News/Research
08 Jun, 2023

Silayan Camson and the {m}aganda Digital Archive

Check out the awesome work our undergraduate certificate students are doing around Cal! Siilayan Camson was responsible for creating {m}aganda digital archives!

In Silayan’s words:

The {m}aganda magazine Digital archive is titled “We’re Still Here”. One of the main aims of my project would be to really look at the “we”- meaning the Pilipinx student community at UC Berkeley and the Pilipinx diaspora. I focused on the entendre of “still” and how it relates to survival, but also being stuck. It also subtly reminds people of photo stills or still life photography. “Here” and locationality is an important subject matter for diasporic communities- the feeling of being in a predominantly white institution of higher education and being in America. {m}aganda magazine is originally a printed magazine, which makes it ephemeral and difficult to archive. These are artists that might never get their work printed anywhere else, so it poses a unique problem of how do we successfully keep a legacy and continue to support a community of artists within an archive. The archive is still open to receiving personal photos, anecdotes, and photos of the magazines in homes. My hopes in creating it was that we can be remembered in the ways we’d like to be and by the people we love.