10.17. Archives in Motion: From Photography to Performance [ES/EN]

The Malvinas War, which took place in 1982 between Argentina and the United Kingdom is the last major armed conflict of the 20th century fought under a colonial enclave. In Argentina, the Malvinas issue remains a central point of debate in terms of sovereignty, due to the trauma of war it inflicted on a large part of the population and because it was the event that brought an end to the Argentine civic military dictatorship. In the 21st century Argentine culture, numerous works emerged and explored representations of collective and personal memory surrounding this conflict. The research question that guides this work is: How has the memory of the Malvinas War been represented in film, literature, theater, and other cultural productions in recent years?. Based on a critical and interpretive analysis of various cultural objects, the aim of this work is to analyze how diverse aesthetic approaches, using archival material, the intersections between documentary and fiction, and intermediality (between film, literature, theater, and performance), allow us to consider various connections between art, the past, collective memory and postmemory regarding the Malvinas War. These cultural productions demonstrate a paradigm shift in how this formative event of national identity in our country is revisited in contemporary culture. I believe this paradigm shift is linked to a generational change among both artists and those who engage with the protagonists of these events (veterans, family members, nurses, islanders, etc.). This change is evident not only in the content of public accounts of the Malvinas War but also in the way these accounts are transmitted to create narratives where emotions take on political meaning, and where, rather than an epic account of the war, we find a more hesitant one, open to new questions and interpretations of the traumatic past.

This paper examines the photographs taken by Anna Turbau in 1977 at the Conxo Psychiatric Hospital (Santiago de Compostela), during Spain’s transition to democracy. These images—kept unpublished for decades—constitute what may be called a dispossessed archive: the visual trace of lives erased from the democratic narrative. The research asks how photographic representations of psychiatric institutions during Spain’s political transition challenge dominant narratives of democracy and human rights, and how they might contribute to a critical memory of the excluded. The study adopts a qualitative and interpretive methodology grounded in visual and memory studies, combining close visual analysis with theoretical perspectives from Foucault, Basaglia, and Didi-Huberman. It situates Turbau’s photographs within the broader anti-psychiatry movement and the countercultural visual field of the 1970s, while also considering their later curatorial reactivation in Poéticas de la democracia (Museo Reina Sofía, 2018). This dual approach allows the paper to explore both the historical conditions of production and the contemporary politics of display. The findings suggest that Turbau’s images transform the psychiatric hospital—an archetype of disciplinary confinement—into a site of symbolic resistance. Her intimate and restrained gaze rehumanizes those rendered invisible by dictatorship and early democracy, revealing the affective and ethical complexity of witnessing vulnerability. By reactivating these images within current debates on democratic memory, the paper argues that photography can foster a politics of care and dissent, where the fragile and the forgotten become central to the unfinished project of democracy.

In the opening minutes of the theatrical performance Tapajós by Brazilian artist Gabriela Carneiro da Cunha, the audience is enveloped in near-total darkness. Only the head-mounted torches of the two performers illuminate large basins filled with a liquid in which photographs are being developed. Meanwhile, watery sounds and laughter-like human voices echo through the space. The emerging images seem to respond to those sounds: photographs of bodies in the river, submerged, floating, moving. This opening scene condenses a set of procedures that structure Tapajós and will be the focus of my presentation. Through its figuration and staging of the inextricable entanglements between bodies and territories—particularly between the Tapajós River and the Munduruku community—the piece continually foregrounds the material conditions that sustain its artistic elaboration, as well as the ethical and political implications that arise from them. In doing so, the performance constructs an archive of the community’s present, assembling photographs, sound recordings, and laboratory analyses that measure mercury levels in the bodies of community members. This living archive is shaped by the ongoing struggle against gold extraction and its consequences for both aquatic and human bodies, while maintaining a constant awareness of its own position as an aesthetic practice and the reverberations of that stance. My paper examines the diverse procedures through which the piece builds an archive of the more-than-human community of the Tapajós, the violences to which it is subjected, and its forms of resistance. This archive attends to the material, spiritual, historical, and affective specificities of the community that generates it. As a result, a practice of memory emerges whose form is configured by the materiality and the history of the processes, bodies, and landscapes that sustain it—making the explicit acknowledgment of its own aesthetic intervention the defining mark of its form.

The Portuguese 20th century is inalienable with the longest authoritarian regime in Europe. Led by Salazar and Caetano, the Estado Novo regime ruled from 1933 until 1974. The day to day life of these 48 years is preserved both in the individual and familial memories of those that lived in that period and also in the collective memory of the country engraved in the national archives at Torre do Tombo. As time passes, the (re)construction process of that historical period is put into question. As such, this presentation seeks to understand how documentaries made on the information available in the archives and memories of this era can be used as sources for revisiting the historiography of the Estado Novo? Based on the criminal archives of political prisoners, this research takes the documentary Luz obscura (Dark Light) by the female Portuguese director Susana de Sousa Dias as corpus of analysis and a theoretical approach to media, memory and (micro)documentaries. Departing from a single photograph of a mother and child on the moment of their incarceration by P.I.D.E., a set of interviews of family members and images from the family home, combining darkness and silence, the documentary explores the individual, familial and collective remembrance of the events considering that "our memories remain collective and are remembered by others, even if we alone took part in the events or observed the things in question. In reality, we are never alone." (Halbwachs, 1990). The collective memory is build upon the individual and familial memory of the “actors”, questioning, yet again, the acts of the political police. Through content and image analysis this presentation aims to understand the potential that the mediated product documentary and the archives negotiate individual and family memories and contribute to the (re)construction of the national memory of the Estado Novo.

A partir da análise de cartões-postais enviados por João Antônio à família, investiga-se a escrita epistolar como gesto afetivo, profissional e literário, ancorado nas tensões entre intimidade e esfera pública. Com base nos estudos da cultura do arquivo (Jacques Derrida, Arlette Farge), da memória (Jeanne Marie Gagnebin, Joël Candau), dos afetos (Suely Rolnik) e da mobilidade (Néstor García Canclini), o trabalho insere os postais no conjunto de sua correspondência, iluminando aspectos do estar só, da autoimagem autoral, da circulação privada e da recepção pública. O acervo pessoal/familiar permite articular crítica genética, epistolografia e cultura visual, reposicionando João Antônio como autor-arquivo do seu momento ao estar no mundo.