Archive Territory _ English Texts

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Presentation Rosa María Juárez Fernández President of the Fundación Cerezales Antonino y Cinia

The Fundación Cerezales Antonino y Cinia is a foundation with a profound commitment to the development of the territory and the transfer of knowledge to society through two courses of action: cultural production and ethnic education. These lines of action are articulated around art in its various current modes in music, the environment, sociology and the economy, among other transversal disciplines.

Archive Territory is the work with which the present volume concerns itself, at least in part. This is not just another project, it is part of the roots of the Fundación, in that it palpably expresses the principles of active listening, rigorous research, participation and action in its proper context that we seek to promote as a team. It is difficult to condense into a single support the four years that, with the publication of this book, we will have shared with the people of Cerezales del Condado, Castro del Condado, Devesa de Curueño, Ambasagüas de Curueño, Barrillos de Curueño, Barrio de Nuestra Señora, Lugán and Peñaranda de Bracamonte, with their documents and their stories. We invite you to discover the rest of these supports, which complement each other, to which we have assigned the function of activations: general archive, website, video and audio documentation, maps, filandón get-togethers, open methodologies… You will find references to all of these all through this publication.

The domestic conservators, the territories and the collaborating institutions —in particular the Fundación Germán Sánchez Ruipérez— that form part of Archive Territory, together with the research team, help the task undertaken by Chus Domínguez hold to its course, and are the bearers of shared knowledge, sensibilities and situations of all kinds and categories, in many cases complex, which we want the Fundación Cerezales Antonino y Cinia to be actively involved in.

To all of them, thanks for opening wide the doors with your attitude and your work.

The Territory as Source of Inspiration Javier Valbuena Director of the Fundación Germán Sánchez Ruipérez The Fundación Germán Sánchez Ruipérez (FGSR) has launched Archive Territory, a joint project of the Fundación Cerezales Antonino y Cinia and the CondadoCurueño district of León, in Tierra de Peñaranda.

These two foundations focus their activities on the territory in which they are located and the people who inhabit it. The territory is the inspiration that inevitably leads them to seek to contrast different realities of rural life and to promote a fruitful dialogue between the local and the global. This wish is realized in Archive Territory, which is now being conducted in Peñaranda and posing new challenges for the FGSR’s Centre for Socio-Cultural Development.

The project entails examining the family archives of the households of Tierra de Peñaranda, following with bated breath the pointing finger of a domestic conservator attempting to identify the landscape, the street, the house, the neighbourhood or the path in an old black and white photo with a crack in the upper right corner or a suspicious shadow along the lower edge; emulating the movement of his lips as he reads out a barely legible dedication and a date, or recreating the travelling photographer at the country fair, armed with a painted canvas landscape and a papier-mâché horse; listening, with your imagination fully engaged, to the names of each of the friends who went out dancing some Sunday afternoon long ago.

It is a matter of forming an archive that combines art with painstaking attention to the way of doing things, to the details, to the surprises that a picture holds in store; of recruiting accomplices willing to share their stories, these personal and communal experiences that are not related to major events, openings or awards, but to everyday life, life in the old days, life now. Life. Of recovering our memory with the stories of those involved, within the framework of an open project that seeks to grow and branch out in Peñaranda, combining art and archive in a process of slow and continuous innovation in which the domestic conservators are the linchpin.

Over and above the number of documents that are

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incorporated into the archive, what is interesting is the map of relationships, of great little stories that crisscross the town, in a kind of affective itinerary that configures the identity of a territory.

New goals, new challenges. Dispensing with traditional narratives in order to find new relationships, new stories of the things we can make out in the pictures in family albums, or in the photos that are displayed on shelves, on coffee tables and on windowsills. Or those that are jealously guarded in metal boxes, hidden from the world. Everything has some significance, including the particular way certain photos are conserved: the town and the district encompass a logic of their own of neighbourhood movements that we are trying to bring to light. Silence, oblivion, a domestic conservator who recalls only a part of the story, choosing in a mysterious way what to tell and what to leave out. Similarly, to explore the relations between the collections of photographs in different households: a particular event is experienced in many ways, and photographed in many different ways. Or the connection between the conservator and the photograph, why they have it, why they have kept it, what it is that makes it special, why they are in it or why they are not, what the people who appear in it mean to them.

