Archives of the Commons IV

The encounter is articulated around three thematic strands:

1. Archive of Life – Archives of/in a Pandemic
This strand touches on the processes of memory built from the minimum and the constrained, but which affects quotidian frontiers; intimate life narrating itself upon discovering the world and which defines the contours of a political landscape through biographical expression. What type of daily jobs involve the sustainability and maintenance of archives? In what way are the intimate relationships sustaining them articulated?

The vitality of archives means not only an investment in energies maintaining their programmes and protecting their materiality with an infrastructure — ways of organising the common life that archives uphold and their dynamics — but also the ways in which archive affects life itself and is redefined by the relationships with common life policies.     

2. Archives of/in Revolt
In recent years, feminist, plurinational, anti-racist and popular flare-ups, tides and protests have broken out in different latitudes, defining new ways of making politics, visual grammar and recording experiences. How is an open revolt documented? How is the memory of these uprisings that alter the modes of visibility and listening supported, cared for and developed? Putting forward archives as a possibility, a desire and a practice over the course of open historical revolts and those to come forms the line of research in this strand.

3. Fiction Futures – Archive Fictions
What conditions are required to modify the way in which we perceive time? What kind of effects can be foreseen from the implementation of new artefacts of memory? The languages entrenched in communities name common experiences contextually, but are also subjected to the wear and tear entailed in their use and their submission to patterns and processes. Thus, the utterance of common events may be unable to name the uncommon, or draw imaginatively or with poetic gestures, or even fictional operations, small flashes of the future on the horizon of time. Flashes which represent the ways in which resistant gestures, repairs and the distribution of different and historically silenced memories, or the recording of fragile and lesser processes which hold within future powers, are organised.

Diego Aillapan Callejas is a professor of history who lives in Lo Hermida, a neighbourhood located in the current Peñalolén commune in Santiago de Chile, Chile. He is a member of the Lo Hermida Workshop of Popular Memories, and the Nucleus of Popular Social History from the Historical Sciences Department at the University of Chile.

Ramiro Álvarez is a graphic designer and professor. He studied at the University of Buenos Aires, where he specialised in Communication Design Theory and where he currently works as an associate professor on the Graphic Design degree course. He participates in university extension projects and in collective art exhibitions with the project La Escofina. Moreover, he contributed to the Archives of the Commons II publication (2020) as a designer and illustration, in addition to other publications. 

Leslie Araneda coordinates the Digital Archive Area and is a member of the working table of Londres 38, memory space. She studied to be a librarian and documentalist at the Universidad Tecnológica Metropolitana, Santiago de Chile, and earned a diploma in Democracy and Politics of Memory at the Institute of Advanced Studies from the  Universidad de Santiago de Chile (IDEA-USACH). Since 2011, she has worked with organisations tied to memory and collectives of survivors of political imprisonment and torture. 

Sonja Bezjak is a sociologist. She works in the social science data archives of the University of Ljubljana, where she is an assistant lecturer. In 2013, she created the Museum of Madness in an old asylum for the mentally ill in her hometown of Trate, in Slovenia, and her interests have a strong focus on social justice and environmental justice.

Lucia Bianchi is a visual artist and teacher who studied at the National University of the Arts, (UNA), Buenos Aires, Argentina. She incorporates diverse contemporary poetics, particularly graphic art, in her practices, and carries out transdisciplinary work and is part of different art collectives. Since 2018, she has been part of the Southern Conceptualisms Network, where she coordinates the publications node of the pasafronteras publisher.    

Javiera Brignardello Cornejo holds a degree in Hispanic Arts and is studying an MA in Latin American Art, Thought and Culture in the Institute of Advanced Studies from the University of Santiago de Chile. She has conducted research into and published work on the Communist Party’s theatre company, Teatro del Pueblo, in 1960s Chile. She is also a member of the Arde project.

Sara Buraya Boned works in Museo en Red (Museum Network), an area belonging to the Museo Reina Sofía’s Public Activities Department, and, since 2013, she has supported the institution’s cultural programmes, public activities and collaboration networks in different ways. Her research and institutional work are intersected by her engagement with feminisms, care policies, urban commons, archive and the memory of social movements and critical institutionality. She also coordinates the L’Internationale European Confederation of Museums and is a member of the L’Internationale Online editorial board, in addition to being part of the Institute of Radical Imagination (IRI).     

