A bag full of telephone cards: Making the Archive of Albanian Migration

Tavros (Anaxagora 33, 1st floor, Athens)
18 █ September █ 2024 - 28 █ September █ 2024

It has now been more than thirty years since the mass immigration of Albanians to Greece began. While we take for granted that Albanian migration has shaped the lives of the migrants, we less often consider how it has been constitutive of contemporary Greek society. In 2022 the Contemporary Social History Archives (ASKI) with the support of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Public Humanities Initiative (SNFPHI) at Columbia University launched a pilot project to create the Archive of Albanian Migration as a way of documenting and shedding light on a set of experiences that remain largely unknown and excluded from dominant public discourse. The exhibition A Bag Full of Telephone Cards quite literally centers around a table that functions as a space for presenting materials from the archive as well as a place of meeting, work, and discussion. By putting an archive under construction on public display, this exhibition invites us to consider the questions that go into making that archive. What should it contain, what stories can it tell, and what dilemmas emerge along the way? How do we approach the task of creating a record of a living phenomenon whose contours are still very much in flux? And how might we continue the work of enriching and expanding the archive in an open and participatory way? By posing such questions, the exhibition and archive seek to contribute to the emergence of multiple and competing narratives concerning Albanian migration and the ways that the Greek present has been fundamentally shaped by it.

Exhibition Hours: Monday-Friday 12:00-19:00, Saturday-Sunday 11:00-18:00