Archive Territory has arrived in Peñaranda with the baggage of more than two years of work by the Fundación Cerezales Antonino y Cinia, work that is receiving well-deserved recognition, not only for the painstakingly thorough work of recovering photographs, stories and comments and for the attractive and intuitive format of the website, but also for the various activations with which the archive stimulates artistic research and conversation from a cutting-edge perspective. This is an archive with a lot of art to dive down into, to discover and to share; an archive in which what matters most are the experiences, the life stories of the people who constitute the territory: an archive in which the processes count for as much as or more than the final result.

From now on, the Condado-Curueño district of León and Tierra de Peñaranda are united in Archive Territory, an essential project for people and a very important project for the two foundations, a central objective of both the Fundación Germán Sánchez Ruipérez and the Fundación Cerezales Antonino y Cinia, which share the effort and the emotions of this unique project.

Archive Territory: Working in Context Rosa Yagüez and Alfredo Puente Curatorial Area of the Fundación Cerezales Antonino y Cinia

It was a conscious and considered decision to omit any direct reference to art in the title of this text, despite the fact that the Fundación Cerezales Antonino y Cinia — with a widely recognized institutional role in this area — regards art as a permanent vehicle of relationship with the territory. All the more so, perhaps, when we bear in mind that Archive Territory is being developed within the line of production and normalization of the work of artists as researchers with which we have endowed the Foundation. This process was begun by filmmaker Chus Domínguez (León, 1967), working on images, audio stories and documents that in their initial phase sought to bestow meaning on a shared space of lived experience in an area comprising six villages in the Condado-Curueño district of León (Cerezales del Condado, Castro del Condado, Ambasaguas de Curueño, Devesa de Curueño, Barrillos de Curueño and Barrio de Nuestra Señora), which have now been joined by Peñaranda de Bracamonte (Salamanca) and Lugán (León). A great deal has happened in the intervening period between the initial phase of the project in 2011 and 2014, the year in which we find ourselves. The complex work of research, understanding and mediation with the territory and its inhabitants, sustained over time and with a clear commitment to reading the socio-economic, political, physical and, of course, poetic context — as has so often been apparent at the meetings of the project team — has frequently overstepped its cinematic, artistic and archival limits, and at times even its emotional limits.

Those of us actively involved in this work often refer to Archive Territory as a documentary or as an archive, without distinction. It has taken a major effort to achieve this. The angles of the project, the intersecting perspectives that give meaning to it and the ongoing discussions among the members of a team rich in the ‘bringing together of areas of knowledge’, whom the reader will identify with their particular roles and expertise in the course

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of the following pages, which fully bear out this claim. We especially thank the efforts and involvement of everyone who is part of this project: Chus Domínguez, Mela Dávila, Jorge Blasco, José Gómez Isla, María del Carmen Rodríguez López, Araceli Corbo, Alfredo Calosci, Toni Buil, María Casals, Guillermo García, Ismael Aveleira, Miguel Ángel Llamas, the team at the Centre for Socio-Cultural Development of the Fundación Germán Sánchez Ruipérez and all of the curators and domestic conservators in the various nodes.

How heavily the word ‘archive’ weighs in any sentence! Nowadays archives constitute one of the most dynamic cultural territories, and one whose boundaries are increasingly permeable. They afford a space of expression and discussion that develops by collecting the memory, material that is exceptionally hard to synthesize, of an environment shaped by experiences: a subjective space — or at least it is in our case. And this being so, there is every reason to engage with this space from the non-fiction documentary, as Chus Domínguez proposed, and set in motion a negotiated process in which it is not only the artist who makes decisions. The people of the community, who contribute images that reflect their stories, have the capacity to influence with their choices and their silences the direction that the work takes, in order to activate a literally endless work — which the archive is not — that draws the lines of its profile, to which the future will add other points of view and other interpretations destined to enrich it.

There is a strong sense of correspondence between the Fundación Cerezales Antonino y Cinia and the territory in which it carries out its activity. Culture and ethnic education, as structural elements of the institution, are two of the keys to understanding and participating in that context. Archive Territory debates and intensifies those keys by means of a set of critical and instrumental ‘tools’ specific to culture and art: exhibition and filandón get-togethers, archive and mediation, fieldwork and theoretical sessions, folksonomies and concepts taken from nonfiction cinema are associated in equilibrium. The school buildings that are the physical headquarters of the Foundation have been opened up without restriction to the local people thanks to these tools. In this way, in Archive Territory we have commenced a project that frequently touches on certain points of inflection, those that are within reach of our

experience — of course, others might have gone further — from, with and to art and society.

