Archive the Everyday: Personal Heirlooms & Community Memory

Image from Hekkayatna's workshop at Shubbak Corner, Festival 2025

Info
معلومات

An intimate community gathering for Arab-SWANA residents from Kilburn to surface, share, and creatively archive personal heirlooms & memory.

Through guided archival practice and creative making, participants will transform heirlooms, photographs, garments, letters, and other artefacts into documented stories that reflect layered identities, displacement, belonging, and community.

This workshop centres on the belief that personal objects are valid heritage.

We are all carriers of memory that speak to migration journeys, intergenerational connection, and the everyday practices that shape our sense of home. By creating space for these stories to be held, witnessed, and archived, we honour how Arab-SWANA communities document and preserve their own histories.

We preserve what we carry. Every home holds a story. نحفظ ما نحمله

We invite you to bring an object that means something to you - an heirloom, a photograph, a recipe card, a letter, a piece of clothing or anything that tells a part of your story as we explore how personal archives help us honour, preserve, and share our histories as Arab-SWANA communities.Together, we’ll uncover how memory lives in the everyday things we keep and explore how they shape our collective memory.

A cohort of young mixed heritage Londoners, currently working on oral history projects that explore themes ranging from Bedouin mapping traditions to Syrian archives, from Moroccan gardens to Sudanese women's journeys, will join with wider community participants to create a cross-generational exchange of memory and storytelling.

Organised by Shubbak at Kiln Theare, in collaboration with and facilitated by Hekayyatna's Al and Zeina.

Organised in collaboration with Kiln Theatre, this workshop is part of Shubbak's Voices of Resilience series - a project documenting Arab & SWANA cultural memory in London. The creative pieces and maps produced through the workshop will be exhibited as part of the final showcase at Brent Museum & Archives in Spring 2026. With permission from the participants, their work will also be included in the museum’s archives collection.

Zeina is an award-winning audio producer and storyteller, Egyptian and a proud Londoner. Serial host in her private and public life. A researcher and advocate, Zeina is currently doing a PhD in Anthropology. She is fascinated with stories of archives and saving what was once thought lost.

Al is a Czech-Iraqi producer (audio & video), with a passion for cycling and crafting narratives that bridge cultures. With a background in Microbiology, English Literature, and community building, Al loves the creative, collaborative process of getting to the heart of a story and the best ways to bring it to life.

Hekayyatna- meaning 'our stories' in Arabic. Hekayyatna is a London-based community organisation that centres SWANA cultural storytelling and community-led programming. Co-founded by Al Shaibani and Zeina Dowidar, we are committed to authentic representation and community care, creating spaces for shared reflection, creative expression, and the preservation of stories. Through museum takeovers, film screenings, supper clubs, and workshops, Hekayyatna builds platforms for SWANA communities to tell their own stories on their own terms.
Learn more…

This programme is made possible by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, Paul Hamlyn Foundation and Arts Council England.