Terremoto's "First Notes for a Proposal for the Decolonization of the Archive"
Archivos Fuera de Lugar publication image courtesy of t-e-e.org.
Check out curator Sofia Carrillo on Terremoto Magazine— “First Notes for a Proposal for the Decolonization of the Archive” from the 2019 #ArchivosFueraDeLugar held in Mexico City.
See the Archivos Fuera De Lugar 2019 publication in Spanish
View videos from the 2017 conference in Spanish
Carrillo expands: “In the first meeting, we were interested in discussing the concept of custody. It was vital to articulate how, from the point of view of the institution and as subjects, we were asking ourselves about the limits between guarding and possessing a collection, recognizing that the means and actions of doing so should be initiatives for the activation of memory in which we no longer continue to encourage the extraction, deterritorialization, and imprisonment of these documents. But this question also led us to recognize from where it is that the discourses of art history are inscribed and what the value of the archive is, not only as a source of information but also as a material asset for institutions. After broadening the question of custody, other questions arose about the characteristics that institutions attribute to archives, the way in which individuals develop a conceptualization of those funds and collections, how the above conditions the assignment of thesaurus, its consequences both in the visibility and in the obliteration of memory, as well as in the quest for methodologies that activate the archive.”