Get involved

Because the archive that takes shape in the course of the project is conceived as a long-term archive, and because updating it is never finished, it is indispensable to form a collective that works on the project together and stays closely connected with initiatives, activists and communities whose knowledge of particular places and stories already exists, worked through in publications, actions and interventions.

Participation in avArc is possible here, through the community platform.

In use, the community platform is close to social media. There one can take part in avArc and share in it. Users connect there in existing groups and in groups they start themselves, around different areas that shape avArc. There is, for example, the group for activist networking between initiatives and people who work on memory. History is never “neutral”, and in our project, as artistic research, we do not claim neutrality either. We position our work clearly as antifascist. The histories we collect and work through come from that position. Histories that try to shift perpetrators and victims are not told in our archive. The platform is meant to open a lot of room for interaction and for the own action of the allies who take part in the project. There is also an editorial team, which takes care that antisemitic, racist, fascist and nationalist narratives are not admitted, and which protects the archive from sabotage from those directions. The Fieldresearch group looks for sites and voids, researches them and tells the community. Another research group looks for as many sources of every kind as possible — literature, websites, project documentation from initiatives, audio tracks, interviews, films, artistic and activist interventions, to name only a few. The Design group looks for people who work on questions of design and on augmented-reality projects. The Artistic Approaches and Interventions group is for exchange about, and for collecting, artistic work, projects and interventions concerned with traces of Nazi crimes and/or antifascist resistance. All these sources are entered into avArc by a Data Update and Care group, which looks after updating and growing the landing pages of the sites.

This happens at the third digital place of the project, the KnowledgeBase and search engine, which forms the publicly visible part of the archive. It contains the map on which sites are recorded, and from which one can reach a landing page for each point. There one finds information and images for that point, and links to all the sources the community finds for a point, so that, step by step, the knowledge of as many people as possible is gathered from diverse antifascist perspectives and contexts. In that way the virtual map of avArc is recorded, and with it the corresponding cartography of the reality of our present.

For information concerning our work feel free to contact us via email: info(at)avarc.org