Long Abstract:

Femicide in the Conflict Zone is a social campaign aiming at restoring war memory, revealing truth and overcoming trauma through uncovering the stories of female victims of war.

The killing of women is said to be perpetrated by men due to hate, contempt, pleasure or a sense of power over women. Deliberate murder of women in an armed conflict is one of the forms of femicide, according to The Vienna Declaration (2012).

Georgia, has endured two wars with Russia in the regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

Armed conflicts in Georgia of 1990's were properly covered neither by world media, nor by local media. There exist no statistical data about the victims of war, especially the civilian victims.

This transmedia project tells the stories of murdering of 13 women during the war in Abkhazia, Georgia. Interviews were conducted with those who have witnessed the crime or got the information from the eye witnesses. Most of the interviewees are closest friends, relatives or the family members of the victims.

Project aims at memorizing women killed at armed conflicts, rethinking ruthlessness of war, informing society, and revealing women's stories in order to archive existing live memory. Project calls for and enables everyone, who has information on female victims of war to send or upload stories through specially designed platform and make their contribution in creation of a virtual repository of war memory.

Different platforms and formats were used to spread the message and reach audiences: In the framework of the project, the garden located in the city center was named after the women killed at war; Stories of femicide victims were performed on the stage and the Georgian version of the song- Where have all the flowers gone was premiered.

Due to the activities, more than 35 stories were gathered in first two weeks of the campaign.

The aim of the workshop is to present a transmedia project and share the experience from idea initiation to turning it into a platform of various uses from therapy to a big source of information, which is personal stories, crowdsourcing tactics, ethical decision-making, audio-visual material archiving and a database creating and making it accessible for public use.

Workshop is useful for researchers working in different fields from psychology to media, communications, art and history. Workshop participants will learn how the campaign team combined various tools and brought the idea to a successfully developing project.