Archives; Archival Fever
The archive as a concept holds an inherently dark and mysterious quality—these collections often sit in quiet obscurity, overlooked and untouched, until an artist or researcher stumbles upon them. The moment of discovery is akin to opening a crypt, releasing its hidden contents into the light. A cascade of stories, objects, and connections emerges, revealing truths that had long been forgotten or concealed. There is a thrilling and dangerous aspect to this process, as the act of unearthing an archive and recontextualizing its contents can lead to entirely new forms of knowledge—insights that often transcend the original purpose for which the archive was created.
When artists delve into an archive, they don't just present its contents; they transform, rearrange, and reimagine, crafting a narrative that captivates the audience in unexpected ways. This creative intervention has the power to challenge established norms about the use and sanctity of archival material, pushing boundaries and sparking questions about ownership, authenticity, and interpretation. In these moments, formalized regulations and protocols for handling archives often come to the fore, highlighting the tension between preservation and artistic freedom.
An archive is not just a static collection of the past but a living, untapped treasure waiting for the artist’s touch to give it new life. This potential for reinvention makes working with archives so exciting and perilous at times. Through the artist’s vision, archives become vessels of new knowledge and imagination, capable of reshaping how we understand history, memory, and meaning. This interplay embodies the tension between the infinite accumulation of data and the constraints imposed by its curated boundaries.
Archives, Archival Fever draws its name and inspiration from Jacques Derrida’s examination of our collective obsession with archives and the complexities surrounding them. This theme and other concepts by post-structuralists like Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault, and Barthes have detonated a departure point for a series of projects that engage deeply with archival practices, exploring how archives function as repositories of history and as intentional constructs with their narratives and implications. The practice of intervening archives thus intends to describe a new world, a new order where decontextualization, iteration, and the re-interpretations of documents create new understandings of layered meanings, originally unintended.
One of my most significant projects is Entrar Adentro, Salir Afuera, Salir Adentro, which enquired into the extensive CIRMA archive. I conducted an in-depth study of the anthropological theories of ladinization in Guatemala, as developed by the Chicago School of Anthropology. This project deeply engaged with archival material and explored how such archives reflect and shape socio-cultural understandings. The work was widely recognized, and I was invited to participate internationally in various exhibitions highlighting the intersection of historical documentation and critical analysis.
Entrar Adentro Salir Afuera Salir Adentro, CIRMA Archive
This ongoing project, initiated in 2012, is an artistic intervention into the Mejía ID Photo Collection housed at the Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica (CIRMA) in Antigua Guatemala. Through this project, I aim to explore the fluidity of cultural narratives and the contested spaces of identity, memory, and collective representation within the Latin American context. The intention is to make the archive’s content accessible, fluid, and open to reinterpretations, sparking new conversations about collective identity, cultural transformation, and the conditions of being Guatemalan.
ENTRAR ADENTRO SALIR AFUERA is rooted in a transdisciplinary approach. It aims to explore and reinterpret archival practices while engaging with socio-anthropological concepts of identity, cultural flux, and Latin American realities. By recontextualizing fragments of texts, names, words, and images extracted from the archive and socio-anthropological contextual frameworks, this work attempts to position itself as a re-conceptualization device, navigating between rigid binaries and contemporary cultural debates.
The work transforms the archival material into a dynamic constellation of interconnected elements, continuously reassembling meaning through projections, prints, books, and immersive displays. Through this fragmentation and reassembly process, I intend to extract, de-construct, and re-construct texts, names, images, and concepts from the archive, systematically reorganizing them in a rhizomatic display. This approach swings and swivels from the universal—the grand narrative of authorship—to the particular—the fragment—and back, opening conversations that challenge binaries and embrace multiplicity.
Presented in multiple formats, this project includes an artist’s book, public discussions, and multiform exhibitions that adapt to different media and environments, ranging from projections to printed matter and Xerox-based installations. Its flexible, evolving nature underscores its capacity to induce questions on how archival fragmentation and artistic interpretations can generate new narratives and meanings.
