Workshops

The archive–memory relationship is proposed as a dilemma. On the one hand, we can ask ourselves how to make present what is absent and how to exhume the memory that is buried and blurred. On the other hand, the archive is not a set of documents that a culture keeps as a memory of the past; in reality, the form of the archive is a creation of meaning; it is a discourse, a narrative through which those who create the file, state or structure some uses of memory.

The Personal and Community, Archives and Memories project, began in Bogotá City in 2014 during a workshop given to older women with a National Stimuli for Young Creators scholarship I received from the Ministry of Culture of Colombia. During those months of work, they taught me and transmitted a large part of the knowledge that they had generated, processed, and improved for decades. However, as has been traditional with women’s history, that knowledge is lost, hidden, or blurred. This led me to rethink how academia or any system of writing history selects the events considered significant and gives meaning to an idea of a nation, homeland, country, or even history itself.

From then on, the objective of this project has been to generate methodologies that allow people and communities to claim historical processes of which they have been actively part, as witnesses or as protectors of some memory asset. During the workshop, the archival form and structure are used to generate representation processes in which attendees appropriate, use, and process their memories.