In the pages that follow we will set out the concepts, identify the positions and delineate our findings and our mistakes. Starting from our various points of departure we have arrived here. But above all, we are convinced it is possible to glimpse here the position of active listening of a team and of the institutions that endorse and support it in relation to the territory in which they are located, not only in geographical terms but also conceptually. If Archive Territory has allowed us to feel a part of something it is very possibly because we have succeeded in engaging in dialogue in proximity, and that bears witness not so much to a physical place as to a common language, a willingness to understand and learn from the people around us. This is the space in which we invite you to join us, the space in which we invite you to participate. This is the space in which Archive Territory unfolds.

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Loose Ends Alfredo Puente Curator ot the Archive Territory

Mrs Aida lives in Castro del Condado. Like others in some of the neighbouring villages, Aida has chosen to maintain her link with the family home, with the spaces she has always used and the relationships she has shared in them. She has resisted, in part, the impetus to abandon these links and move to the city. She has albums and boxes of photographs of people, places and events, public and private. She remembers all that is reflected in the images that make up her domestic archive, some of whose documents are neatly arranged and displayed on a shelf.

The itinerant photographer Gregorio Díez Robles, known as Goro, travelled this same area — Castro, Cerezales, Ambasaguas … — in the late nineteen twenties. Goro married and settled in Castro del Condado, and had a daughter, Trinidad, who is the one telling us about him.1 He had previously lived in Vegas del Condado, and even had time to go out to Argentina and come back. It was there that he acquired the camera with which he subsequently — almost a century ago now — took his popular photographs of the activity of the district in which he finally settled down.

Lino Díez and María Robles were Néstor’s parents. María was born in Castro del Condado, like Aida, and Lino in the nearby village of Cerezales.

When they married they moved to a new home in Devesa de Curueño, another village in the area.

Néstor still remembers it, and Ludi Viejo, a Devesa resident, can even describe how the street where he posed next to him has changed.2 Goro was hired to photograph the whole of Néstor’s family.3 Robustiano Robles and Abilio Avecilla were also itinerant photographers, like Goro. In their photographs they depicted fiestas, processions, fairs, communions and other significant events such as weddings or the start of the school year.4 There is a territorial vocation and a geographical, political, social and cultural structure in the concatenation of these stories. A vocation that adjusts the plane of economic, technological and identity globalization of the world of accelerated transits in order to recover a localized emphasis on singular

identities, symbolic relations and common heritage.

Archive Territory engages situations that cannot be understood in isolation from this global sphere, but instead of being addressed from a maximalist perspective belong to the space of the close at hand, to that which has a ‘human scale’, in strict proximity.

Chus Domínguez (León, 1967) is an audio-visual producer. Throughout 2011 and 2012 he visited the aforementioned villages under the auspices of a production programme for artists and researchers run by the Fundación Cerezales Antonino y Cinia, knocking on doors to chat with the inhabitants.

According to the customs of the area, after a few visits, the conversation was continued inside the house, where he saw the photographs treasured

by Aida, Rosa, Pablo, Milagros, Ludi and Gaspara, among others, and noted their disposition to articulate personal narratives according to how they were shown — on DVD players, dressers, chests, tables or walls. He wondered whether this desire to show and organize photos — documentation, when all is said and done — corresponded to the idea of an archive. He asked. He was also shown boxes of old photos, albums and negatives. Later on, towards the end of the first phase of field work in the area, in the spring of 2012, Chus Domínguez even came across home movies shot on 8 mm and Super 8 mm. He appreciated and analyzed the importance of what the owners of the photographs had to say about them, what they remembered or had forgotten, the clear political substrate condensed in these descriptions — that which made them images — and pervading the vocabulary employed in the people’s stories, and decided to record it. He proposed, as a filmmaker, to digitize a selection of these photographs, the negotiating of a montage.

‘Images are more real than anyone could have supposed. And just because they are an unlimited resource, one that cannot be exhausted by consumerist waste, there is all the more reason to apply the conservationist remedy. If there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology not only of real things but of images as well,’ as Susan Sontag noted.5 Beyond Sontag’s implicit identification of photograph and image, a reductionist synonym in this case, Archive Territory confronts the fact of constructing, sharing and conserving images in a much broader sense than the photographic. Images lie — which does not mean they aim to be fiction; so does the

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physical world — ‘but by passing through them we arrive at knowledge’.6 Passing through those images, in our context, includes confronting the individual stories — real images of a territory —with a common story, and seeking new light with which to bring out of the shadows ‘the instability of our identity’.7 This work has frequently led us to wonder about the distinction drawn by the New York essayist between real things, images and documentation, from politics and poetics. So, if we accept that images speak of the way we dwell and of the quality of this fact in a plane that extends beyond mere physical appearance, we might come to infer that they are a particular way of being-in-the-world — an aspect we will continue to investigate. Certainly, the DNA of these images contains photography, a basic documentary typology in this work, and an essential trigger, but not the only one.

