Desfases del archivo, o Cómo construir la imagen desde la memoria (y no a la inversa). Tres casos de estudio

Abstract

The article gathers some of the ideas upon which Mela Dávila based her contribution to the seminary Memoria y desacuerdo: políticas del archivo, registro y álbum familiar (Huesca, October 20th-22nd, 2016). Through three case studies, Crónicas Mecas; Territorio archivo and Sammlung Mina Menz, by the German artist Gesa Lange, she considers how the notions of identity, archive and photography are influenced by the everyday act of picture taking. The first is a social project of family albums that the community of O Grove in Pontevedra is developing on Facebook. The second work began in Cerezales del Condado (León) and it is an online archive project. It compiles pictures from family albums that are organized by topics. This archive includes voices of the protagonists or their families, explaining the pictures they have contributed to the project. The last work is not strictly an archive, but an artists’ book that considers the notion of the passage of time, where classic ways of documenting the past (drawing and photography) are subverted. It is an abstract photographic chronicle, focused on the absence of the characters who once populated the scene under observation. The interaction of fields, disciplines and epistemological practices are shared aspects of these three projects, allowing us to relate photography to anthropology, sociology and personal memory.