Danalas (dillybags) are living cultural objects rather than dormant artefacts, practical forms for carrying materials for sustenance, ceremony, and daily life. This series considers what it might mean to construct a danala as a survival kit for navigating and enduring colonial archival systems.

Working with DuPont™ Tyvek®, a material widely used in museum and archive conservation to wrap and protect artefacts, the work assembles a speculative toolkit drawn from my own archival practice. Scissors, needles, folding ribs, and binding materials are repositioned as instruments of both preservation and intervention within the archive.

Through woven bodily adornments, I engage with the colonial frameworks embedded in archival systems, where materials are classified, contained, and controlled, and where conservation and protection also operate as systems of authority, determining what is preserved, how it is handled, and under what conditions it may persist. Made from archival protection and conservation materials, these works extend that logic to the body, becoming protective structures that safeguard my own cultural wellbeing while also offering resistance to the archive's challenging conditions.

The dillybag becomes both object and proposition: a survival structure that holds the labour of archival work while reimagining culturally grounded form as a strategy for endurance, refusal, and transformation within colonial knowledge systems.