If Chus Domínguez had not championed the Archive Territory project,8 launched in spring 2011 in the aforementioned region of León, and we had not extended it by way of new phases of research in Peñaranda de Bracamonte (Salamanca) and Lugán (León) during 2013 and 2014,9 it is likely that the loose ends with which this text began — which make it possible to compose a legible and interpretable fragment of the relationships that have structured the lives of these people, shaped their environment and conditioned their memory and affections, and which barely constitute a small sample of the exhaustive work carried out over the last three and a half years — would have remained loose.

Non-fiction Archive Territory is a project born of the particular relationship that its prime mover, the director Chus Domínguez, has with cinema and documentary; a relationship that has to date been of a non-fiction nature.10 It is relevant to see the relationship between film and document as a fundamental vector in Archive Territory. Back in 1914 Edward S. Curtis spoke of ‘documentary material’ and ‘documentary work’ to refer to non-fiction moving images. In other words, for quite some time now filmmakers have been using the concept of ‘document’ to describe films or footage linked to reality and debating the status of such documents and their evaluation. As so often, Anglo-Saxon logic has been very incisive in

extending the category of document to the realm of the image and developing it around the idea of evidence or proof: the term was assimilated from Latin documentum,11 and first entered the English language in the fourteenth century, according to Philip Rosen, who cites the Oxford English Dictionary. In the eighteenth century, the meaning of the word continued to grow in English and came to cover all forms of written testimony, and also prints and coins. Today, few would hesitate to apply the term ‘document’ to works on all kinds of support, and photography and audio-visuals are no exception.12 Chus Domínguez moves in this sphere. Photography — which has been joined by other types of document as Archive Territory has evolved — as the core of this filmic-cum-archival development we shall proceed to analyze alongside the sound recordings is a valid ‘proof’ (in the sense of its documentary valuation)13 in the conception of the work carried out in six villages in the Condado-Curueño district of the province of León: Cerezales del Condado, Castro del Condado, Barrillos de Curueño, Ambasaguas de Curueño, Devesa de Curueño and Barrio de Nuestra Señora. From that perspective, photography does not fictionalize, at least not at this time. Photography is too sensitive an impression of lives and places to deny it a major role, even though its condition as leitmotif of the project is the result of a chance encounter. In his peregrinations through the villages of the district, in search of a subject that give direction and meaning to the relationship between the filmmaker and the institution, Chus Domínguez began to be recognized by the ever fewer locals. Their initial suspicious reaction to his questions gave way to an increasingly accepting and trusting relationship: people literally opened their doors to him. There, inside the houses, Archive Territory began to take shape, and came to be described as a documentary whose support, rather than celluloid or video, would be an archive; whose script would be a sum of documents, consisting of photographs, audio recordings and cine films provided by the domestic curators (subsequently incorporating contracts, tickets, invoices and artworks to round out the meaning of the project), and whose montage is the result of the agreement between the director and each of the domestic curators when it came to the choosing, including and removing of images and verbal descriptions.

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It is important to understand this fact, whether as users, viewers or researchers of Archive Territory, or simply as readers of the texts compiled in the present publication, because it offers a guide to the dérives that can be adopted in a process of work such as this, which is both complex and extended in time, and far removed from anthropology. The structural framework that surrounds non-fiction film, coupled with specific criteria pertaining to the archive’s relationship with art, has served to focus discussions within the team whenever necessary. It could be thought that all photographs are artificial, pure construction, as Jean-Louis Comolli argues; that bringing them together in an archive provides an irrefutable trace not of what has been — a formulation with Foucauldian overtones — but of what has enabled and fashioned the existence of that same archive;14 that they show a persistent tendency to play in the realm of fiction, and all the more so when expressed in audio-visual form. We must not on that account abandon the practice of resistance, taking them into a space with fewer formal references and anchors, placing them at the very edge of irrelevance, in so far as what is relevant is the image — the amalgam of experiencememory-dialogue-document-photograph. That is the place of non-fiction.

