TO YOUR MEMORY: FRAGMENTS FROM THE AFGHAN ARCHIVE WITH OMID JAMDAR
Omid J. is an Afghan-American collector, archivist, and cultural preservationist whose practice resonates deeply with AASI’s commitment to speculative memory, underground aesthetics, and embodied archival work. Through decades-old vinyl, cassettes, and forgotten television footage, Omid has been quietly gathering what remains of Afghanistan’s pre-war cultural memory, fragments of sonic and visual histories that risk erasure under the weight of exile, occupation, and authoritarian control.
Raised outside his homeland, Omid’s connection to Afghan culture was formed through the intimacy of sound: late-night radio broadcasts, Pashto poetry recitations, and grainy music videos watched with family. These acts of remembering—tender, informal, and intergenerational—laid the foundation for an archive-in-exile: one driven not by institutions, but by devotion and diasporic longing.
Since the Taliban’s return to power in 2021, Omid’s work has taken on renewed urgency. Though media archives remain technically intact, the looming threat of suppression persists. In response, he continues to digitize and circulate Afghan music and media: not as nostalgia, but as resistance. Each cassette, radio clip, and visual fragment becomes a refusal to forget.
Omid’s archive is not fixed. It’s porous, intimate, and unfinished. It reminds us that cultural survival doesn’t always happen in galleries or libraries, it happens in bedrooms, on hard drives, in shared playlists and passed-down recordings. In preserving memory through sound, Omid opens space for future cultural possibilities, futures shaped not by loss alone, but by resilience, beauty, and refusal.
Listen to Omid’s sonic offering via our Soundcloud.
This collaboration was conducted as part of AASI’s ongoing editorial archive on speculative embodiment, underground image-making, and the reclamation of cultural futures through aesthetics of refusal.
