Contemporary Social History Archives (ASKI) is the leading archive of the Greek political left. As archival custodians, its staff undertake public history projects that activate their archives of the Greek Resistance, among others. Collective Biography follows the process of a group of 40 history students from Greece, Spain, Italy and Poland who travel to the archive to make podcasts about the lives of women who were active in the Resistance in WWII and after, with the help of historians from each country. Collective Biography unpacks the significance of their collective intergenerational method of biography. This method enables an understanding of the diverse and transnational character of women’s mass participation in the Resistance, which drastically changed the social position of women in Europe and created the conditions for the Women’s Liberation movements that followed in the 1970s. “There is not one history of women in the Resistance”, states ASKI archivist Anastasia Kapola, and the method of collective biography emphasises this multiplicity. At the same time as the film weaves a collective biography around the life of Resistance fighter Maria Beikou, it documents the way the method of collective biography engenders international and intergenerational anti-fascist solidarity among the researchers and students involved in the project.<p></p>
NTRO Output Category
- Original Creative Work : Other
Place
Athens, GreeceVenue
La Trobe Art Institute, Bendigo, VictoriaNTRO Publisher
https://www.latrobe.edu.au/art-institute/exhibitions/storytelling-liberationMedium
4K video with soundResearch Statement
This film sits within the fields of contemporary art, feminist historiography, and archival practice. It documents how ASKI—the leading archive of the Greek Left—undertook a collective process of making public history about the lives of women in the European Resistance during and after the Second World War, in collaboration with forty history students from across Europe. The research addresses the limitations of dominant historiography, which methodologically marginalises women’s political participation in social movements. It explores how ASKI’s collective and intergenerational approach to biography models a way of making history in which the research methods arise from the politics they document, aiming to expand feminist and anticolonial methodologies for collective history-making.
The work contributes new knowledge by theorising and demonstrating “collective biography” as a feminist and anticolonial method of history-making. Through documenting the process of collaborative writing and narrating of over sixty life stories of women active in the Resistance, the project transforms biography into a collective and intergenerational process of learning, remembrance, and solidarity. The film enacts this methodology through its dialogical composition—layering archival materials, footage of students making podcasts, and group reflections—to perform the process of inheriting political memory and transmitting it across generations.
The research significance lies in the way its study and articulation of a situated feminist method enables that method to become transversal and learned by others with shared purpose. The first exhibition of the work, as part of a dedicated exhibition for the broader project Storytelling Liberation, was staged at one of Australia’s leading university museums, La Trobe Art Institute (2025), and has since been approved for acquisition into their permanent collection.Size or Duration of Work
20mins 27secAffiliation
Alex Martinis Roe, University of Melbourne
