How Do You See the Disappeared? A Warm Database

"Mariam Ghani is a Brooklyn-based artist whose work in video, installation and new media maps the contrapuntal narratives that emerge in the border zones between cultures. Chitra Ganesh is a Brooklyn based artist whose drawing, installation, text-based work, and collaborations suggest and excavate buried narratives typically absent from official canons of history, literature, and art.

'How Do You See the Disappeared? A Warm Database' investigates immigrants who disappear into the complex, bewildering, and often heartless bureaucracy that governs the immigration courts, detention centers, asylum adjudications, and deportation proceedings that separate hundreds of thousands of new Americans each year from their everyday lives, family ties, and points of connection.

How Do You See the Disappeared? is an ongoing collaborative project by Mariam Ghani & Chitra Ganesh whose goal is to is to create alternative systems for collecting stories from the immigrants whose lives as individuals are lost in the abstractions of legalities and headlines, and to develop from those stories new terms and languages through which the issues of the immigration debate can be framed. A Warm Database is the web-based phase of this project, and serves three purposes: as an annotated guide for the uninitiated to and through the mountains of documents that surround detention, deportation and immigrants' rights; as a resource for and call to action; and as the starting point of a data collection project designed to span multiple communities and languages. The Warm Database that is presented in this first version of the project is an interface for the further visualization and presentation of the data that we will collect and translate after the project's launch, as we've done in the examples of the small set of responses collected already." -- From Turbulence