The initial fieldwork sessions and encounters with the people of the selected villages in the CondadoCurueño district, together with non-fiction as the conceptual structure of the project, produce a decisive variation in the course of Archive Territory and free it from any kind of imposed format. On the basis of those first sessions, the approach evolved from the idea of operating with the landscape as fundamental itinerary into the idea of recording the deep structure that defines the concept of territory: the links and tacit narratives that are formed in time among the inhabitants of a given physical space.

Mariano de Santa Ana has warned of the archive momentum in such cases,15 and identified the critical situation in which art is placed by the oscillation between a ‘taxonomic delirium’ — anchored in the attempt to objectively reflect an age — and the understanding of the art phenomenon itself as a ‘crack in time’, in which the archival gesture determines the meaning of the archive. We intuit that our work is closer to the latter position, less deterministic but more slippery than the former, and that it leads us to recognize, if we have not

done before explicitly, that Archive Territory is an art project.

As a consequence of what we have described, the concept of non-fiction led to an extended script, which pushed the whole project towards sharing a variety of languages and formats. To avoid falling into fiction, either by ‘reductionism’ or distraction on the part of the director, film — or, more accurately, the documentary, understood in a traditional sense — was no longer sufficient. Its language had not been abandoned but it needed to be complemented with other practices and perspectives. The core of the project came to be articulated around the idea of archive, and from that point on, in the autumn of 2011, Archive Territory was transformed into an organic structure,16 corresponding to a set of tools more appropriate for dealing with the kind of reading of the territory it was intended to undertake. There then emerged the ‘activations’ of the archive, which came to form the backbone of the work: filandón get-togethers,17 display on the website, exhibitions, critical publication, workshops for future curators and, starting in 2013, new readings of the archive by other teams of researchers and artists, such as the one at the Fundación Germán Sánchez Ruipérez Centre for Socio-Cultural Development in Peñaranda de Bracamonte (Salamanca) and the one led by the filmmaker Ismael Aveleira in Lugán (León), as part of an approach that seeks to bring more energy and resources to all of the work being done. The dynamic of the work is also evolving. Chus Domínguez has become an increasingly multifaceted operator — filmmaker, consultant, visual artist — in a team that includes researchers, documentalists, archivists, theorists of photography, specialists in organizing information on the Internet, lawyers and specialists in legal rights and intellectual property, as well as mediators with the local people, database and blog developers and experts in information processing, data display and exhibition design.

Archives In a more or less responsible or daring fashion, all of this abundance of decision-making has resulted — as we anticipated — in an archive; in fact, in more than one. Inside Archive Territory there are three centres: domestic and distributed throughout the territory when it comes to the collections; the digi-

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tized general fonds, located in the headquarters of the Fundación Cerezales Antonino y Cinia and the Centre for Socio-Cultural Development Foundation Germán Sánchez Ruipérez, and the adaptation of the fonds for Internet display, ‘offshored’ and relocated at territorioarchivo.org. Archives enmeshed in an archive. This distribution amounts from the start to a good antidote to historicist readings or pyramidal genealogies, since it entails tirelessly positioning ourselves in relation to it; it speaks of an archive detached from any institution, open, multiple, choral; a structure in the service of trust among people, based on dialogue and compromise dialogue, rather than a top-down directed structure. A risky bet.

Carmen Rodriguez, Mela Dávila, Jorge Blasco, José Gómez Isla and Araceli Corbo,18 in the first instance, are crucial to the structure that Archive Territory acquired during the years 2011-2012. The sum of their knowledge as archivists and researchers in the field of documentation and the teamwork sessions held in Cerezales del Condado and in León give rise to debates that enrich, nuance and add layers of meaning to the project.

Among the most significant developments in the identification of those documents that have occurred over this time, it is worth noting how — thanks to the methodological review launched in Peñaranda de Bracamonte during 2013 and still ongoing — the emphasis has shifted from the initial approach, which collected photographs and audio recordings as a unit, to treating photographs and sound recordings as two distinct and independent types of document. Over and above its functional significance, this shift has a poetic dimension, supporting the possible construction of an oral story without scopic correspondence by those who wish to use the archive in the future, beyond the conditions established during the initial phase. This multiplies the levels on which Archive Territory can be read and opens it up to other perceptions, less irrigated by the power of the image. With the photographs and the audio recordings describing them constituting the basic documents, associated by the personal stories of the donors, progress has been made in identifying the documents that may belong to this archive and are required to give it meaning: the fonds. The receipts, tickets, contracts, maps both geographical and conceptual,19 cession documents, video recordings of the technical analysis sessions, photographs of the work process,

emails and documentary records necessary for the reliable and transparent explanation of the conditions of work are part of this general fonds, stored on servers, hard drives and storage facilities in the headquarters of the Fundación Cerezales Antonino y Cinia and the Fundación Germán Sánchez Ruipérez Centre for Socio-Cultural Development.

