Boundaoui will co-create story circles in the community, experimenting with different media, including audio, video, illustration and Tatreez, Palestinian cross-stick embroidery. (image courtesy Tatreez & Tea)
Algerian-American documentarian Assia Boundaoui is a 2020-2021 Co-Creation Journalism Fellow at MIT Open Documentary Lab, generously sponsored by JustFilms at Ford Foundation. She describes her current work, titled Inverse Surveillance Project, as a “hybrid documentary, multimedia, AI project, co-created with my immigrant-Muslim community in Chicago, which repurposes thousands of declassified FBI records collected during decades of surveillance, as raw material for creating a counter-narrative and reimagining the secret archive. Using AI-fueled truth-seeking and traditional Arab cross-stitch embroidery we will design/produce a co-created process that makes space for a community traumatized by state surveillance to build power, seek truth and heal.”