Re-imagining Memorialization and Documentation in Afghanistan
The new miniseries of the Justice Visions podcast focuses on the current debates and discussions surrounding memory and memorialization. In this third episode of the miniseries, we shed a light on memorialization and documentation efforts in Afghanistan, and reflect on the merits of arts-based approaches, as well as the challenges posed by such approaches.
Sophia Bijleveld Milosevic is a member of AHRDO, an Afghan human rights organization that uses a transformative, victim-oriented approach. Their work aims to document human rights violations for judicial purposes while also telling victims’ stories in a way that reflects their lived experiences, among others via art-based approaches. Through the Memory Box initiative, AHRDO collected over 15.000 personal items of war victims, creating a space for individual and collective memorialization in Afghanistan. “We felt it was important to continue to share these testimonies and to continue to advocate for victims”, states Sophia. “In the Afghan context, memorialization can be considered as a form of symbolic reparation and a way of acknowledging the stories of the victims.” To leverage their expertise in documentation, and launch an online platform, AHRDO partnered with HURIDOCS.
HURIDOCS is an organization specializing in archival and documentation practices in the domain of human Rights. Its documentalist, Bono Olgado talks about how the victim-centred and arts-based practices of AHRDO challenged his organization to revisit its existing archival practice, and how memory and memorialization are understood. “When we are talking about creating a platform or a database that would reflect these art-based approaches, then we would need a different form of expertise, which is quite challenging because we’re technically creating counter-epistemologies to existing practises of documentation.” Initiatives such as the Memory Box and art-based methodologies, Bono stresses, reconfigure our understanding of documentation and data. “The challenge is to design technologies that actually support this new set of methodologies as opposed to flattening them.”
Benedict Salazar Olgado (Bono) is an archivist, scholar, and community organizer, working at the intersections of documentation, technology, and human rights in the Global South. He is the senior documentalist at HURIDOCS, assisting human rights groups with their documentation and technological needs. Bono is also an Assistant Professor at the University of the Philippines School of Library and Information Studies, teaching archival theory and practice. He received his PhD in Informatics with a Global Studies emphasis from the University of California, Irvine, and an MA in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation from NYU. His current research focuses on the datafication of memory politics in TJ.
Sophia Milosevic Bijleveld leads the Memorialization and Transitional Justice Program at the Afghanistan Human Rights and Democracy Organisation. Formerly the Global Networks Program Director at the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, she has extensive experience with cultural heritage and transitional justice initiatives in Switzerland, Afghanistan, Rwanda, and Kenya. With a PhD in political science, her research explores the political use of cultural heritage and the dynamics of memory politics in post-conflict settings. Dr. Milosevic Bijleveld’s work includes numerous publications on memorialization’s role in transitional justice.
