We wish to highlight is the systematization of the theories and methodologies proper to the construction and curation of centralized digital archives. The prototype for these contributions dates back to the construction of the Archive around the work of Rubén Darío, initiated by UNTREF in 2016. The initiative sought to build a common virtual space to store and organize all the documents related to the writer. As Daniel Link and Rodrigo Caresani have clarified in a article devoted to this project (2018), the construction of this archive has enabled multiple actors and institutions to carry out a common archeology, to sustain an open and collaborative practice, and to establish a regime of spontaneous participation, one that implies unifying dispersed materials and combating the invisibility and inaccessibility that this dispersion provokes. We call this process of digital gathering of materials of the same nature - product of the collaboration between heterogeneous researchers and institutions - “centralization”. This criteria of digital organization and centralization has been replicated in our new project: Juan Rodolfo Wilcock Archive (AWOC).
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 believe that by creating and sustaining archives, as repository and as resources and materials for different creative and political projects, 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.
