Building a digital archive of migrations across the Mediterranean: ethnography and public sphere

The paper explores the production of a digital archive of migration memories, solidarity, border violence and resistance between the Horn of Africa, the Mediterranean space and Europe. Under an ongoing multidisciplinary project started in 2022, scholars from Europe and North Africa are applying ethnographic methodology and participatory approaches to co-construct with migrants an archival representation of the political cultures of migration in the Mediterranean space. This representation aims at contributing to different but interrelated domains: the production of anthropological knowledge; the archival representations as the byproduct of narration experimental practices; the archive as a hybrid laboratory addressing the public sphere. In relation to the production of anthropological knowledge, the authors take seriously the issue that archives are “surrogates for anthropology” (Zeitlyn 2012), as archive is not a “natural” product of ethnographic research but the reflexive axis of the fieldwork itself. Researchers and migrant participants continuously and horizontally engage with the reflection on how and with what implications (moral, cultural, economic, political etc.) the production, sharing, formalization of existential materials such as migration pathways and experiences takes place during the ethnography. In relation to experimenting with narrations-for-the-archive, the latter’s assemblage during the ethnography allows a practical reflection on migration as an existential, generational and cultural terrain for thinking and re-forging both individual selves and collectivities. Finally, the project aims at using ethnography as the hybrid laboratory in which researchers and migrants engage with the cultural and political formalization of the silenced representations of migrations within public spheres between Africa and Europe.