“As an extension of her earlier “Stories of Surveillance” Co-Creation/Open Doc Lab fellowship, Boundaoui worked with projection artist Robin Bell to “project redacted FBI documents onto government buildings, specifically the the FBI Hoover building in DC and the NSA Titanpointe building in New York city. On the sides of these buildings, we projected the redacted documents and in the black holes I projected videos and family photos from my personal family archives of what we were up to in the 90s, juxtaposing the really mundane everyday things we were doing. Graduations and picnics and barbecues and camping, our family photos and our archive into the black holes of the FBI documents, juxtaposing what they were saying about us, with what we were actually up to, and also their archive with our archive.”“
“Renowned Algerian-American documentarian Assia Boundaoui returns as a new Co-Creation Journalism Fellow at MIT Open Documentary Lab with her new work, Inverse Surveillance Project. She describes it as a “hybrid documentary, multimedia, AI project, co-created with my immigrant-Muslim community in Chicago, which repurposes thousands of declassified FBI records collected during decades of surveillance, as raw material for creating a counter-narrative and reimagining the secret archive. Using AI fuelled truth-seeking and traditional Arab cross-stitch embroidery we will design/produce a co-created process that makes space for a community traumatized by state surveillance to build power, seek truth and heal”.”
