Ancestral Mist

Join us for a multidimensional journey through the Ancestral Mist project, a digital memory space that curates the complex archival narratives of Afro-Brazilian returnees (the Aguda) into an immersive storytelling experience using StoryMapJS.

Ancestral Mist acts as a creative “calling into being” for stories that vanished from the traditional record. The project bridges the 19th century archives of Salvador, Bahia, with the lived realities of returnee communities along the Bight of Benin. By tracing specific lineages through archival materials including the Livros de Notas housed in the Arquivo Público do Estado da Bahia (APEB), baptismal records in Agoue, and oral speculations of return, the project moves beyond the “homogenized” data of the archive to recover the weight of names that were nearly lost to history.

The presentation will feature a live walkthrough of the StoryMapJS pilot, followed by a deep dive into the project’s research methodology. The research team will discuss the challenges of our “ancestral inquiring” of colonial archives to find the “ghost names” and establish a presence that never even made it to the margins of liberty notes.

This project is the result of a collaborative effort dedicated to uncovering these hidden migration patterns. Joining lead researcher Dr. Jumoke Verissimo will be research assistants Peter Ton and Suprabha Vidharshani Irugalratne, who will share insights into the archival process and the digital art curation that brings this “Ancestral Mist” to life.