*Note 1: All content and artistic texts in the book are in Spanish / El contenido total de textos en este libro están trabajados en idioma Español, o bien en Castellano.
**Note 2: This research project is part of a total constellation of works which can be presented in a array of possibilities, while supports, sizes and media can vary (projections, prints, wall mounts, indoors/outdoors, xerox’s, etc). It includes an artist book, book presentations with discussions on the topics and multiform exhibition displays.
† This work has been included in several publications and exhibitions, including:
Guatemala from 33,000 km: Contemporary Art, 1960–Present (2017). Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, California, USA.
Solemne Edición No. 03 (2016). Guatemala.
Rudin Prize (2014). Norton Museum, Florida, USA
Tétano #00 (2014). Guatemala.
Artefactos 5º Edición (2013). Guatemala.
Entrar Afuera Salir Adentro Salir Afuera (2012). Palacio Nacional de la Cultura, Guatemala City.
Medical Experimental, The EYE “Dutch Film Institute’s” Archive
The Pharmacological Practice of Dr. Vanapuneberg (~5:00 mins) is a collaborative project created with Yvette Granata. Together, we worked with early Dutch ethnographic films depicting "the Cannibal Isles" and other South Pacific locations, re-cutting, re-focusing, and reconstructing the footage to craft an entirely new narrative. Using techniques akin to those employed by the original filmmakers, we engaged in a process of historical montage, zooming in on overlooked details and exploring the folds within these archival materials. This project became a way to question and reshape historical narratives, opening them to alternative interpretations and hidden possibilities.
In 2013, The “Medical Experimental” project unlatched a small drawer of The EYE “Dutch Film Institute’s” archive in order to research and survey on “Films once produced to discipline human bodies within the institutional framework of Western medicine, to educate and transmit medical knowledge now emerge within a larger framework of storytelling, art, truth and falsification.” For this project, a re-reading on Aby Warburg’s “A Lecture On The Serpent Ritual”, and Philippe-Alain Michaud reading on the afore mentioned, in his book: “Aby Warburg And The Image In Motion”, opened-up new venues to rethink the possibilities of how narratives contained in archives could be revisited and intervened today.
Narratives are constructions, a piecing together of frames, therefore, they can also be de-constructed and reconstructed, contextualized and re-contextualized in a new construction, as a possibility to expose aspects of their originally intended meanings. These conditions imply an altering in the relationships and the processes between the images, bringing an emphasis towards the importance on the use of imagery as language. Warburg’s lecture deals with the symbolic signification on the relation image-language, and consequently brings attention to the abstract operation of symbols in specific cultural contexts. Inexhaustible, throughout Michaud’s text we are presented with the notion of movement, composition or re-composition-ing and the juxtaposing of elements in order to construct and produce new meanings. In order to articulate these concepts in one coherent narrative, we propose utilizing the idea of the ‘moving picture’ as a metaphorical space where matters and thoughts could be joint and composed in one single place, in this case, the frame as a conceptual space of constant movement.
*Work presented at: The EYE “Dutch Film Institute’s” archive; “Medical Experimentation” Presented by the Rietveld Academie and the Universiteit van Amsterdam’s Media Studies department.
Las Brisas, Edificio Las Brisas Archive
Host to a complex of medical clinics, Edificio Las Brisas is a modern architectural landmark in Guatemala City. But besides this, it also hosts Guatemala's largest modern and contemporary private sculpture collection. In 2015 the owner-curator of Edificio Las Brisas commissioned three artists working with photography, to survey and produce visual work taking the location as inspiration source and work venue. The final output of the project concluded in a book publication.
For this project I focused first on experiencing the everyday of the common spaces; meaning transit of visitors, present objects (including benches, plants, chairs and sculpture), outlined trajectories, and the qualities of natural and available light. At some point while traversing in and through the location, it became almost inevitable to notice the implicit architectural politics of the space. During this surveying processes I made quick videos, wrote field notes, highlighted key words, made short poems; this process led me to produce a small theory on how I understood timely and spatiotemporal relations at the site.