The file card,20 which notes the different fields and the technical description of each document incorporated into the fonds, is one of the elements of the work of Archive Territory most closely linked to the archival discipline, despite its having been subjected to a deliberate process of ‘distortion’,21 aimed at finding new spaces for poetry in the archive, after intense internal debate about whether it was permissible to do so or not. Research is concerned with objectives, but also with chance discoveries and dérives, which are sometimes very productive and always open to criticism.

To return to the previous point, this is a fonds whose digitized documents — on the basis of the distributed documentation conserved by the domestic curators in their homes — are intended to be activated and to make sense on the Internet.

An information policy whose keys are the present and actual power structures. During these years, the team has on numerous occasions come across family albums in its fieldwork sessions. The family album is an element of the popular culture, and has become an invaluable source in the context of Archive Territory. This is hardly surprising, and though we will not stop to analyze the fact here, we should not forget that in recent years the family album has taken off as a ‘tendency’ in the art world, and a seemingly endless stream of studies treat it as almost a specific genre.22 We shall simply note in passing that this is an element with a significant audio-visual nexus: it is constructed from photographs and objects and is often shared, accompanied by the voice of the person describing its content. The website www.territorioarchivo. org is the result of our efforts to embrace this idea and extend it, and to present the archive in a format sensitive to the logic of using the Internet, with a number of references to the family album of which we have spoken. We constantly ask ourselves, regardless of the fact that we use open licences for content distribution,23 about the validity of embracing a space as hostile to privacy as the Internet. The documents we have agreed to share

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may suffer in the indiscriminate flow of content on the Web. Is it an ‘appropriate’ channel? We have hotly debated what information is made available on a medium which amplifies almost everything and immediately generates memes and power relations.

At the same time, we have taken advantage of the resources that the Internet has popularized to link databases and archives. The website can be browsed in a variety of ways: accessing the whole album or making a selection and creating a personalized album, on the basis of the geolocated distribution of documents on an interactive map or by way of a special section devoted to folksonomies. Each document entry on the website contains sections for users to contribute or contrast information. We have witnessed the good use that has been made of this function by visitors to the website and how it has fostered relations between users, corrected errors and discovered new data.

Furthermore, the website is, together with the works carried out to date by Chus Domínguez, the medium in which the commitment to make Archive Territory an audio-visual work is most evidently materialized. The photographs are accompanied by the associated audio recordings and, wherever possible, by other related photographs that have been traced by listening carefully to the audio material supplied by the domestic curators. The Internet provides us with an editable space in which to compose sequences and display the work of assembly and montage.

Let us, at this point, return to Mrs Aida. Aida has lived all her life in Castro del Condado and has a considerable number of photographs of the village and its configuration over time. She also has a prodigious memory, thanks to which she can accurately describe what is happening in the photographs and even things that are not actually shown in them, what we call ‘out of field’. However, new strands continually appear, as when, from the bottom of the box or the family album in which photos are conserved in the private, domestic sphere — in this case, given the willingness to share the material, privacy is situated on another plane — images are found of people who emigrated or those that, from somewhere other than the territory directly covered by our research, speak of the area that is the object of our study, who also evidently possess a fragment of this territory. Once we have started to catalogue the documents by making out file cards for them we

need to add another datum, where this is possible, which also becomes part of the record: the physical location captured in each picture. Viewed in this light, the district studied has no clearly defined boundaries, because the references that serve to document it extend to León, Valladolid, Bilbao, Mexico, Argentina and beyond, given that people from the district have taken there or sent from there a part of their memories, and the documentation that bears witness to this. Here, too, the archive cannot draw a clear boundary. Once again we have a map within a map that is never complete.

