Language of Silencing is a 6 month long fellowship that features 6 San Diego-based participants from immigrant and refugee backgrounds to engage with the history of Japanese-American incarceration and its relevance to present-day civil liberty struggles to create a collaborative art piece— a 7-foot tall immersive book.

The fellows researched how language holds power to silence our civil rights. With visits to the Japanese American Historical Society of San Diego, the fellows looked over archival materials and heard firsthand of the generational impacts of incarceration. Each page of this final project blends the fellows’ personal histories and its parallels to the stories of Japanese-American families. These stories are further brought to life by using Augmented Reality to create digital artifacts — to show that historical archives are not static but can be reinterpreted and evolve over time.