Held on 29 Jun 2023
The Documents programme explores the relationships between art and publishing, addressing subjects that include the effects of archive on narratives of art history, the artist’s book and publishing as an artistic practice. This latest edition includes a conversation on the experience of Archivo Arkhé in recovering the historical memory of LGBT prior to 1969 and a visit to its new premises in Madrid. Founded in 2016 in Bogotá by Halim Badawi and Pedro Felipe Inestrosa, the space compiles publications and documents related chiefly to Latin American art and queer subject matter. Thus, Archivo Arkhé looks to establish itself as a documentation centre which is accessible to researchers interested in one or more of its strands, as well as granting visibility to its holdings via temporary exhibitions.
Institutions of memory — particularly art museums — often situate the dawn of the LGBT movement in the Stonewall riots in New York in 1969. Many of the leading figures (activists, artists, and so on) who drove this movement forward in the 1970s and 1980s are still alive and some of their archives are, either partially or entirely, in institutional or private repositories. Yet what happens with the history of sexual dissidence before this period, in the years stretching from 1869 to 1969? What happened to the archives of leading figures during this era preceding the LGBT movements that made headway? Were they dispersed or destroyed? Has the transformational step towards this world of activists been narrowed to a trace, a fragment? Documents 26. Queer Before Queer. Documentary Archaeologies in Archivo Arkhé seeks to explore these questions in greater depth.
Halim Badawi is a critic and curator specialised in Colombian and Latin American art from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the artistic director of Archivo Arkhé. He has curated exhibitions for institutions such as the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, the National University of Colombia and the Gilberto Alzate Avendaño Foundation in Bogotá. His most recent publications notably include Historia urgente del arte en Colombia. Dos siglos de arte en el país (Crítica, 2019).
Pedro Felipe Inestrosa is a lawyer who specialises in financial law, and is the executive director, co-founder and a trustee of Archivo Arkhé, dealing with the Foundation’s legal and administrative affairs.
6pm / Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
Conversation with Halim Badawi and Pedro Felipe Inestrosa
7:30pm / Archivo Arkhé (C/ Doctor Fourquet, 18)
Visit to Archivo Arkhé
Participants
Participants
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In the years of the Popular Unity Government in Chile, three young film-makers, Marilú Mallet, Valeria Sarmiento and Angelina Vázquez, went to the offices of Chile Films to present a film project. This session screens three films which convey the three directors’ experience of exile. In Dos años en Finlandia (Two Years in Finland), Angelina Vázquez depicts the social and working conditions of Chileans exiled in the Nordic country. The fictional work Lentement, directed by Marilú Mallet, follows a young Chilean exile around spaces of Montreal blighted by nostalgia and political rage. In Huellas (Fingerprints), Valeria Sarmiento returns to Chile to explore the memory of violence inflicted by Pinochet’s military dictatorship. The session culminates in a talk with the three directors, gathered here for the first time.
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This series is organised by equipoMotor, a group of teenagers, young people and older people who have participated in the Museo Reina Sofía’s previous community education projects, and is structured around four themed blocks that pivot on the monstrous.
This fourth and final session centres on films that take the museum away from its axis and make it gaze from the edges. Pieces that work with that which is normally left out: peripheral territories, unpolished aesthetics, clumsy gestures full of intent. Instead of possessing an institutional lustre, here they are rough, precarious and strange in appearance, legitimate forms of making and showing culture. The idea is to think about what happens when central authority is displaced, when the ugly and the uncomfortable are not hidden, when they are recognised as part of the commons. Film that does not seek to be to one’s liking, but to open space and allow other ways of seeing and inhabiting the museum to enter stage.