woman leading a workshop
Malak Elghuel's Threads of Memory workshop

A cultural memory project documenting Arab & SWANA heritage & oral histories in London

Athar / أثر - Notes in the Margins of the City imagines Brent and Westminster as a book, and Arab and South West Asian & North African lives as the notes scribbled in its margins. The title nods to Ibrahim El-Salahi’s Prison Notebook drawings - small, insistent marks made in the tightest of conditions - and to the letters, poems and testimonies of writers like Mahmoud
Darwish, Samih al-Qasim and Assata Shakur, whose words insist: we are still here; we refuse
erasure.

Instead of one big monument, Athar proposes many small ones: a scattering of sound, textures and stories leaving traces across the neighbourhood turning our city into a small, playful archive of Arab and SWANA memory waiting to be discovered.

Stay tuned!

Project Credits

Commissioned by Shubbak and created with our youth archivists and local communities.

Commissioned Artist & Co-Curator: Tasnim Mahdy
Audio Producer & Co-Curator: Olivia Melkonian
Visual Documentation & Photography: Ahmad El Mad

Co-created with our Young Archivists:
Adil Hassan
Aminah Al-Shagga
Anayis Der Hakopian
Lobna Alsana
Maria Ayaka
Nuha Tumia
Safa Himat
Safia Amarchih
Sally Zarzour
Zain Al Sharaf Wahbeh

In partnership with: The Showroom, Grand Junction and Kiln Theatre, with training and archival support from Brent Museum & Archives, Museum of Youth Culture and Westminster Archives.

Tasnim Mahdy is a London-based Egyptian multidisciplinary artist and facilitator, born in Scotland and raised in Cairo. Working across cyanotype, murals and site-responsive installation, her practice explores memory, ecology and the politics of place through hydrofeminism, hauntology and collaborative making. She leads trauma-informed, often bilingual (English/Arabic) workshops and has delivered projects with organisations including Royal Museums Greenwich, Amnesty International, Artichoke Trust, Counterpoints Arts and Southbank Centre.

Olivia Melkonian is an audio producer, sound artist/archivist and DJ invested in cultural preservation. In exploring and documenting the Western Armenian experience, she uses audio to work with fragments of memory to reimagine and reconstruct what has been lost, forgotten and misremembered - addressing absences and epistemic gaps. Her practice uses sonic archiving to preserve associations of place and memory as a result of endangered histories, while questioning memory and knowledge formation. Olivia’s work preserves intangible cultural heritage, exploring how sound-based memory informs collective knowledge and sustains cultural continuity. Through acts of remembering, she considers how historical consciousness is carried into the present and informs contemporary modes of living, learning and connecting.

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

  • Paul Hamlyn Foundation
  • Supported using public funding by Arts Council England

Find out more

Threads of Memory

Intimate creative workshops led by Malak Elghuel, inviting SWANA women from across London to gather, reflect and create from their personal and inherited memories

Open Call: Public Art Commission

Calling Arab/SWANA artists and creatives! Apply for our interactive public art commission, activating Arab & SWANA community memory across Brent and Westminster