Positioning my own relationship to cricket within a collective consciousness and memory embedded in the playing and following of the sport in Pakistan, this project reconstructs events and spaces that occupy significant moments in the post-colonial history of Pakistani cricket. A set of commemorative objects have been laser- cut and arranged together to form the beginnings of an archive — a key plate, a scoreboard, plaques — that leads back to the Lahore Gymkhana. Originally a colonial structure for the social elite and now home to the country’s only museum, the site is self-referentially included amongst the collection, creating a loop between artefacts new and old, existing and speculative.
The archive does not aim to plug holes in the sport’s history in Pakistan, but rather reclaim for it forms of commemoration that it hasn’t been afforded thus far. Speculation undermines ‘ownerships’ of certain histories and each individual speculation is based on, and thereby results in, histories of its own.
1. Two plaques
In 1882, the British imported soil from Worcestershire to lay new pitches at the Lahore Gymkhana. A piece of that soil is preserved in a box in the museum today.
2. A key plate
In 1954, 72 years after the soil was imported, the Pakistani team toured England for the first time, beating them in the final match of the series. It’s a well known historic victory with much written about it, but few images and hardly any footage exists. This key plate is a translation of an image capturing the moment of victory, with extra inscriptions speculating which of the players were involved in the scene.
3. A scoreboard
The scorecard for that same match is easy to find, but within the one grainy YouTube video of the match, you get a few glimpses of the old Oval scoreboard that doesn’t exist today. Together with images from that same scoreboard from other matches, this is a reconstruction of what it would have looked like at the moment of the scene above. All pieces have been lasercut and etched to enable this to be a fully functioning scoreboard that can be used to score matches today.
4. The Lahore Gymkhana facade
The building, though standing and in use, is itself poorly documented online and has taken on a myth-like presence in the folklore of Pakistani cricket. The pavilion is often lauded for the beauty of its English oak construction, but no construction drawings or truly clear images can be found online. This is a speculative model of the facade, based on various contemporary and archival images of the building. The model could be imagined as a decorative architectural element possibly fitting into the ornament of the building itself.
5. The Lahore Gymkhana interior elevation
Based on the dimensions of the model above, as well as piecing together whatever little images of the interior exist, one can begin to get a sense of how artefacts are arranged, displayed and preserved in the pavilion as a museum. This elevation was printed at a 1:33 scale on 30 A3 sheets, and pinned up on the wall. Interestingly, the physical objects that were lasercut prior to this seem to fit within the artefacts diagrammed onto the wall; there are scoreboards, plaques, photos of matches, and most interestingly, photos of the pavilion itself.
6. Acquisition document
Tying all these together is this document that treats these objects that could hypothetically be acquired for museum collections. The focus is only these fabricated objects as the artefacts rather than their source materials; the age of the source material is juxtaposed alongside the time taken to digitally fabricate the object. Additionally, collector’s notes provide suggestions on rules for displaying or archiving the objects. For example:
“If Object 5 (the interior elevation sheets) is the proposed site for the collection, then all objects listed in this catalogue are to be omitted from acquisition as they are already embedded within the site.
See page 2 for clarification.”
In this way, the whole archive and archiving process is self-referential, returning to the Gymkhana as the literal and spiritual heart of Pakistani cricket’s collective memory.