In 2023-24, a team at a London local authority developed a proposal to create a ‘Sensory Archive’. The archive emerged out of creative and community-led work with young people and was based on their experiences and understandings of violence, which were often not captured by conventional metrics. The proposal is therefore for an all-digital, participatory, qualitative evidence base documenting what violence affecting young people looks, sounds and feels like to them. It expands understanding of this violence and points to new ways to measure it. The team included Ariana Markowitz and Abbie Ametewee, who co-authored a City Scenes Sounds Action article – ‘Despair and Repair’ – about this work (Issue 30:1-2). Ariana is currently working with Cristian Olmos Herrera, a visual researcher, to create a short stop-motion video showing how the Archive can work, which we will be uploading here soon.
