What Survives When Institutions Don’t

Annotations as record. Margins as archive.

Why Certain Things Circulate

I’ve been thinking about why certain things circulate.

You notice it in small ways at first — a post shared without commentary, a screenshot dropped into a WhatsApp chat, a DM from a friend with no words — just this made me think of you.

(This is usually the part people share.)

It’s not because any of it is new.It’s not because it shocks.

It’s because it names something people already recognize — something they’ve seen up close, participated in, or benefited from — without ever having it acknowledged as work.

When you start paying attention, the pattern is hard to miss. Salons. Kitchens. Living rooms. Reading groups. Spare rooms turned into meeting places. Someone editing late into the night or sharing knowledge without payment. Someone hosting without credit. Someone quietly

spending their own money when funding disappeared, when safety became uncertain, when legitimacy was never granted in the first place.

Institutions struggle to recognize this kind of labor. Movements, meanwhile, depend on it.

When Work Is Never Taught to See Itself

A lot of this work didn’t vanish because it failed. It faded because no one taught it how to see itself.

Hosting was framed as generosity — something you did because you cared — not as a form of governance. Editing was treated as support work, not authorship. Care sat in the background, essential but unnamed, assumed to be endless.

Much of it happened in moments that felt temporary — just until things stabilized, just until someone else stepped in. The kind of moment everyone recognizes, where care expands to meet a crisis and quietly becomes infrastructure.

Even the people doing this work rarely paused to call it what it was. There were meals to cook, conversations to hold, texts to circulate, people to look after. Documentation could wait. Credit felt secondary. Survival took precedence.

By the time anyone thought to look back, much of the work had already done what it came to do — and moved on.

What Institutions Know How to Hold

You start to notice this when you look for where work ends up — and where it doesn’t.

Institutions are built to recognize what can be submitted and assessed — publications, titles, funded projects, outcomes that survive a review panel or an application deadline. They are good at preserving what looks finished, authorized, and legible on paper. They struggle with work that remains in motion. Work that unfolds through conversation, through care, through decisions made before anyone thinks to formalize them.

This kind of labor doesn’t arrive neatly packaged. It circulates through informal spaces and unfinished conversations, through drafts that never quite settle, through rooms that became sites of decision before anyone thought to call them that. By the time institutions learn how to name it, the work has often already shifted, adapted, or moved on — carried elsewhere by the same people who were never meant to be visible in the first place.

What survives, then, is rarely what was easiest to archive. It’s what was resilient enough to live without recognition — sustained not by policy or funding, but by relationships, repetition, and the quiet insistence that some things are worth keeping alive even when no structure exists to hold them.

Encountering Rasheed Araeen

I was reminded of this recently while spending time with the work of Rasheed Araeen more deliberately. I’d encountered his work before — in fragments, in citations, in the way certain names circulate without much context. I knew there was a connection to Black cultural life there, but not the extent of it, largely because it was never fully articulated in the materials that tend to foreground themselves — a reflection of what archives prioritize, and what platforms and institutions have historically seen no need to name.

One early work makes this especially clear. In P*ki Bastard (Portrait of the Artist as a Black Person) (1977), Araeen confronted racial naming directly. When he described himself as “Afro-Asian,” it wasn’t a soft identity label or a gesture toward hybridity. It was a political position — a way of naming how race functioned as infrastructure in Britain.

In that context, Blackness was not a matter of lineage but of condition. It named a shared positioning against white supremacy that included African, Caribbean, and Asian peoples alike. To claim Blackness was deliberate, strategic, and costly — and it shaped how Araeen worked, where he published, and who he aligned himself with.

When Political Positioning Is Made Safe

What happens with Araeen is not unique. It’s part of a broader pattern in how political positioning becomes legible only once it’s been stripped of risk. Over time, refusal is recoded as style. Alignment is softened into influence. Structural antagonism is translated into aesthetic contribution. What remains circulates — detached from the conditions that once made it urgent.

This is how certain histories survive while their stakes disappear. Work that once moved through relationships, proximity, and consequence gets stabilized into objects, movements, or fields. The labor of holding things together becomes invisible again, even as its outputs are preserved and praised.

Seen this way, the question isn’t why some figures are forgotten. It’s how so many are remembered in ways that make them safe — and how often that safety depends on detaching ideas from the very struggles that gave them force in the first place.

Reconstruction Studies

This way of noticing — paying attention to what circulates, what gets held together informally, what disappears once it becomes safe — is not about recovering forgotten figures or filling gaps in the archive. It’s about tracing how power shapes what is allowed to endure, and how people have always worked around those limits.

I think of this as Reconstruction Studies: a practice of reading across fragments, absences, and distortions to understand how continuity is made when recognition fails. Not a discipline, not a brand, but a way of staying with the work long enough to see what official histories smooth over or leave out entirely.(This is where you link the RS document.)

It asks a different set of questions. Not just what was produced, but what was sustained. Not just who is remembered, but how remembering itself is structured. And not only what survives, but at what cost — and to whom.

Jonah Batambuze is a, Ugandan-American interdisciplinary artist and founder of the BlindianProject, a global platform remixing Black x Brown identity through art, history, and storytelling. His work moves across installation, film, writing, and education—challenging systems of erasure while building new cultural blueprints.

Batambuze speaks and facilitates internationally on topics including Black South Asian solidarity, caste and colonial legacies, diasporic memory, and cultural resistance.

For speaking engagements, workshops, or media inquiries, contact: jonah@blindian-project.com or visit jonahbatambuze.com/speaking