Fugitive Archives

Michelle Dizon
Media and Cultural Studies
UC Riverside

Fugitive Archives is a community memory project that documents the conditions of life in the Harvard Park neighborhood of South Los Angeles. The project is based out of the Southern California Library (SCL), a social justice archive that has been located in Harvard Park for the past fifty-five years. It begins from the SCL’s concrete need to develop and expand their practice of community documentation, including the local organizing/advocacy efforts taking place in South LA as well as the lived experiences of residents around the library, many of whom face conditions of extreme poverty, homelessness, incarceration, lack of documentation, and environmental toxicity. The Fugitive Archives collaboration, spread across two UC campuses and four UC entities, will attempt to realize the full potential of the SCL’s documentation efforts by joining SCL with UC-based media artists, students, and archivists. Our goal is to develop SCL’s capacity for documentation across digital media, to translate these memories into a series of short films, and to create an exhibition and a virtual platform for these films that reflect the community’s need for this kind of memory work.