Damián Cabrera is a writer, researcher, cultural manager and curator, and the author of fictional texts, narrative essays and critical pieces, with his works of fiction, like his essays, focusing on research into the situation in the Triple Frontier, specifically the border between Paraguay and Brazil. He is part of the Ediciones de la Ura collective, the research group Estudos Culturais: Identidades e Cultura Política from the University of São Paulo, and the International Association of Art Critics, Paraguay (AICA-Paraguay). He currently coordinates the Documentation and Research Department at the Visual Arts Centre/Museo del Barro and the Southern Conceptualisms Network.

Graciela Carnevale is an artist and teacher at the Faculty of Humanities from the University of Rosario, Argentina. She was an active participant in Rosario’s avant-garde scene in the 1960s and in 1968 she organised the Experimental Art Series and was part of the collective work Tucumán Arde, conceived as a counter-information device with the aim of revealing the economic and social situation in the Tucumán province during that period. In 1978, she was awarded a British Council grant for post-graduate studies in London. Since 1994, she has been part of Grupo Patrimonio, organising exhibitions, collective actions and urban interventions, and in 2003, with artist Mauro Machado, she founded El Levante in the city of Rosario, an independent initiative including workshops, exhibitions and artists’ residencies. She is part of the Southern Conceptualisms Network.

Millaray Castillo Caripan is a feminist activist and Mapuche resident of Lo Hermida, a neighbourhood located in the current Peñalolén commune in Santiago de Chile, Chile. She is also a member of the Lo Hermida Workshop of Popular Memories.

Diego Cazar Baquero is a journalist, teacher and singer. He is the director and managing editor of the digital magazine La Barra Espaciadora and the co-founder and a member of the editorial board on the magazine LATE. He was awarded the 2019 Jorge Mantilla Ortega National Prize and was a finalist in the Gabo Prize, also in 2019, with the research project Frontera cautiva (Captive Frontier), carried out by twenty journalists from three countries, and a semi-finalist in the same Gabo Prize edition for his series of reports entitled: Abacá: esclavitud moderna en los campos de Ecuador (Abacá: Modern Slavery in the Fields of Ecuador), a work co-produced with the journalist Susana Morán. He is also a founding member of the Periodistas Sin Cadenas (Journalists without Chains) Foundation.    

Moira Cristiá is a researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council, Argentina (CONICET) and the Gino Germani Research Institute from the University of Buenos Aires, where she is part of the Study Group on Art, Culture and Politics in Recent Argentinian History. She holds a degree in History from the National University of Rosario, and an MA and PhD in History and Civilisations from l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. She has been a member of the Southern Conceptualisms Network since 2016 and coordinated their archive node from 2018 to 2020.  

Lía Colombino earned an MA in Museum Studies from the University of Valladolid, and between 2001 and 2008 she was part of the seminars Identidades en Tránsito (Identities in Transit) and Estudios de Crítica Cultural (Studies of Cultural Critique) in the Visual Arts Centre/Museo del Barro (Asunción, Paraguay), where she directs the Museo de Arte Indígena section. Since 2009, she has been part of the Southern Conceptualisms Network and coordinates the seminar Space/Critique. She is co-founder of the Ediciones de la Ura collective and, since 2000, has coordinated the writing workshop Abrapalabra. At the present time, she serves as director of the Advanced Art Institute from the National University of Asunción, where she also lectures.

Javier Couretot is an agricultural engineer specialised in urban agroecological development to implement and consolidate local agri-food systems centred on social inclusion. This development is carried out via participatory, pluri-epistemological and transdisciplinary focal points. He has also carried out post-graduate studies on medical plants and agroecology, and, since 2009, has been part of the Urban Agriculture Programme (PAU), from the Rosario Local Council, Argentina. He is also part of teaching teams on post-graduate and university extension courses specialised in agroecology and urban agriculture.       

Adolfo Corts worked as a sound engineer for a producer covering sporting events, an experience that first brought him into contact with Argentina’s different sounds and landscapes. He would later go on to contribute to FM Aire Libre community radio, where he started to produce the early materials of what he defines as “sound journalism”. These two experiences gave rise to his passion for recording sounds as memory in an urban landscape.  

Magui Dávila lives and works in Madrid, where she coordinates the independent publishing house Las Lindas Pobres and oversees the production and programming of electronic music events and the label Semantica Records. She curated the programme Picnic Sessions in the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (CA2M) in 2016, 2017 and 2018, collaborates in the image production for the She Makes Noise festival in La Casa Encendida and is part of the performance group Net-Out. She is currently studying her PhD in Art, Literary and Cultural Studies at the Autonomous University of Madrid. Moreover, she is part of deleteD, a techno sound duo with which she has conducted research in the Museo Reina Sofía Study Centre. 

