Documenting Gender Apartheid
Oral history, testimony, and lived experience
Documenting Gender Apartheid is an ongoing oral history and documentary project exploring the lived realities of gender apartheid, political repression, forced displacement, and resistance.
The project centres the voices of those directly affected — particularly women and marginalised communities whose experiences are often reduced to headlines, statistics, or political rhetoric.
Through filmed testimony, interviews, written accounts, and long-form documentation, the project seeks to preserve experiences that might otherwise be silenced, forgotten, or deliberately erased.
At its core, the work is concerned with memory, dignity, and the right to speak openly about lived experience.
Participants are invited to contribute in ways that prioritise safety and agency. For many contributors, visibility carries real personal risk. The project therefore explores methods of anonymity and protective editing, including irreversible visual and vocal anonymisation where necessary.
The work also recognises that exile is not only geographical. Many contributors continue to live under systems of pressure, surveillance, and social control even after crossing borders.
Rather than speaking about people from a distance, Documenting Gender Apartheid aims to create space for people to speak in their own words, on their own terms.
The project exists across multiple forms:
- oral history collection
- filmed interviews
- documentary development
- publishing
- public discussion and cultural events
- archival and educational work
Documenting Gender Apartheid is supported through collaborations with writers, filmmakers, translators, cultural organisations, and communities across Norway and beyond.
The project remains ongoing.
