Periodic Reporting for period 1 - TRANS.ARCH (Archives in Transition: Collective Memories and Subaltern Uses)
Période du rapport: 2020-09-01 au 2023-08-31
In the field of memory studies, there is a broad consensus that interrogating and amplifying national and transnational politics of memory can strengthen democratic structures. Discussions around the politics of memory reveal the centrality of archives, especially when it comes to the experiences and the knowledge of subaltern groups, historically excluded from public debates. TRANS.ARCH focuses on a relatively unexplored dimension of this field, namely the different political, judicial, cultural, and artistic uses of the archives deployed by migrant groups and sexual dissidents in Europe and Latin America.
In sum, TRANS.ARCH sustains a network of young and experienced researchers who have been examining the current functions and uses of archives in the context of globalization. While the transatlantic structure of the consortium of institutions involved in the project encourages a comparative analysis of the European and Latin American contexts, the innovative focus on the uses of archives by migrants and sexual dissidents has demanded that researchers create a new transdisciplinary approach, with a strong gender perspective.
We have made progress in the analysis of the artistic, cultural and political production of different minorized collectives. Furthermore, we have launched the creation of new archives: AREIA and AWOC. A general synthesis should be appreciated: the importance of renew the efforts towards the construction of the archives and their digitization. In this sense, we believe that archives that address the migration issues and diverse linguistic corpora in terms of methodology demand the work of a multinational research team. The analysis of these archives also requires elaboration of metadata in various languages covering not only the transcripts, but also the translations in order to share the documents with a wider academic audience and with general public.
The work carried out in these thematic areas can be characterized by a double perspective. On the one hand, there is the development of archival practices (editing and curating the archives and texts; philological sorting and curating of these documents, their digitization and dissemination), on the other hand, the theorical approach that consider these practices. We have analysed and restored the importance of aesthetics and ethics in terms of archives’ construction and their publicizing through artistic exhibitions and cultural activities. We have also developed a theoretic and methodological prototype for the digital construction of scattered archives based on the experience with the archive of Rubén Darío. This being the case, we focus on the philological curating, digital centralization, construction of multilingual metadata and the ethics of a collaborative work.
The project has had a noticeable impact in our societies through the work with little known or totally unknown documents, which were thus incorporated into existing or new archives, adding thus new sources. A case in point is the papers and works of art created by Argentine artist Miguel Ángel Lens. During his lifetime he was barely known as a poet and as a a gay and anarchist activist. Once he passed, his small circle of queer friends kept and guarded his private papers, letters, books and experiments in visual arts. After hearing about the interest of UNTREF in documents and archives, and after getting to know Trans.Arch as a broader collaborative project, they decided to donate the state of Miguel Ángel Lens to UNTREF’s archive. All the documents and works contained in the state were then classified, organized and given archival form. They were later digitized and made available to researchers and the broader public. Researchers from Trans.Arch were also behind the publishing of a volume of poetry by Miguel Ángel Lens and the discussion of his life and work in academic journals and in the press. After this initial circulation outside the precincts of academic institutions, researchers from Trans.Arch decided to curate an exhibition based on the visual production of Miguel Ángel Lens, opening then his state, for the first time, to a broader examination by a very wide audience of students, artists, activists, writers, and curious citizens.
We plan to continue strengthening this line of action, and this committed way of creating and sustaining archives, both as repository and as treasure of resources and materials for different creative and political projects. We believe that in this way we will be contributing to the politics of memory already deployed by migrants and sexual minorities, and hence to an amplification of their voices in our public spheres, which in turns will strengthen their presence as full citizens in our changing societies.