Ángeles Donoso Macaya is an educator and researcher. She is a professor of Latin American Literature and Visual Culture at the State University of New York (CUNY) and coordinates the project Common Archives: Practices/Knowledge/Migrant Memories, which is part of the seminar on Public Participation and Collaborative Research from the Graduate Center at the same university. Her research areas include the theory and history of Latin American photography, the production of counter-archives and activism for human rights and feminisms.  

Elisa Fuenzalida is a Peruvian researcher, writer and activist with an MA in Advanced Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the Complutense University of Madrid. Her career as a researcher focuses on developing critical methodologies applied to gender, race and territory, and she has worked as a carer for children and the elderly in Spain during the COVID-19 health crisis. She collaborates in the Aníbal Quijano Chair, curated by Rita Segato, in the Museo Reina Sofía. She is currently a research fellow at the Study Centre with the work El futuro era tu cuerpo: memorias de duelo y cuidado en las comunidades trans travestis del Perú en los años 90`s (The Future Was Your Body. Memories of Grief and Care in Transvestite Trans Communities in 1990s Peru), with artist Javier Vargas, inside the framework of the “Our Many Europes” residencies organised by Museo Reina Sofía and L’Internationale.   

Karolina Gembara is a photographer and researcher, and a member of Sputnik Photos and The Archive of Public Protests (APP) in Poland. She writes about the agency of photography, and its repressive and emancipatory potential, political action and visual protest. She also teaches photography, visual activism and artistic cooperation. 

Rosemary Grennan co-directs the MayDay Rooms archive. Her concerns revolve around developing platforms and practices of collective participation with historical material, and recently she has been working with 0x2620 Berlin to create a collaborative repository aligned with ephemeral materials of radical politics called leftove.rs.

Pía Gutiérrez Díaz holds a PhD in Literature. She chiefly researches, writes and teaches on the link between art, literature, archives and community, and has been part of literary archive and theatre projects in Chile and has worked sustainedly on the discussion around archive policies. She is a lecturer at the University of Chile and is part of the research team in charge of the First National Registry of Performing Arts Archives. She is also a member of the Arde Project.

Antonio Kadima is a visual artist. Since 1977, he has directed the Tallersol Cultural Centre and the Memories of Resistance Archive. In the 1970s and 1980s, he was part of the Graphic Art Workshop and actively participated in the cultural resistance to the civil-military dictatorship in Chile.   

Antonio Lattuca is an agricultural engineer with an MA in Agroecology and Sustainable Development. He is a pioneer of agroecology in Argentina and since the 1990s has coordinated the Rosario Urban Agriculture programmes and advocated community parks-allotments. Today he is a local and international reference point in food sovereignty and citizen participation from agroecology.

Lucho Lemos is a specialist in agroecological agriculture. He is one of the founders of the  Ñanderoga Seed Bank, which he also coordinates. For many years he has worked in the production and adaptation of seeds, which he conditions and packages to be distributed and used. 

Maria Mallol works in Museo en Red (Museum Network), an area belonging to the Museo Reina Sofía’s Public Activities Department. Her professional experience spans the coordination and justification of cultural cooperation projects in the sphere of museums, the promotion of performing arts and the coordination of audiovisual series. She has also worked at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Netherlands, Teatros del Canal, Madrid, and in the Centre de Cultura Contemporània (CCCB), Barcelona.  

Erica Malunguinho is a professor of Aesthetics and Art History. She previously worked as an educator, trainer and cultural agent, and is the founder and manager of the Aparelha Luzia space, a centre devoted to Black arts, cultures and politics, also visible as an aesthetic-political installation, affectivity zone and a biome of Black intelligence. She also makes works in myriad artistic languages. After Brazil’s elections in October 2018, when she was elected a state representative for São Paulo, she became the first trans person to be elected to a State Congress in Brazil.

Javiera Manzi is a sociologist, archivist at the University of Chile, independent researcher, curator, teacher and feminist activist. She has specialised in researching issues that cross art and politics, memory, and the visual culture of social movements, and is currently conducting research into the muralist brigades in exile and putting together a book on cultural coordinators in Chile during the 1970s and 1980s.

