Cultural Documentation & Preservation Center

The South Sudan Cultural Preservation Project is a collaboration between Brandeis University and the Sudanese Education Fund. This project is devoted to documenting, preserving, and archiving the various forms of cultural expression created by the refugee and resettlement community from southern Sudan. Works to be collected and conserved include painting, sculpture, adornment, music, song, dance, theater, poetry, fiction and nonfiction writing, folklore, and oral history. We anticipate building up a physical collection of artworks, manuscripts, and material objects as well as a multimedia digital repository documenting performing arts and oral narratives.

Our underlying premise is that the life experience of refugee and resettled persons from southern Sudan has been distinctive and in many ways entirely unique. As such, the culture of this group has the potential to illuminate dimensions of the human condition in new and profound ways. We believe this cultural-preservation project will prove invaluable, not only to students and scholars in the social sciences and humanities but also to the general public. We will aim to spend the next few months organizing an art exhibition that we will tour throughout New England. It is our hope that this exhibition will more deeply educate our communities about the recent history of the South Sudanese people.

The paintings shown here are part of a collection of art we have acquired from Sudanese artists currently living in Kakuma Refugee Camp. We are hoping to find funding to purchase these paintings from the artists, enabling us to incorporate them into the exhibition and ultimately preserve and archive them at Brandeis University.

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