In association with camra and collaborating curator Arjun Shankar, Ethnographic Terminalia presents:
The Ward: Dubois and Oral Histories
The Ward is a community organization dedicated to promoting W. E. B. DuBois vision for Philadelphia’s black community, a vision he developed in the seventh ward when writing The Philadelphia Negro. The Ward promotes “public history,” by collecting the memories and recollections of the seventh ward’s population. They have used this rich archive of personal histories in a variety of ways creating a board game, a school curriculum, a mural, maps and mapping tools, a variety of books and brochures and documentaries, one of which camra helped them to produce.
The installation will provide an interactive space for users to “play” board games as they watch and hear about the life of civil rights activists and religious leaders from the Seventh Ward community. By thinking outside of the book and even outside of the film we seek to think about the many ways that learning (kinesthetic, audiovisual, etc.) can occur and the differential possibilities which tactile interaction might provide for active engagement with “lived” histories, like that of the Seventh Ward community. The Ward’s work reminds us that the possibilities for creative generation from archives are not limited to acts of inscription.
Board game
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The Bureau of Memories: Archives and Ephemera is a thematic reflection on the archive and its discontents. Washington’s identity as the seat of American political power is amplified through its role as the locus of its own memorialization. Where there is history, there is haunting. By drawing on the archive’s unnerving, uncanny, and ephemeral specters, this exhibition is an effort to re-imagine and reposition archives as sites which not only have the capacity to produce and contest historical memory, but also generate significant gaps and blind spots.