

In 2025, I was selected as one of three Mentors on the Prince Claus Fund and the British Council’s Moving Narrative’s programme. Moving Narratives is an international fellowship programme supporting artists working from the ‘Global South’.

Cycle 2 of the programme brought together 12 international artists who are engaging with historical narratives across film, performance, archives, sound, writing, and painting practices. The programme proceeded through two in-person convenings in the Netherlands and Nepal, alongside weekly online engagements across 2025.

The programme was structured around mentor-led streams of activity. Each mentor proposed three pedagogically-driven chapters intended to inform artistic practice throughout the course of the year.

I designed and facilitated the three chapters detailed below, focusing on the concept of Shared Histories — how collective histories are produced, inherited, contested, and remade through cultural practice.

This opportunity enabled close, year-long collaboration with the full cohort of artists and culminated in a co-authored publication, developed through collective study, dialogue, and writing.

Archival presentation at the International of Social History, Amsterdam, May 2025 | Captured by Leonardo Martinelli 

Mentorship Stream: Shared Histories

My mentorship stream approached history not as a fixed account of the past, but as an open political field shaped by contestations and relations to power. Across three chapters, I worked with the cohort to examine how historical narratives orient a range of political commitments, influence creative practice, how narratives are constructed and contested, and how cultural practice can produce new historical interpretations.

The stream foregrounded collective learning, drawing on anticolonial theories and approaches, critical historiography, and speculative methods to engage with historical narratives.

Chapter 1: Shared History

The first chapter introduced shared history as a way of examining how groups of people are positioned within — and position themselves in relation to — historical narratives. Through opposing readings of different historical moments - such as the Grenadian Revolution (1979-1983) and the assassination of Congolese President Patrice Lumumba (1961) - we explored how historical narratives are mobilised to shape collective identities and influence ways of making sense of the world.

The chapter grounded the cohort in thinking about the past as an open site of struggle, and the ways in which historical narratives shape politics, solidarities, and collective imaganation.

President Reagan's Address on Events in Lebanon and Grenada, 1983  |  Maurice Bishop Speaks in NYC at Hunter College, 1983 

Chapter 2: Working With and Against History

The second chapter focused on the production of history - the role of power in shaping the historical record, how facts are assembled and silences are produced, and how interpretations of the past influences how we form collectivities in the present. Key reference points for this chapter included Malik & Kamola’s The Politics of African Anticolonial Archiv (2017) and Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past (1995).

Through these texts, I invited the cohort to consider how their artistic practices work with and against historical narratives.

Chapter 3: Producing History Anew

The final chapter explored the possibility of produceing history anew — in honour of, and in tension with, the histories we “inherit”. The contents of this chapter drew on Saidiya Hartman’s method of critical fabulation, alongside readings of Frantz Fanon and Édouard Glissant to consider how collectives might produce a shared history that can reflect contemporary political concerns, objectives and affinities.

I opened the session with a reflection on a photograph of my great-grandfather, Hamad Mohamed El Malik (1869–1934). I used the image from my family archive to think through colonial power and the politics of recognition. The chapter foregrounded speculation, memory, and imagination as tools for engaging accounts of the past so as to posit alternative ways to relate with historical subjects, events, and movements.

This chapter concluded my stream with the following question: If history is made, then how can it be remade to build new forms of collectivity in the present?

Publication

The programme culminated in a collectively produced publication, developed through sustained dialogue, shared research, and collaborative writing across the cohort. The publication brought together reflections and propositions developed throughout the programme, extending Moving Narratives beyond the fellowship into a shared material intervention.

[Images of the publication coming soon…]