ASCL acquires 'Traces' as a permanent exhibition

The ASCL is proud to have acquired the photo exhibition 'Traces'. The photos, by Marieke Maagdenberg, will be on permanent display at the ASCL, in the Herta Mohr buiding in Leiden. The photo exhibition was first on display at the opening of the new building, accompanying the presentation of the book 'Traces'.

TRACES presents a photo-ethnographic project by ASCL researcher Lidewyde Berckmoes and Marieke Maagdenberg that investigates how violent conflict reverberates across borders and generations. It explores the ways in which people connect to conflict in the past and present despite (temporal and geographical) ‘distance’. When ten years after the civil war, a new political crisis announced itself in Burundi in 2015,

Anthropologist Lidewyde Berckmoes felt forced to leave her ‘second home’. The peaceful future she had hoped to contribute to, seemed shattered. For a long time, it remained unsafe to return to broken Burundi, and so she wanted to learn from other people who live with its traces.

Through photo-ethnography in the Netherlands and Belgium, Marieke Maagdenberg (photography) and Lidewyde Berckmoes (ethnography) explored how young people of Burundian heritage relate to the conflict past and present in Burundi. In the work, they open up questions of transnational belonging, diaspora activism and legacies and reiterations of conflict trauma. 

The book can be purchased in the online ASCL bookshop.

(Photos: close-up details of the photos by Marieke Maagdenberg, now on display at the ASCL)