With the power of communal testimony, no one person has the responsibility for every perspective but together we create an entwined whole. The Triangle Fire Open Archive makes the unfathomable concrete to remind us of our shared humanity.
While all the projects were fascinating this week, the Triangle Fire Open Archive had a profound impact on me. I love the above quote found in their About section. To me, it so elegantly captures many of the concepts that we’ve been studying this term including spreadability, engagement, social justice, and structure. All of the contributors have different frameworks for contribution whether they are cultural, social, or politically motivated.
Although the project has a specific aim – pulling together an online archive of materials related to the Triangle Fire, it in no way limits the types of submissions that people can make to the project. It was fascinating how people took a very specific moment in history and spun it off into music, paintings, buttons, and more, all while relating it to issues that are current today – labor structures, workers rights, history preservation and garment worker conditions. The subject is still galvanizing for issues of social justice given the massive amount of work that still needs to be done to restructure how factories and labor are organized on a global level.
The project also brings out the idea of appointment-based structures vs. engagement-based paradigms. The exhibit is both physical and virtual, but by expanding the exhibit online, the curators are expanding their audience and the amount of impact the project can make. You don’t have to be at the museum to engage with the exhibit.
I’ve been thinking about this too. The more online projects we explore, the more it hits home how powerful a tool digital media can be for collecting and weaving threads between disparate stories. Where with traditional forms like longform nonfiction or feature documentary it would take one voice to pull them together, on websites we can create a cohesive whole that emerges organically out of a community.
Emily, I loved the quote you pulled out of their website. It’s quite appropriate as a highlight to the way in which the curators decided to pull together the virtual and physical memorial for the Triangle Fire victims. The collaboration that used voluntary submissions gives the project a totally different and more personal flavor than memorials crafted by a hired artist who’s work might be directed by a committee. Allowing for personal contributions I feel brings more of an intimate human element to it. As you mentioned, there really is a great elevation to the project with the online archival, allowing so many more visitor who have direct ties to the accident as well as to offer the opportunity for a larger dialogue about human rights and labor issues.
And, what is so subtle about this project is that it offers us a beautiful model to replicate in all kinds of environments…as Patty Z and I say, to”invite participation” on multiple levels, both online and across to public environments…from intimacy of one contemplation to another in a social environment we all walk through.
Also, think about how Buscada also had to collaborate in whole new ways with its partners, and how these collaborations will live on in the simple and effective categories the project offers…I believe that each one of us could take any thread line from Triangle and buidl completely different and compelling story lines…from reveries to the hard facts of the kinds of tragedy that still confronts us in the global clothing trade (Bangladesh?)