BlogJAM: Intimate Cartographies in Community 2022

Their project team created this video for a network event to share their activities and experiences up until September 2022.

Video Transcript: 

Our visits highlight sites of memory in order to contemplate how experiences of trauma and community are anchored both in spaces of refuge and of incommensurable suffering. This is clear in the case of a building that functioned as a camp of concentration and extermination during the 1976-1983 military dictatorship.

Taking this experience as a point of departure and through the work in a series of artistic workshops (podcast, mural painting, photography, creative writing) and a workshop on archival research, the students create their own cartographies. These cartographies are intimate and personal but created in community. In them, students recognize the traces of the past in the present, and they include in daily life the cycle of memory not only about traumatic experiences of the past but also of moments of refuge and community.

We understand territory as a place of coexistence of the past with the present and we extend a glance towards the future with concerns about racism, enduring inequality, the devastation of the environment and the lack of adequate housing. The project has been welcome by teachers, school administrators, and members of human rights, environmental protection, and cultural heritage organizations. The participants’ productions will be showcased in the Science and Humanities Fair at the National University of San Martín. Students will also create their own tours of their neighbourhood. We also hope to connect them to participants in other EdJam projects through zoom.

We hope to frame the experience of daily life in a wider spectrum and give participants the opportunity to create accounts of their own intimacy in community. We anticipate that this community will include an array of experiences that will make an ethical relationship with the sufferings of the past possible, and that will inspire a commitment to a fairer future in which dissidence is respected, and a communal life in generosity and solidarity can be imagined.

In September 2022, experiential tours will take participants to memory sites, community spaces, and wetlands. Human rights activists will visit the schools.