Researching inside theoretical conceptions and creative process becomes fundamental in order to conceive employable strategies that enable me to produce artifacts or analogies that enter the realm of artistic representation. Before, and at the time of the shooting I was researching on Poesía Concreta and Dadaist collages, I am almost certain that that, had a direct effect on how I approached the image taking and making. Doing collages and text compositions became a consequence and an attempt to embody those concepts that I tried to grasp from my experience while surveying Las Brisas.
A Song for Empathy, at Breda Photo Festival
In Empathy, I engage with the paradoxical relationship between humanity’s capacity for compassion and the looming presence of destruction. The video is centered on an image of a nuclear explosion—appropriated from the vast digital archive of the internet through a simple screenshot—and paired with Amit Chatterjee’s haunting composition “Empathy,” which I remixed to align with the work’s intention. This juxtaposition reflects on the unsettling notion that humanity's last resort for maintaining peace is the implicit threat of nuclear obliteration.
The video invites contemplation of the fragile balance between fear and survival. It questions whether the empathy we show one another is genuine or merely a mechanism to ensure collective continuity. To me, authentic empathy arises only in the small, intimate actions we perform for those we love—a stark contrast to the broader, impersonal systems that govern global peacekeeping. The choice of a nuclear explosion, a symbol of ultimate destruction, underscores this tension, offering a stark reminder of the lengths we go to preserve a fragile world order.
At its core, Empathy reflects on the dualities of human existence: love and fear, connection and distance, creation and destruction. The haunting image and Chatterjee’s evocative melody come together to pose a profound question: Is our empathy genuine, or is it born from the shadow of annihilation? This work seeks to evoke a sense of unease and reflection, leaving the viewer to grapple with the complexities of human connection and survival in a world on the brink.
*Video-loop, Sound, Sizes and display formats variable, duration 4.10 min. Originally, this video projection is designed to be shown as an immersive installation in a complete dark room. The piece (8:00 min. edited as double loop) runs in a constant loop.
† This work has been included in the following exhibitions:
Specific installation for Breda-photo 2012. Museum of the Image, Breda, Netherlands.
The Artist Notebook: an Evolving Archive
The notebook is a non-pretentious place-space that reveals process, potentiality, and attempt–it is always the first step, the next step, and the last step. The notebook is the concoction lab–there is no failure, only a continuum. Each attempt in the artist’s notebook is more than a scribble; it is a struggle to reach a poetic gesture. Keeping field notes in notebooks is vital to constructing a personal archive; I see it more in the sense of something continuously happening–ungoverned and uncrystallized, embodying a living repository of thoughts, ideas, and reflections that organically increase over time.
These notes capture observation, imagination, and inquiry moments, forming and mutating into a record of my creative and intellectual quest. Adding, revisiting, and reformulating this personal archive allows me to witness my transformation, revealing how my perspectives have shifted and grown. Whenever I return to these field notes, I reorganize my mind, extracting content and concepts to reinterpret or repurpose them unexpectedly–reiterating concepts for contexts. Each page becomes a leaf; just as a tree’s growth reflects the passage of time, these notes accumulate layers of knowledge, insights, and reflections that enrich my practice. Some ideas may fall away, dry out, or fade, but new ones always emerge, adding to the archive’s richness and depth.
Almost all my projects have, in one way or another originated from the pages of my notebooks. I transform written notes into visual compositions, making text take on the qualities of an image and allowing images to read like text. This interplay reflects the ongoing dialogue within my notebooks, where thoughts evolve and merge, creating new expressions that challenge my conventional distinctions between word and image. I believe that a notebook is an essential companion for every artist—a space where unrestrained imagination can find a way to be visualized and recorded. Ultimately, the notebook is a material object with a sensual allure that invites reflection and personal connection.