Paper short abstract:

By focusing on the case of “Vite Archives”, a collaborative archival project in the neighbourhood of Vite (Santiago de Compostela, Galicia, Spain), we analyse the mechanisms by which archiving can be imagined, constructed and enacted as a tool to search for social justice.

Paper long abstract:

Vite is a neighbourhood in Santiago de Compostela (Galicia, Spain) that was marked with the stigma of being a marginal neighbourhood in the last decades of the twentieth century. Its transformation from a rural area to a public housing project in the 1970s, and from there to embrace a collective sense of neighbourhood pride, has been shaped by local struggles and the interweaving of a dense web of caring relationships between different generations and social groups. Through a collaborative project between the “Coordinadora del Barrio de Vite” (that includes different neighbourhood stakeholders) and INCIPIT-CSIC, a community archive named “ViteArquiva” was created in 2019 (https://vitearquiva.com). Through a participatory process, the name "ViteArquiva" (in Galician, meaning Vite Archives, instead of the Archive of Vite) was selected to emphasize the action of archiving. This paper analyses the mechanisms by which archiving can be imagined, constructed and enacted as a tool to search for social justice. ViteArquiva is a neighborhood project in progress. Currently, the project is critically contemplating the different digital possibilities of representing the existing archived materials and the future actions of archiving.