Gathering the Archive: Ethiopian & Eritrean Stories, Photos & Memory

Please join Daughters of Desta for an afternoon program dedicated to celebrating—and documenting—our communities’ rich histories in the DC area.

As a collective of Ethiopian and Eritrean American artists, filmmakers, and writers, we’re honored and delighted to be working on a project focused on archiving our histories through audio interviews, visual footage, written stories, and events like this and future exhibitions.

We’ll share a bit about ourselves and the work, but we want much of our time to be spent hearing from what an in-depth archive of Ethiopian and Eritrean DC would look like to you—the people, places, sounds, and tastes that have shaped your lives here.We’ll also spend time helping you to start preserving your own personal records: The DC History Center will be onsite to guide us through working with the special scanners that they use to digitize physical snapshots of the past, like this collection of printed materials from DC elections in the 1980s.

Please bring photos and any other paper items you would like to scan for your personal or family archives—things like letters, stamps, concert tickets, or posters. And if you can’t get to those albums just yet, don’t worry—we’ll have a photo station onsite so you can document your own story right now.Light refreshments will be provided. The entrance is on 39th Street, through the red door near the loading dock. Street parking is available, or you can use the parking lot at the main entrance off Rhode Island Ave.