Diego Marchante (Genderhacker) is a transfeminist activist and audiovisual artist who holds a PhD in Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona and, since 2007, has worked as a lecturer at the same university and the International University of Barcelona (UNIBA). Between 2008 and 2010, he conducted the Programme of Independent Studies (PEI) at MACBA. In 2016, he finished his PhD thesis Transbutch. Luchas fronterizas de género entre el arte y la política (Transbutch. Gender Frontier Struggles Between Art and Politics), an archive of social movements and artistic practices exploring gender issues in the context of Spain from a queer and transfeminist perspective. With his research project Gendernaut. Queering the ‘90s he has been a research resident in the Museo Reina Sofía Study Centre, inside the framework of the “Our Many Europes” residencies organised by the Museo and L’Internationale.  

pantxo ramas is a researcher and activist. He coordinates the Documentation Centre Oltre il Giardino, managed by the La Collina cooperative in collaboration with the Mental Health Department and with the "Franco Basaglia" Permanent Conference For Mental Health in the World, which has set out to support processes of emancipation around mental health since 2010, where he is also an active member. Moreover, since 2014 he has been part of Entrar Afuera, a militant research collective on care practices in southern Europe. 

Rita Rato Fonseca is a political scientist with a degree in Political Science and International Relations from Universidade Nova de Lisboa. She was a member of the Assembly of the Portuguese Republic (2009–2019), and coordinated the parliamentary group of the Education, Science and Culture Commission, as well as being on the Committee of Social Affairs and the Equality Subcommittee. She has created teaching content for textbooks in the areas of Citizenship and Development, and has been director of Museu do Aljube Resistência e Liberdade, in Lisbon, since August 2020.  

Georgina Ricci holds a Fine Arts degree from the National University of Rosario (UNR), where she is also a lecturer. She works at the crossroads between contemporary art, cultural management and publishing, and has propelled Ediciones Castagnino+MACRO, the self-managed project Anuario. Registro de acciones artísticas, and the publishers Éditions du cochon and Yo soy Gilda. She is part of the Friends Association of Publicación Independiente Experimental (AAPIE). Moreover, she is a researcher at the Institute of Critical Studies in Humanities from the National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina (CONICET).

Carolina Saavedra is an educator at Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture (New York), a non-profit organisation that champions a healthy and sustainable food system, and a sous-chef in La Morada, a restaurant and activist centre funded by her family in the Bronx. Her work is fuelled by ancestral knowledge received in San Miguel Ahuehuetitlán, Oaxaca, where she studied Mixteca culinary traditions, and her training in the International Culinary Centre (ICC). Furthermore, she has taught in museums such as The Bronx Museum of the Arts and The MET, and is also in charge of the Bruckner Mott Haven garden and is the creator of Brewing Memories, one of the cores of Archives in Common (…).

Ana Sánchez Mina is a researcher. From a perspective of militant commitment, she traces political experiences, reflecting on the current forms of resistance to neoliberalism, the creation and mix of open languages and spaces and connections for the commons. Her political and life interests are tied to urban resistance, experiences of self-organisation, self-management and social economy, as well as feminist struggles and gazes. Her political experience is rooted primarily in the last two decades of struggle in Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood, and she is currently developing research around the memory of the El Laboratorio social centre, a self-managed endeavour which took place in Lavapiés between 1997 and 2003.

Cynthia Shuffer is a researcher, teacher and photographer who holds a PhD in American Studies at the Institute of Advanced Studies from the Universidad de Santiago de Chile (IDEA-USACH). She was selected for Fondart Nacional funding in 2018 (inside the line of research in Photography for Hora cero. Democracia en Chile. Investigación y recuperación producción fotográfica Kena Lorenzini 1990-1994) [Zero Hour. Democracy in Chile. Kena Lorenzini Research and Photographic Production Recovery 1990–1994]) and the programme FONDECYT 2018 (with Tortura: concepto y experiencia [Torture: Concept and Experience]). She is the co-founder of Rufián Revista, coordinator of the archive node of the Southern Conceptualisms Network and coordinator of the Laura Rodig Brigade of the 8M Feminist Coordinator in Chile.  

Emilia Yang is an activist, artist-researcher and director of AMA and No Olvida — Museum of Memory Against Impunity in Nicaragua. Her research interests and artistic practice explore the role of memory in the political imagination and the creation of participatory and interdisciplinary projects through archives, digital media, films, games and urban interventions. She is a PhD candidate in Visual Arts and Interdisciplinary Practices at the School of Cinematic Arts, from the University of Southern California.

Adam Zuliani works on Radio Fragola (Trieste and Gorizia, Italy) community radio for mental health issues and activists, where he also coordinates the Radio Attiva programme in the Oltre il Giardino Documentation Centre. His work encompasses audio editing, via audio and video streaming management on the radio, and more organisational and artistic tasks. He is a founding member of Area 174, Gorizia, and has also gained experience as a teacher of contemporary music history inside the framework of the project Palimpsest for Inclusion.