CounterArchive is a recurring program proposing alternatives to the record of official history through process-driven and collaborative activities. The first iteration in 2024 was anchored around CounterArchive: Fictional Healing Collective Filmmaking Lab that worked on developing counter-narratives to the Malayan Emergency using surrounding the Malayan Emergency using processes that explore the potential of fiction and filmmaking as a form of reparation.
In 2023, during a three-month residency at Delfina Foundation, London, I began searching for traces of my paternal grandfather, a former Communist fighter, in The National Archives in Kew. Hoping to uncover records of deportations from British Malaya to cities in China, I instead found something else: reams of documents detailing the British Colonial Office’s extensive propaganda operations during the Malayan Emergency (1948–1960).
The materials revealed how the Colonial Office used photography, graphic design, and language—terms like “bandit” or “terrorist”—to justify violence and sway public opinion. I was disturbed by the racialised narratives and the psychological tools used, which still shape Malaysia’s political and social landscape today, and the sheer volume of 16million leaflets printed in one year.
What began as personal research grew into a public presentation hosted by Malaysia Design Archive, which also made the materials I copied accessible to Malaysians.
Realising this narrative was not mine alone, I invited others to join a collective filmmaking process. For many millennial Malaysians, our grandparents’ and parents’ experiences of this period remain undocumented, unwritten, and barely spoken of. Fictional Healing Collective Filmmaking Lab became a way to recover those silences and explore how empire, media, and memory continue to shape who we are today.
