What happens when the “official” and the “popular” stories about your hometown do not match what you archive in your family album?

We collaborate with women and families in the Medellín metropolitan area to document their stories of displacement, violence, resilience, and rebuilding. This project is an alternative narrative force that complicates the archival landscape. These are stories about how cities are made by the people who (really) make them.

See our latest work Mira nuestras últimas obras

Stories of peace and resilience Historias de paz y resistencia

In collaboration with DukeEngage Colombia and the
Manantiales de Paz (Springs of Peace) community
Summer 2015 En colaboración con el programa DukeEngage Colombia y
la comunidad de Manantiales de paz
Verano 2015

Read our latest publication Lee nuestra última públicación

Disrupting Doble Desplazamiento in Conflict Zones: Alternative Feminist Stories Cross the Colombian-U.S. Border Disrupting Doble Desplazamiento in Conflict Zones: Alternative Feminist Stories Cross the Colombian-U.S. Border

By Tamera Marko
Reflections, Fall 2012 Por Tamera Marko
Reflections, Otoño 2012

About My Home

This project is a multi-institutional, transnational collaboration between families, artists, academics, documentarians, students and faculty in the US and in Medellín. We collaborate with families who over the last 60 years have been building their communities in the city of Medellín. Thousands of these families came to Medellin because they were forced to flee their homes in rural communities due to violence. Families tell their own stories of resilience in their own words and images. As of 2015, we have documented 250 stories, and have archived over 7,000 hours of video, 10,000 photographs, and 1,000 pages of written-word text.

About DukeEngage Colombia

Duke University students in the program DukeEngage Colombia have come every summer from 2008 to 2015. DukeEngage is funded by grants from the The Duke Endowment and The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The DukeEngage mission is to empower “students to address critical human needs through immersive service, in the process transforming students, advancing the University’s educational mission, and providing meaningful assistance to communities in the U.S. and abroad.”

In the last eight years, DukeEngage Colombia students have interviewed over 100 families in the city of Medellín and the community of Manantiales de Paz, created dozens of short documentaries, and contributed thousands of hours of video to the My Home archive.

Collaborators

This is a collaboration between the First Year Writing Program and the Office of Service Learning and Community Action at Emerson College, DukeEngage Colombia at Duke University, Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Medellín, MIT, el AULA in Medellín, the Alcaldía de Medellín, the Secretaria de Bienestar Social, Programa Medellín Solidaria, Agencia de Cooperación e Inversión de Medellín y el Área Metropolitana.