THE YAZIDI COMMUNITY ARCHIVE
The Yazidi Community Archive by HÁWAR.help documents and preserves Yazidi history and memories by telling the stories of the Yazidi people through their own personal material – material that, due to centuries of flight and persecution, continues to be at risk of being lost. Our goal is to centralize unique material, preserve it, and make the stories of the Yazidi people accessible to future generations. To avoid reducing the Yazidi history to the genocide, the project includes material from before 2014 and also looks at the current complexity of life.
The Yazidi community participates through photography and photo editing workshops, gaining skills to create and preserve their own material. This empowers them to take an active role in telling their stories, adding personal authenticity to the archive.
A project for the Yazidi community, by the Yazidi community!
While featuring material from before, during and after the genocide of the Yazidi population in the mid-2010s by ISIS, the project emerged as a response to the genocide and serves as an act of resistance against this violent attempt at erasure.
While violence represents an integral part of these stories, the project challenges the tendency of reducing individuals to representative victims. Instead, we seek to show a range of experiences that define these individuals’ lives and the multi-dimensional stories of those who participate in the project.
The archive combines non-professional content from the Yazidi community, such as photos, videos, and artefacts, with professional material from HÁWAR.help and archivists. This mix ensures both grassroots authenticity and contextual depth.
As part of the project, several dozen women were given psychosocial support and access to psychotherapeutic measures. Thus, the project contributed to the women processing their trauma and improving their mental health.
The archived material will be made accessible to community members, researchers, journalists, and artists on both online and offline platforms. In addition, the project and its material will partially be made available to the general public through films, publications and exhibitions in Germany and Iraq. We look forward to sharing the stories from the Yazidi Community Archive on our social media platforms with you!
BACKGROUND
In August 2014, ISIS attacked about 20 villages and towns in the Sinjar region, the Yazidi’s ancestral homeland in Iraq. More than 5,000 Yazidis were killed during the genocide in the cruelest possible way. Half a million people became refugees overnight, hundreds of thousands fled to the autonomous Kurdistan region in northern Iraq, where many still live in camps for internally displaced persons (IDPs) today.
ARCHIVE COMPOSITION
The archive features a diverse collection of digital audiovisual material from the Yazidi community, including personal photos, videos, music, and artifacts. This collection is enriched and contextualized by supplementary materials from HÁWAR.help and professional archivists.
FOCUS
The focus of the material lies on collecting family histories, documenting the holy site of Lalish and other Yazidi communities. The material includes photographs, videos, interviews and the digitization of physical artefacts to preserve the valuable heritage of the Yazidi community.
Stories from the Yazidi Community Archive
Follow us on social media for more from the archive!
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Partners
We would like to thank the Federal Foreign Office for supporting the Yazidi Community Archive. The project was implemented in cooperation with elbarlament.
