memory

archive

Somatic Archives. Futures. Embodied Memory.

ABOUT

Seen under conditions, 2026

(From an ongoing work.)

I create at the intersection systems of power and people who are impacted by it. My work traces how bodies carry what archives erase. Through visual assemblage and sensory practice, I explore the afterlives of oppressed people’s stories. My practice is not nostalgia. It is recovery.

Not spectacle, but evidence.

Not the past, but the possibility of repair.

More on one of my most recent exhibitions: Digital Flesh here

Poetic Archivist

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Poetic Archivist ·

The body is the first archive.

I make work about what history leaves behind

and what the body remembers.


  • Geometric drawing of an outline square with sections divided by vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines.

    Plan with Fragments. Memory. Nervous system. I work where history becomes sensation.

  • Geometric drawing of an outline square with sections divided by vertical, horizontal, and half circle lines.

    What was erased can still be felt. My practice is a somatic study of history, trauma, and futurity.


  • Geometric drawing of an outline square with sections divided by vertical, horizontal, and circle lines.

    I’m not documenting the past. I’m redesigning how we study it.

  • Geometric drawing of an outline square with sections divided by vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines.

    History is the first language of my work.

History

My work examines how history is shaped not only by what is recorded, but by what is rendered inaccessible

This was documented correctly, 2026

(From an ongoing work.)

Dia Smith

Visual Artist & Cultural Documentarian

Community Educator | Archival Researcher |Historian

Western Massachusetts


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