Paper short abstract:

The paper discusses preliminary ethnographic, epistemological and methodological reflections on a research project aimed at co-producing a digital archive of the migrations of Somali refugees and asylum seekers in Italy. The project addresses the nexus between mobility, heritage and memory

Paper long abstract:

The paper presents preliminary considerations on a research project aimed at co-producing a digital archive of the migrations of Somali refugees and asylum seekers residing in Italy. We structure the paper in four points which represent on-going lines of reflection rather than conclusive thoughts.

First, we introduce the historically situated ideas and practices of memory making about migration of young Somali refugees and asylum seekers who during the last fifteen years have travelled from the Horn of Africa to Europe via the Libyan-Mediterranean route.

Then, we discuss the possibilities of how a process of co-archiving migration experiences, involving forms of solidarity, violence and social-economic vulnerabilities, can publicly document and represent the memory making dynamics.

In the third point we debate the theoretical and pragmatic aspects of co-archiving as a reflexive pathway that leads to subjectivation processes ranging from resilience to emancipation. In the case of Somali young migrants this relates to the individual and collective construction of social membership within the setting of inter-generational relations and the transnational cultural ecumene assembled during the decades of the Somalis’ diasporic dislocation in different continents. Pathways of subjectivation are also framed within and challenged by the everyday conditions of uncertainty generated by the European migration regimes.

In the final point, we highlight the ethical and epistemological implications of collecting, cataloguing, archiving and disseminating public representations of this co-produced body of knowledge.

Paper short abstract:

The paper focuses on the consultation and analysis of digital photographic archives to identify iconographic trends related to the subject representation of African migration towards Europe in contemporary migration photography.

Paper long abstract:

Documentary photography has been regarded as an accurate medium for representing key historical social events of 20th and 21st century visual culture. The ethnographic missions that took place in Africa during the 19th-20th century generated a substantial photographic archival body that depicted local communities at the time of colonial expansion. These images, together with the travel journals from the missionaries involved, generate a complex archival that provides an insight into how Europe sought to create a position of supremacy based on racial differences. Nowadays, as migration photography occupies the frontpages of European media outlets, questions surrounding the subject representation of African migrants arises. As the precarity of migration becomes the core element behind the imagery, colonial iconographic patterns associated with deindividualization and dehistoricization emerge as part of the photograph's meaning. Consequently, this paper focuses on the use of digital photographic archives related to 19th century ethnographic missions in Africa to identify iconographic patterns that remain prevalent in contemporary migration archives. Through the analysis of two digital archival projects, Antislavery Usable Past and Harraga, it is possible to identify representation trends related to the dehistoricization and deindividualization of African populations. These patterns highlight the prevalence of an anonymous corporeality, where the precarity shown on camera is meant to become a standardized source of evidence for European governments and humanitarian agencies to provide or withhold aid.

Paper short abstract:

This paper moves from the digitalisation of MAET african ethnographic and photographic collections and discusses the history of this heritage. It focuses on the role of “archival silence” in the past Museum's knowledge production based on evolutionist (when not openly racist) scientific paradigms.

Paper long abstract:

This paper aims to contribute to the debate about African cultural heritage preserved in European archives and museum institutions. In particular, it aims to emphasise how lacks rather than presences often characterise the archival data relating to the history of large ethnographic and photographic collections originating from or relating to the African continent and its inhabitants, whether of colonial or more recent production. The critical analysis and the digitalisation of the ethnographic and photographic collections and the historical archives of the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography of the University of Turin (MAET) has brought to light a substantial 'archival silence' that says much about how this heritage was understood since the recent past. This contribution intends to focus on the african ethnographic and photographic collections which in the past were used as a corollary and documentation of theses about human evolution. Digitalised and analysed by cultural and museum anthropology with the aim of reconstructing their 'social life', these collections reveal the meanings they carry by raising new questions about the role of the museum in society. This approach to collections reveals the histories and ideas about otherness and the power relations underlying the practices of accumulation and exhibition. Digitalization made possible new research paths that brought to light the need to use more inclusive approaches that open heritage to the subjectivities that can be recognised in it and that have so far not had a voice.

Paper short abstract:

Digitising archives risks recapitulating the mechanisms of the colonial epistemological project which founded them. Digitising at ILAM might share the biases of past archival technologies if novelty and fidelity are privileged over localised and embodied forms of knowledge-making.

Paper long abstract:

The International Library of African Music (ILAM) is an ethnomusicology archive, founded in 1954 by Hugh Tracey, that aims to preserve and promote the music and oral arts of Southern Africa. The agenda of this paper is to interrogate the role of technology in the formation of ILAM, with the intent of emphasising how technologies shape the archive and are embedded in the colonial epistemological project of extraction and control. ILAM, in the production and preservation of objects, enacts a dislocation which is both topographic and temporal. Concurrent is the act of consignation which falls onto generalised notions of ‘Africa’, employs patriarchic titles such as “The Hugh Tracey Collection”, and uses metadata to render the contents of the collection ‘legible’. The archive fetishises technologies in a manner that figures an ‘uncivilised other’. This object-centred authentication of knowledge is found in tools such as photography, writing, and audio recording, which, in their aim to preserve, also invalidates tacit knowledge systems. Through object-making, the archive enables the extraction of cultural value. Digitising, within the internet’s neo-extractive colonialism, may further cultural extraction through an asymmetry in access that mirrors colonial development. Indeed, megacorporations have created sprawling open-access digital archives under the guise of 'global culture' which, functionally, provide uneven access to exploitable cultural repositories. If integrated into this framework, the cultural heritage invested in ILAM’s archives will become alienated. If the archive is to be decolonised, it needs to deprioritise novelty and fidelity in favour of intentional and localised education and dissemination.