How to Tell a Herstory

Some stories are never told. Even though they deserve to be heard. This is a space to retell history.

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This project is now archived and was part of DDW22

This project is part of
Embassy of Inclusive Society

Maria Julia Serra courtesy of the Serra Family

How to Tell a Herstory is a unique platform, tool and workshop for telling narratives about women, to witness and celebrate their experiences. At the heart of this project are women storytellers and their narratives of love, belonging and migration told through the family photo album.

Some stories are never told. Even though they deserve to be heard.

Our aim is to open a space for thinking and critical reflection on gender, migration and family power structures through the lens of vernacular photography. We explored the potential for storytelling by intersecting family photographs with a custom-built machine learning tool created in partnership with technologist Babusi Nyoni. Each herstory narrative begins with a few photographs of the subject of the story, selected by the storyteller and uploaded to our Herstory Tool. The tool reads photos using object detection, proximity and sentiment analysis to prompt the storyteller into a narrative flow. The completed herstory is a visual essay with text, photos, annotations and voice notes. Through a public call, we invited participation in storytelling workshops with a primary focus on migrant women. The workshops were moderated by photographic artist Ebru Aydin and held at De Voorkamer, a cultural meeting place in Utrecht. The resulting visual stories formed part of an installation at De Voorkamer, created in collaboration with the textile artist Marjolein van der Wal.

This is a space to retell history. Your Herstory begins here.

You can visit the Herstory platform and use the Herstory tool on the website tellaherstory.org. How to Tell a Herstory is invited by curator Shay Raviv to be part of the Embassy of Inclusive Society during Dutch Design Week. The installation can be seen at the Van Abbe Museum from 22 October till 30 October 2022.