Asylum Archive originally started as a coping mechanism while I was living in Direct Provision centres in Ireland: it is directly concerned with the reality of life for asylum seekers and the trauma involved. Asylum Archive grew from that experience. I kept myself intact by capturing and communicating with the environment through photographs. This creative process helped me to overcome confinement and incarceration.

Asylum Archive is to collaborate with asylum seekers, activists, artists, academics, and immigration lawyers, amongst others, with a view to creating an interactive documentary cross-platform online resource, critically foregrounding accounts of exile, displacement, trauma and memory.

Asylum Archive is a political platform and an artefact of Direct Provision as the continuation 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, psychiatric hospitals, etc.

Vukašin Nedeljković