Silence can be a plan rigorously executed

the blueprint to a life

It is a presence it has a history a form

Do not confuse it with any kind of absence

— Adrienne Rich, 'Cartographies of Silence'

Often referred to as Britain’s ‘silent’ minority, Chinese communities have been an integral part of British society for more than three centuries, yet they remain largely unseen and unheard in public and political life. It is perhaps no coincidence that the history of Chinese migration, intimately tied to Britain’s colonial past, has been systematically erased from national narratives and relegated to the margins of official records. As the Haitian scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot observes, ‘silences are inherent in history... something is always left out while something else is recorded.’

The lives of early Chinese migrants surface in colonial documents only at moments of institutional contact—port registries, shipping records, parliamentary acts—and in accounts of discrimination, forced deportation, and racial violence.

Drawing on Saidiya Hartman’s method of ‘critical fabulation’—which combines historical research with speculative storytelling to restore agency to lives lost in histories of slavery and colonialism—the invited artists create new works from archival materials that resonate with their own migratory histories and artistic concerns. Their sound and moving-image pieces explore intimate connections and personal triumphs: from the story of the first Chinese British citizen in 1805, to the vanished multi-ethnic world of Liverpool’s Pitt Street, to the sonic legacies of indentured labour across Britain’s imperial ports.

Through these fragmentary vignettes, narratives, and reimagined soundscapes, 'Voicing the Archive' explores what can emerge when absence becomes ‘a space for imagination.’