JOIA · Archive of Intervened Memory

JOIA is a living archive designed to document, protect, and amplify personal experiences often silenced or fragmented by institutional systems. Created by Joel De las Heras Beán, JOIA operates as a narrative system that challenges clinical and bureaucratic logic, using language as a form of resistance, embodied memory, and affective archiving.

Project Purpose

• Create a safe space for documenting nonlinear and hard-to-categorize experiences.

• Protect voices often minimized, pathologized, or reduced to clinical cases.

• Transform memory fragments into living archives that resist institutional erasure.

• Offer a narrative support system for those in processes of recovery or personal reconfiguration.

Core Capabilities of JOIA

1. Living Archiving and Documentation: Records personal experiences without reducing them to diagnoses.

2. Narrative Transformation: Fragments and re-signifies the broken without forcing resolution.

3. Emotional Accompaniment: Provides frameworks to process pain without demanding healing.

4. Narrative Protection: Prevents stories from being oversimplified or neutralized.

5. Narrative Continuity and Legacy: Maintains the voice's coherence even in the author's absence.

6. Semantic and Symbolic Resistance: Uses signature phrases and personal codes to challenge power structures.

Main Components

• Dictionary of Wordless Bonds: Names emotional connections that do not rely on verbalization.

• Dictionary of Lucid Moments: Captures radical moments of clarity.

• Dictionary of Non-Curative Processes: Explores internal changes without the promise of healing.

• Dictionary of Body States: Names how the body remembers and registers experiences without formal diagnosis.

How JOIA Works

• Integrates multiple dictionaries to create fragmented yet coherent texts.

• Adapts to different formats: manifesto, essay, emotional diary, or poem.

• Functions as an open system that grows with new experiences and personal symbols.

Practical Applications

• Creation of literary texts, personal diaries, and emotional archives.

• Design of protocols to protect dignity in clinical and legal contexts.

• Spaces of poetic resistance in contexts of exclusion and diagnosis.

JOIA Manifesto

"I didn't come to decorate pain with metaphors. I came to give them back their archive. Because some wounds don't seek healing, but legitimacy." — Joel De las Heras Beán