This (Dis)location/Black Exodus zine is one of several San Francisco-based narrative projects by the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP) formed in order to better contextualize the history upon which the contemporary moment of gentrification rests in San Francisco. The AEMP is a data visualization, digital storytelling, and critical cartography project that maps displacement and resistance upon gentrifying terrains. (Dis)location takes the form of a print/online zine and public workshop series that uses arts-based methods to amplify the narratives and resistance of Bay Area communities facing displacement. Much like the origin story of our oral history project, (Dis)location was born out of an interest in humanizing data made visible by our quantitative maps. Committed to challenging traditional notions of where knowledge resides, the project collectivizes the archival process by foregrounding the voices of those often left out of the “official” historical record.
Activated by the unprecedented out migration of San Francisco’s Black population, the inaugural chapter of (Dis)location, titled Black Exodus, aims to assert a multimedia topography of Black history in San Francisco with an emphasis on Black cultural production, housing, and resistance. The zine is centered around over thirty oral histories by long term residents, educators, community activists, community-based organizations, and artists that we gathered between 2017 and 2019. Together these stories span more than a century’s worth of memory on events, people, places, and movements that are particular to Black life and experience in San Francisco.