Activations Archive Territory has consolidated itself by way of a sequence of activations, several of which are ongoing, that have made it possible to give form to its research proposal. This sequence embraces — simultaneously, in some cases; consecutively, in others — the transfer from the archive to the Internet through the development of a web site, which we have already described as part of the archive itself; two visions of the archive and the working method deployed in Archive Territory that might be called site specific: the first was in the exhibition space of the Fundación Cerezales Antonino y Cinia in Cerezales del Condado in 2012, and the second, in preparation, will take place in December 2014 in the exhibition space of the Fundación Germán Sánchez Ruipérez in Peñaranda de Bracamonte; the promotion of filandón get-togethers in the villages of the Condado-Curueño district covered by the project; the publication of this book; the invitation of more scientists, researchers and artists to work with the fonds, to expand it and give it new perspectives, which currently (2014) applies to the work of Ismael Aveleira in the village of Lugán and the incorporation of Peñaranda de Bracamonte as a node for the reproduction, distribution and researching of the project methodology, driven by the aforementioned Fundación Germán Sánchez Ruipérez Centre for Socio-Cultural Development for the years 2013-2014. It is very likely that this stream of activations will continue and incorporate new lines of activations well beyond the publication of this book.

We have already situated the activation involved in adapting the general fonds to the conditions of the Internet as an ‘archive within the archive’; however (it is worth insisting on this), given the recur-

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rent and seductive presence of the Internet in our daily lives it may seem that the interpretation and visualization of the archive in this medium is to be identified with the whole project, rather than merely constituting one of its activations. This is not so, even though it is expected that in the future the resource that is www.territorioarchivo.org will acquire enhanced features and performance. The website brings us closer to a sequential reading of the documents it contains, closer to the experience of film, which is based on a different economy of time to that which prevails on the Internet. The viewing of Archive Territory online is not the project itself, although it is one of its main spaces of interpretation.

In discarding this identification of the part with the whole, we have taken into account, among other factors, the context in which the domestic curators, as principal actors in the whole process, and the project’s team of archivists work — a rural environment, that of León (in general, the rural environment of Castile and Spain), in which it is far from easy to access information and there is a huge technology gap.24 A deterministic interpretation of the possibilities of the Internet as a language and benchmark support would have been equivalent to splitting the territory all over again and irremediably separating the archive from the conditions of its production.

Above and beyond this, Archive Territory involves a working process in which the primary political emphasis is on strengthening the responsibility as domestic curators of each and every one of the local people who have worked on the project in the six initial nuclei in Peñaranda de Bracamonte and Lugán. This unique aspect of the working process, monitored, documented and endorsed by the parties, and including a specific section on the distribution of documents retrieved in any medium, including the Internet, under a Creative Commons licence, establishes a radical difference from a traditional archival process. Without this decision, the work would have been closer to the idea of a conventionally organized collection of images and audio recordings, in contrast to the political aspect embodied, in this case, in vesting responsibility in the various domestic curators as actors involved in the social, political, cultural and economic reading of the territory in which they live and with which the archive they have agreed to construct is concerned. In addition, the domestic curators’ own lexicon, the words they have used to talk about

what the images show, is part of the common statute that defines the archive and is one of the project’s significant discoveries. This lexicon is organized in the form of folksonomies25 on the website.26 The memories and the comments of the domestic curators, describing the images and what is ‘out of field’, provide a cartography that evolves and is inscribed in time, revealing the relationship between subjects and spaces; all that they are capable of situating establishes the social, cultural and geographical infrastructure and structures the shared image that offers a shared time, and emphasizes the complexity of the territory studied.

It may be possible to identify this as the most intense aspect of the artistic mediation undertaken

by Chus Domínguez, Ismael Aveleira and the teams at the Fundación Germán Sánchez Ruipérez Centre for Socio-Cultural Development and the Fundación Cerezales Antonino y Cinia in Archive Territory — a mediation with each house and each inhabitant that has served to catalyze memory. We can recognize, in these terms, the ‘monumentality’ of the document invoked by Foucault,27 but a monumentality that has dispensed with nostalgic pedestals and rhetorical sentimentalisms. The domestic curators have provided us with the interweaving stories that construct this place. The way they have chosen to be represented by these accounts is significant. The general themes that arise are narrated by way of clichés; other themes are absolutely unique; many more are still pending, and have not even been addressed at this stage.

The methodology of the encounter between the curators and Chus Domínguez, in the first instance, and subsequently with the rest of the research team is in the form of an interview. In this interview the choosing of each photograph represents the starting point on which a conversation is established. All that is typical of a conversation between people who are initially strangers present here and gradually, on the basis of the protagonists’ feelings, is modulated: affection, distrust, taboo, eloquence, suspicion, transparency, shyness. In this way, these feelings mark out a certain psychological territory and have their place on the file card.

