Abstract
Art is a powerful medium for telling, sharing, and remembering stories. Since the onset of the so-called refugee crisis in 2015, an increasing number of artists have been telling stories about why people are forced to flee and what home, displacement, and refugeehood look like to them—challenging the erasure of these stories from collective memory and highlighting the complex factors driving contemporary migrations. This paper examines a collaboration among an international group of artists, curators, activists, and an archivist to develop The Amplification Project: Digital Archive for Forced Migration, Contemporary Art, and Action. This participatory, community-led archive documents, preserves, and disseminates art related to displacement and refugeehood. The Amplification Project aims to amplify refugee narratives and agency in archives and greater collective memory, disrupt dehumanizing media and political representations of refugees, and foster awareness about the myriad ways individuals and communities experience and navigate forced displacement from a global perspective. Drawing on my role as co-founder, director, and archivist of The Amplification Project, this paper integrates reflective practitioner insights with scholarly discourse grounded in community archives, participatory archives, art and cultural studies, and migration studies. I will also discuss the concept of “collective interventionist archiving”—a praxis that embodies the project’s ethos. This approach underscores the activist potential of crowd-sourced participatory digital archiving as a means to contest dominant narratives that marginalize or misrepresent individuals and communities, foster solidarity, and resist archival and societal memory erasures.
Presenters
Kathy CarboneAssistant Professor, School of Information, Pratt Institute, New York, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
The Arts in Social, Political, and Community Life
KEYWORDS
ART OF DISPLACEMENT, PARTICIPATORY ARCHIVES, COMMUNITY ARCHIVES, REFUGEES
