by Makena Mugambi
Trazar el archivo is an artistic enterprise. The Real Academia Española suggests that trazar is “hacer trazos,” “delinear o diseñar,” “describir, dibujar, exponer.” Inherent in these definitions is the notion that tracing is both an intimate and creative undertaking made possible through active engagement with a body of work. To trace the archive is to make strokes that outline its evolution, delineate its absences, expose its inconsistencies, and design novel histories in their place. The verb in English, trace (to find or discover by investigation), adds a forensic dimension to our encounter with the archive. Investigation more often than not occurs under conditions of insufficient or inaccurate information. Considering these English connotations, tracing the archive becomes an artistic enterprise with the more targeted end of uncovering an origin or a truth that is either absent or misrepresented in our narrative of history. That is, it acquires an ethical and political dimension.
When we visualize what tracing the archive would look like in light of these definitions, the first image that comes to mind is that of an encounter—in dusty rooms and covered boxes—with a wealth of preserved ancient documents, photographs, films and objects that have aged with time. The authors included in this issue of Esferas extend our understanding of the archive beyond these strictly material forms. If they center our conception of the archive around one fundamental element—the existence of a repository or collection of information—they also show that the “space” of the archive in the 21st century can be both material and virtual, inanimate and living, static and in continuous motion. All of our authors allow us to appreciate the medley of forms that the archive can assume, complicating our understanding of the material and immaterial engagements to which tracing the archive gives rise.
In “Fervor de colección” Adriana Amante engages with the collection at the Museo Histórico Sarmiento and speaks of a fever both real and metaphorical as she describes how objects, deliciously identified, labeled and placed acquire the status of relics in their archivization. The process of archivization, her quote by Álvaro Fernández Bravo underscores, establishes “a memory of things […] that can synthesize a trajectory where material culture was used as a body capable of encapsulating time, inscribing it on the surface of things and imprinting on it intangible properties.” As Daria Berman shows in “El criptojudaísmo en el siglo 17” those properties assigned to the accumulation of documents become legal proofs of constructed arguments that need to be read carefully to reveal the preconceived ideologies that shape them and sustain them.
The response to those ideologies within and without the archive can be read through many of the articles in this dossier. James Fernández, for example, while talking in “Dreaming Wide Awake in the Archives” about the historical importance of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives—ALBA, housed at NYU’s Tamiment Library—reminds us that “‘Setting the record straight’ is often the driving force behind the creation of the archives.” And Maritza Rico, in “Emotional Archiving for Community Organizing,” begins her writing thus: “Creating personal and collective archives for identity forming and memory keeping should maintain as a goal the preservation of a history of resistance, resilience, and survival.” We must remember, indeed, as Zeb Tortorici does in “Sex in the Archives: Desire in the Fales Library & Special Collections,” the need to observe how “the very structure, organization, and classification system of any particular library or archive simultaneously prejudices and privileges particular forms of knowledge.” With this knowledge comes the possibility of power, and it is this possibility that lies in the foundation of The Archivo de la Memoria Trans, a virtual place to share anecdotes, photos, testimonies, letters and police chronicles of the Argentinean Trans and Travesti communities, presented here by Ana Gabriela Álvarez and the members of AMT. AMT works against the hegemonic, heteronormative structure of the archive, its static quality and towards conceiving the archive as “potencia en mutación.” Indeed, AMT is an archive organized as a cooperative where members take over the spaces of production and legitimation of knowledge. By contrast, photographer Nelson Morales, in Mexico, embeds himself as the I and the eye in the world of muxes as he allows them to perform various elements of their identity.
It might do us well to remember that historically the body, as repository and transmitter of knowledge, could be considered as the first archive; in this sense, our dossier shows a return to the body as a site of archivization. In “Hacer memoria con gestos,” Marie Bardet explores how dancers use their bodies and their gestures to traverse and be traversed by the corpus of images, videos, words, designs, drawings, oral and written interviews that inhabit dance archives and, by so doing, they invoke, evoke and go through the materiality of the past and make it present. In this sense, Bardet tells us, dance demands that our bodies engage in a seismography of the tensions that inhabit the archives. She explores how movement produced through dance can transport an audience to distant temporal or spatial realms by transmitting materials and materiality between the past and the present, by moving into, through, and beyond the archive. Lourdes Dávila challenges us to consider the implications that this conceptualization has for our understanding of the encounter between philosophy, politics and the body. Her essay, “Marie Bardet y el registro de los cuerpos en movimiento” inquires about the simultaneity of action and archivization in the corporeal present.
Nevertheless, material records continue to serve as significant repositories of information.
