AltaHeirloom 0.1 - Digital Zine Access

About the Publication:

AltaHeirloom 0.1 is a digital zine re-membering what Black life has looked like in Altadena, CA. Through a meditation on the salience of her enduring family archive, Benn composes a thoughtful reflection of the Black community that her family took root in four generations ago through an assemblage of family photographs and digitized materials. Blending personal prose and the tactility of archival collage, the work re-members the critical beauty of the neighborhood and the working class Black community that helped nurture the creative, communal spirit that Altadena is known for today.

The 80-page zine embraces the intimate form and information of family photographs as an interior lens for narrative amid the wide external gaze prompted by the Eaton Fire and against cultural negligence. The work is conceptually organized into three chapters: 1) Interiors: placemaking intentions, 2) Migrations: southern and midwestern heritage, and 3) Activations of this intergenerational experience. In turn, the project carefully demonstrates activation as a method of affective engagement with the archive and insists that memory is not limited to it. AltaHeirloom 0.1 frames just a piece of Altadena's collective re-memory, each image picturing the enormity of what still exists in the living memory of this community.

Written and edited by Cienna Benn in residence at Pitzer College with support from the Community Engagement Center and Pitzer Art Galleries.