Why?
The Project Plataforma – Archives and Identities started around 2015, when we realized the lack of documents in the neighborhood of Plataforma, Salvador de Bahia, Brazil. Living in the midst of remains of a past materially richer than their actual condition, Plataforma inhabitants do not know their past.
Before becoming one of the poorer areas of the city, with high crime and poverty rates, Plataforma was an important economic pole, in which the workers organized themselves to defend their rights. The dissonance between the actual negative representation of the neighborhood and these remains of an economically and culturally richer past led us to want to discover more about Plataforma and the reasons for the obliteration of its past.
But there is no reason to leave the inhabitants outside of this process of reappropriation of their past since they are the first heirs and subjects of this history.
This is why our project intends to sustain the rediscovery of the richness and cultural value of Plataforma by its inhabitants. As archivists, we know that historical documents in their various forms are able to foster the appropriation of knowledge and give diverse meanings to it. Promoting the creation of divergent narratives from the ones that insist on the poverty and lacks of the area transforms archives into supporting material for social justice, and allows for alternative interpretations of identities and causalities.
How?
During the various steps of the project, a working group composed of young people from Plataforma and archival students from the Federal University of Bahia will collaborate to discover and actualize official documents as supporting material for alternative narratives that will be presented to the public. We intend to foster a renewed feeling of worth and belonging among Plataforma inhabitants in the framework of the history and present of Salvador de Bahia, as a cultural right to participate.