CounterArchive Collective is a loose and evolving group of artists, filmmakers and researchers united by a shared concern with the omissions and constructed fictions of colonial records.
The collective formed in 2024 through its inaugural Collective Filmmaking Lab in Kuala Lumpur. The lab brought together Ali Alasri, Anthony Ngoya, Ben Yau, Dahong Hongxuan Wang, Jakob van Klang, Joshua Kok, Julien Chen, Xu Jen, Yao Sau Bin, Eddie Wong, Kevin Bathman, Chen Yih Wen and Yvonne Tan, with artist-filmmakers Michelle Williams-Gamaker and Sabine Groenewegen serving as mentors and supervising directors, and curator Jo-Lene Ong as research advisor and producer.
Revisiting documents held in the UK National Archives relating to the Malayan Emergency—a Cold War proxy war—the group experimented with speculative reconstruction, collective authorship and performative research, resulting in the omnibus short film “We Return in Pieces”, currently in development.
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.
