Waking The Archive: Building a Living Legacy for Tomorrow’s Warriors
Sula Douglas-Folkes, a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths researching collaborative and improvisational archival practices, is working with Tomorrow’s Warriors to build their first comprehensive archive. She brings experience from the Royal Court’s Living Archive and Peckham Platform’s Memories for the Future project – both models for activating materials to facilitate unfolding stories. The challenge: how to create an archive for an organisation built on live music, improvisation, and intergenerational transmission – art forms that resist static preservation.
Sula is organising and cataloguing photographs, audio recordings, programmes and correspondence whilst developing what she calls a repertory model: an approach that keeps materials active and available for reinterpretation.
Her research on the ‘echoing archive’ – based on principles of collaboration and improvisation – makes this a natural fit for jazz. If jazz itself is archival, built on citation and passing knowledge between generations, then archival materials can become part of that cultural transmission rather than simply documenting it.
By creating an archive that functions like the organisation itself – collaborative, responsive, generative – the project ensures these materials remain a vital resource for current and future musicians
The Host and Project
Sula Douglas-Folkes is working with Tomorrow’s Warriors to build their first comprehensive archive, documenting over thirty years of the organisation’s role in shaping Black British jazz. The challenge: how to create an archive for an organisation built on live music, improvisation, and intergenerational transmission – art forms that resist static preservation.
Sula is organising and cataloguing photographs, audio recordings, programmes and correspondence whilst developing what she calls a repertory model: an approach that keeps materials active and available for reinterpretation. If jazz itself is archival – built on citation, revision, and passing knowledge between generations – then archival materials can become part of that cultural transmission rather than simply documenting it.
The project connects TW’s legacy to wider conversations about Black British cultural heritage whilst building a collection designed to support teaching, inspire new creative work, and enable interdisciplinary research. By creating an archive that functions like the organisation itself – collaborative, responsive, generative – the project ensures these materials remain a vital resource for current and future musicians, community members, researchers and other creative practitioners,
The Journey So Far
Sula has established a comprehensive cataloguing system for Tomorrow’s Warriors’ materials, developing unique metadata categories based on principles of call and response. Working with thirty years of history has been both fascinating and humbling – the sheer scope of TW’s impact on Black British jazz is extraordinary.
The main challenge has been resisting conventional archival logic. Early in the project, Sula found herself defaulting to preservation-focused thinking, when the work demands equal attention to how materials can be activated and used. Working closely with TW and witnessing their current practice helped shift this approach – seeing how past and present members worldwide continue to create this legacy revealed the archive as another manifestation of TW’s living heritage.
This realisation has fundamentally shaped the project’s direction. Rather than building an archive in retrospect, Sula is developing a repertory model designed for an organisation still very much in motion. The work now involves finding new ways to balance preservation with activation, creating infrastructure that can hold materials for future use whilst remaining responsive to TW’s evolving practice.
Hopes and Plans for the Future
Sula envisions an archive that lives and breathes with Tomorrow’s Warriors’ community. The project will establish an interdisciplinary working group and protocols that keep materials in active circulation, ensuring the archive thrives beyond the fellowship.
Through a series of public sessions, artists and practitioners will engage with archival materials to create new work – music, writing, visual art – that folds back into the collection. This demonstrates the archive’s generative power: not just documenting TW’s extraordinary legacy, but actively participating in its ongoing creation.
The goal is to prove that archives can be sites of artistic possibility, connecting past achievements to future innovations whilst providing Tomorrow’s Warriors with infrastructure to sustain this vital work for generations to come.
Story Skills In Action
Sula employs all four story skill domains: transforming raw archival materials into meaningful narratives through careful attention and innovative metadata systems (story generation); centring themes of intergenerational belonging and cultural justice throughout the work (story values); developing a repertory model that guides collective action towards shared goals (operational narrative); and ensuring marginalised voices in Black British jazz history are properly represented and amplified (narrative representation). She hopes to deepen her ability to create sustainable infrastructure that enables diverse voices to shape how stories circulate and inspire future creative practice.
Interested in story fellows using archive in their projects? Why not see how Story Fellow ___ is using this Story Skill.
Meet another Story Fellow doing work in London: ___
Have a look at some of the our Fellows who have reached the end of their projects: _____
