Hello, I'm Josie Long and this is the podcast of Shortcuts.

I hope you are all right.

I hope you are weathering this world as best you can.

And today's episode is about archives

and the power of people who manage to keep hold of what is important

and pass it down along the line into the future.

This is Shortcuts, Brief Encounters, True Stories, Radio Adventures and Found Sound.

Today, Archival Imaginings.

It means preserving legacy. A new generation, this is your culture.

Artists are our cultural historians.

Many of them are living archives of really important ideas.

You better stop quick because one out of three of you will turn queer.

I think what might quickly come to mind when you hear the word archive is a kind of librarian type.

But what's funny is my own experience with visiting different archives, what's so clear about them,

is the intense passion and dedication they have to protecting the collections of things that they look after.

Without the passion of archivists and librarians, we would lose out on so much of our cultural heritage and understanding.

But more than that, without them, we might end up believing anything that we're told.

In our first ascent, the audio artist and producer,lon McKenzie Witter invites us to scan history's horizon,

where we catch a glimpse of a West African mythical bird in the findings of memory workers across the black diaspora.

This is the flight of Sankofa.

Sankofa is a bird.

Sankofa comes from a place that they now call Ghana.

...