There are Living Eyes | عيون حيّة is an experimental archival platform of living heritage. it documents the memories, oral histories, images, sounds and forms of knowledge through which relationships to place are inhabited and transmitted.

it uses geospatial mapping technology to situate audiences within the landscapes shaped by these stories, subverting the geographical map as a top-down instrument of classification through an evolving map that assembles itself as the archive grows. places are not connected by cartographic proximity but lived spatial relation, a formation that may be material, remembered, destroyed, inaccessible, imagined or anticipated. the archive takes the form of an expanding network whose connections remain plural. this distributes the production of narrative and keeps the relationships between records open to contestation and revision, resisting by design any authoritative interpretive order or the record as something consigned to a completed past. the archive documents not only what was, but what persists, changes and continues to be made.

alongside the platform, the project exists as the development of an enactive, participatory research methodology, treating the archive as an ongoing relation between witness and record. rather than operating as a closed repository, it will function as a locally governed node within a wider archival network, connecting dispersed records without requiring their centralisation or the surrender of custodial authority.

it asks what an archive can make possible when its structure remains open to those whose history it holds.