Honorary Mention at Ars Electronica Award for Digital Humanity

Digital Research Travelogues through European Archives (Marina Gržinić, Jovita Pristovšek, Sophie Uitz)

Credits: Marina Gržinić, Jovita Pristovšek, Sophie Uitz, and contributors © FWF-PEEK AR 439, Weltmuseum Wien, 2021/22. In collaboration with: Šefik Tatlić, Valerija Zabret, researchers, artists, activists. With support from: Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, various NGOs across Europe

Digital Research Travelogues through European Archives creates an interdisciplinary platform for art and science to explore the current politics of forgetting in relation to 3 traumatic events of the 20th century: Belgium (colonialism in the Congo), Austria (antisemitism in World War II and the post-war period) and the former Yugoslavia (turbo-nationalism, Srebrenica genocide). The platform departs from the research conducted as part of the FWF-PEEK project "Genealogy of Amnesia: Rethinking the Past for a New Future of Conviviality" (AR 439). It was presented as a digital format to promote emancipatory politics in the humanities through the 2020-2021 exhibition at the Weltmuseum Wien, Austria. It consisted of 42 interviews presented as 42 posters with QR codes. This part of the exhibition was a unique artistic-scientific and collaborative research work, presented as an interactive digital installation. The 42 QR codes were divided into 3 sections, each with a description and content, and accessible to the viewer via mobile phone. Each user could listen to the interviews in English. As a second level of interaction, an interactive table was presented in the exhibition space, allowing the viewer to spend hours exploring the connections between the 3 sections presented in parallel through images and texts, as a kind of double index, footnotes and hypertexts through European trauma histories.