The Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) is delighted to announce that a new collection – the Asylum Archive – has been published in the Repository through our Community Archive Scheme.
In 2020, the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) announced that the Asylum Archive was selected as the winner of our annual Community Archive Scheme. Established as a pathway to amplifying community archives and empowering visibility to the stories and histories of specific cultures and communities that are often underrepresented in national or regional archives, the Community Archive Scheme provides the opportunity for the ingestion of collections into the Repository.
The Asylum Archive
The Asylum Archive was established by Vukašin Nedeljković who, during the years 2007-2009 was housed in a Direct Provision Centre whilst seeking asylum in Ireland. The Asylum Archive originally began as a coping mechanism for Nedeljković during this time. The archive sought to collaborate with asylum seekers, activists, artists, academics, and immigration lawyers – amongst others across Ireland – with a view to creating an interactive, documentary, cross-platform and online resource, critically foregrounding accounts of exile, displacement, trauma and memory.
Nedeljković envisions the Asylum Archive as a political platform and an artefact of Direct Provision – as well as a continuation of the preservation of the history of Carceral Institutions in Ireland – bearing in mind that we have very little visual information about previous incarcerations of the poor, the marginalised and the undesired in institutions including Magdalene Laundries, Borstals, Mother and Baby Homes, Industrial Schools, and psychiatric hospitals, etc.
Of this collection Nedeljković states:
“The existence of this archive is an act of solidarity to bring a different perspective on the lives of people who came to Ireland to seek protection.”
The Collection
The Asylum Archive collection in the Repository comprises of forty-four assets documenting ‘emergency accommodation centres’ across the Republic of Ireland. Each asset contains multiple images of these accommodation centres with descriptive information highlighting the years the centre opened, the county and previous use(s) of the building. Descriptive information also draws attention to racist and anti-migrant attacks that occurred in particular locations.
Digital Repository of Ireland (2024) [Publisher]. Digital Repository of Ireland [Depositor].
https://doi.org/10.7486/DRI.ww72r498p
Digital Repository of Ireland (2024) [Publisher]. Digital Repository of Ireland [Depositor].
https://doi.org/10.7486/DRI.v9807w546
The forty-four assets in this collection provide an important resource that documents the presence of carceral institutions in Ireland. The stories that permeate the images offer a poignant yet stark insight into the experiences of migrants, asylum seekers and marginalised peoples living under Direct Provision in Ireland.
DRI Director Dr. Lisa Griffith said:
We at the DRI consider it a privilege to safeguard and steward the Asylum Archive collection in the Repository, ensuring long-term digital preservation and open access of these images for all to learn from and view.
We would like to thank Vukašin Nedeljković for working with us so that we could learn, share and preserve this collection.
As winner of the DRI Community Archive Scheme, this collection reflects the DRI’s commitment to achieving goals of openness, equity, inclusivity, accessibility and transparency as outlined in our Equality Diversity and Inclusion policy.
We hope to continue onward collaborations with Vukašin in the future.
About the Project
Vukasin Nedeljkovic is an artist, activist, and independent scholar. They have been working on the multidisciplinary project Asylum Archive since 2007. In 2017 they were awarded an Arts and Activism bursary from Arts Council/Create and published the Asylum Archive book. In 2021, the Asylum Archive featured in ‘The Narrow Gate of the Here – and – Now: Queer Embodiment’ exhibition to mark 30 years of Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. In 2021, ‘Disavowing Asylum: Documenting Ireland’s Asylum Industrial Complex’ book by Ronit Lentin and Vukasin Nedeljkovic was published by Rowman and Littlefield.
In 2020, they initiated the Fortress EU platform and to research, document, and map some of the migrant detention localities in Greece, France and Italy.
All assets from the Asylum Archive collection can now be viewed in full in the Repository.
DRI are delighted to include this valuable collection in the Repository. Other similar collections in the Repository include: the Clare Memories: Women’s Stories collection, the folklore.ie collection and the Life Histories and Social Change collections. You can keep up to date with all of our collections by signing up to our newsletter.