Cristina Anillo, Casilda García López, and Abigail Weinberg offer insight into how books, songs, and historical documents can transmit knowledge. In “Activismo a través afecto,” Anillo considers how, by documenting the story of Argentine mothers who lost their children during the military dictatorship, the 1992 publication of Círculos de locura: Madres de la Plaza de Mayo preserves and transports a unique political history across time. García López’s “Canciones para después de una transición” recognizes this same capacity in works by Quintero, León y Quiroga, noting the ability of song to carry and carry bodies through political conflict in a highly emotive manner. The potential for encounters with the archive both to move and inform us is the central theme of “Working with Archives.” Reflecting on her experience at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island, Weinberg outlines how her engagement with the archive sparked joy in the form of curiosity. This ultimately served as the animating force for her endeavor to trace the archive.
The fruits of this undertaking are outlined by Ezequiel Amador, Maritza Rico, and Zeb Tortorici. In “Fotos de la familia y la identidad colectiva” Amador explains that by tracing the archive we can uncover a narrative that shapes our identity. Drawing on the exposure of Azucena (Norma Elia Cantú’s protagonist in Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera) to photos of her mother, he illustrates how photographs can be of aid in contextualizing one’s history. Maritza Rico echoes this claim and
celebrates the potential for the affective archive to function as a solidarity regime. She sheds light on a case where tracing the archive with the aim of democratizing knowledge can serve as a powerful force for translenguaje and cross-border collective identity building. Zeb Tortorici describes the “radical potential” that archival holdings, such as those he encountered through his research at NYU’s Fales Library & Special Collections, contain. He reports that in these holdings, one can find “the raw materials from which ‘history’ itself can be conceptualized, narrated, and written in the past, present, and future.”
The temporal dimensions of the archive are a central element of Diana Taylor’s “The Archive and the Many Lives of Performance”. Diana Taylor, the founding force behind the Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library for NYU’s Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, grapples with the archive as she considers how ephemeral actions and performances can be kept and shared. Taylor invites us to trace the life of a performance from its initial ephemeral enactment to its possible reenactments and readings. She argues that preserving performance in digital repositories is a political act that creates an indeleble link between the past and present by giving the live enactment a tangible afterlife. Irina Troconis expounds on this temporal linearity in “Spectral Remains: Under Hugo Chávez’s Gaze.” She describes the archival traces that saturate the urban landscape of Caracas as “fragments of the past that linger in the present and that lead an animated afterlife.” James Fernández joins this conversation as he makes a case for tracing the archive as a means of critically engaging with our own futures. In his article, he draws upon his encounters with primary sources from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, noting that the archive is inherently tainted by “its own history, its own agenda, its own unmarked omissions and silences.” In light of this, tracing the archive becomes an exercise in interpretation and intervention with the objective of shaping both the present state of our collective identity (as Azucena and the translenguaje and cross-border groups were able to do), as well as its future trajectory.
In “Habitar cómo huella de vida: los objetos y la humanidad más allá de la ley”, Antalya Jano recognizes an opportunity to broaden our communal understanding of penitentiary life by filling the unmarked omissions and silences in the archive of which Fernández writes. Analyzing the photography of Eduardo Lalo and Mauricio del Pino, Jano remarks that there is a potent history within the jail’s physical structure that is overlooked when narratives of those who reside within the walls are silenced. She suggests that by integrating these narratives within the collective, we can forge connections with a population that has historically been marginalized from society. Simran Motiani makes a case for intervening in the archive in “Archiving the Black Mammy: Discoveries and Challenges Encountered with Racist Memorabilia.” Alluding to the power dynamics underpinning the creation of the archive, she notes that discriminatory representations (such as the one provided for America’s beloved Aunt Jemima), can transmit the prejudices of those who control the institutions of recording. This can have a profound impact on the integrity of the knowledge we readily embrace, warranting intervention in the interest of promoting a historically authentic collective identity.
Ariana Ávila openly shares Motiani’s concern over prejudiced institutions of recording in her writing. As she draws on observations from her visits to the Javier Puerta Museum of Anatomy and the National Museum of Anthropology in “La representación del cuerpo femenino en los museos y sus implicaciones,” Ávila cautions that the sculptures and portraits of women that we readily admire are often socially and politically constructed representations of gender. Analyzing the overt absences in the Spanish historical record under the Franco dictatorship in “La residencia,” Kira J. Burkhauser offers a constructive means of engaging with prejudiced archives. She assures us that in the same manner that a negative of a photo is able to disclose substantial information, the physical absences in the archive can still produce meaning. The challenge is simply to trace the meanings that can bring new life to the archive.
Like several other contributors to this issue of Esferas, Andermann’s “La ausencia fulgurante: archivos virales en Restos y Cuatreros de Albertina Carri” pushes us to recognize that the archive is not a mere artifact of history, but an element that is very much alive. If it is true, as Andermann explains while quoting Usai, that archival destruction runs parallel to the act of archivization (a statement that becomes even more true in the case of the medium of film with which Andermann is working, as the medium itself is marked by its own destructiveness) it is also equally true that the return to the archive bears the promise of discovering another narrative that can only be made available by intervening in history as we trace the archive.
