How do we archive the story of a year in Malaysia?

Malaysian Design Archive is crowdsourcing material - be it a meme, a drawing, an item, a piece of paper - that tells your story of 2020. Photo: Malaysian Design Archive

The Malaysian Design Archive (MDA), located at the Zhongshan building in KL, has been busy this month with an online workshop (What Is An Archive?: The 2020 Edition) that explored the inner workings of the archive-making process, and also the launch of the recent Projek 555 project, which invited the public to contribute to “a collection of everyday observations and reflections... through a mini visual diary.”

In a year with so many firsts for the country – from the pandemic to the sudden change of Government – archiving has never been so important, according to Jac SM Kee, who’s part of the MDA team.