The 4th Women 100 movement newsletter is out.
Since 2013, the movement Women 100 (Hundred Years of Immigrant Women’s Life and Work in Malmö) has tried to make visible and recognize immigrant women’s life and work in Malmö.
The fourth newsletter has come out (No. 2, 2015). A collection that in hardcopy size resembles a small book. The newsletter reflects the continuation of exercises, conversations and methods aiming to visualize and unfold stories of immigrant women in Malmö. However, not as boxed and finished stories but as processes of participation and exchange.
Feminist Dialog initiated the project or movement, partnering with Malmö City, Malmö Museum, ABF Malmö (Workers’ Educational Organisation), The City Archive, researchers at Malmö University, and, not least, women networks, organisations and individuals. Seminars, lectures, exhibitions, and workshops with group conversations and thematic work around e.g. interviewing, archiving, cartoon storytelling, Roma life in Malmö, have taken place the last two years.
Malmö University’s Erling Björgvinsson and Anders Høg Hansen have been involved from the beginning, as partners in development of methods, documentation and research on the movement—as part of the Living Archives project. Erling is now PARSE professor of design at University of Gothenburg, but still a researcher on Living Archives, while Anders is a teacher/coordinator on the MA in Communication for Development and involved in Living Archives and other research activities.
The various forms of mediating old and new Malmö identities, complex and in process, have been exciting and challenging. How to let people articulate their hi/stories, and to make visible unwritten and unrepresented aspects of the city’s past and present? The movement embraces the historical and the contemporary and among several key ideas—as sought reflected in the newsletter’s documentation of activity—the aim has been to mobilize (living) archives as social resources and reservoirs where alternative people’s histories highlight problems and pose new ways of living, working and being in Malmö.
Newsletter no. 4 (No. 2, 2015), edited by initiators Parvin Ardalan and Mamak Babak-Rad among others, is a collection of articles, visual essays, and montages depicting different methods of participation, immigrant stories and engagement around life and work in the city. Read, for example, A Circular History on a Flat Wall which recounts a critical evaluation of a museum exhibition, To Say the Truth or Not, Which One is Important on feminist interview methods, or read a report on a cartoon workshop or on a dinner conversation between Latin American women of Malmö, The Seeds have Bloomed.