Activating Archive Territory as a site-specific exhibition entailed, in the first instance, engaging with all the challenges of relating this controversial biopolitical mechanism to art; and in the second place, subjecting the work carried out — first, that from the 2011-2012 phase and subsequently from then

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up to 2014 — to a process of synthesis, as well as seeking, in line with the cinematic conception proposed by Chus Domínguez, a perfectly visible climax of the entire project to date: its public scrutiny. While in each of the activations we have been able to detect the different pulses in this work and we have found that it is possible to conceive of a way to link it to the territory, both materially and symbolically, in which the action and practice of archiving flow as part of the living energy that gives it meaning, there is in the logic of the exhibition a critical space which we have embraced the need to engage. If ‘in recent decades art practices have appropriated archival practices and vice versa’,28 this is the result of an ‘archive culture’ as such, with all its structures. An archive of photographs, films, audio and administrative detritus such as the present one, made up of documents that for the most part were created with little or no artistic intent — the base image, in Blasco’s words29 — runs the risk, in exhibition form, of being assimilated as a repository of nineteenth-century positivism or as a bigorexic technological-metaphorical construction: in either case, uninhabiting it. In our case, we have set out to discover a space in the exhibition area based on the codes and behaviours with which the villagers who participated in this work in recent years received us, and where new visitors can recognize themselves in certain attitudes. In the exhibition held at the Fundación Cerezales Antonino y Cinia from 21 October 2012 to 17 February 2013, we showed the series of photographs, unorganized, copied onto paper, in a large box-table, and we filled shelves with our instruments and tools: maps, GPS, notebooks and administrative documents. We treated this material with the utmost respect, as a reflection of its footprint on a social contract within Archive Territory.

Furthermore, we added what we had created specifically within this work: the video recordings containing the itinerary and decisions that guided the project; the audio-visual and photographs by Chus Domínguez and the three volumes of archives that record the work carried out with all the documentation. Finally, we completed the exhibition with several analyses of the archive with different perspectives on the controversial new extensions of cultural studies, such as public navigation of the web site, data visualization and mapping tools — as recent as they are doomed, if nothing prevents it, to follow the logic of substitution and obsolescence that

currently drive technology — which have been launched accompanied by explanations, for all who have requested such, of their function and operation, by the team from the Fundación Cerezales Antonino y Cinia. But what makes this first confrontation with the action of exhibiting Archive Territory irrefutably an activation is the fact of having defined a space that is free of ‘prohibitions’ an inclusive.

None of the institutional schemes that are used to distinguish spaces of power in an exhibition area has been activated. We haven’t separated a public space from another private one. Over the months that this activation has lasted, users have been given unrestricted access to all areas of the Foundation, but especially to the conversations that have taken place there, whether or not they are related to Archive Territory. If we have followed the behaviour that reigned at the gatherings in the homes that opened their doors to us, the paramount ‘code’ has been that which relates to the mutual hospitality established among all the inhabitants of the project.

Technology largely conditions the present, and is bound up with in the way it flows. However, there remain spaces unmediated by technology, profoundly transversal cultural preserves, in dire need of attention. The filandón get-togethers are proof of this. For several centuries (of the several studies carried out to date, none has succeeded in determining exactly when they originated) people in the province of León have engaged in a sort of intergenerational get-together of neighbours based on oral transmission, a repository of emotions and analogous to other types of oral-based gatherings and exchanges of experiences found in different parts of the world. In León it is known as a filandón.30 In its present form the gathering includes both men and women. Its origins are disputed, but it is commonly believed that the name derives from the custom of chatting and sharing knowledge on different subjects while spinning wool — filar31 is the archaic form of the Spanish verb hilar, meaning to spin — during the long hours of shelter from the harsh climate of the province of León, especially in winter.

Undoubtedly, this practice constitutes a repository of a wealth of oral heritage that may be studied in the light of the conditions under which the collective history of a particular place is produced, in this case an area of León, a chapter that could be inserted into the current of research that analyzes the

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communal.32 At filandón get-togethers, people shared and still share in an open and nonhierarchical way, ‘knowledge’ related to customs, medicine, recipes, vocabulary, toponymy, manufacturing and handling of all types of tools, information about people, families, society, popular stories, music… They constitute, in themselves, a genre that might be called oral literature. They are a repository of knowledge that exercises and is exercised by memory, one of the clearest ends of Archive Territory. Thus, based on pictures and other documents collected, conducting numerous filandón get-togethers with inhabitants of the region has enabled us to enlarge the public dimension of the archive, enrich the quality and quantity of links among the documentation, add information where gaps existed in the archive and compare from more than one perspective and version narratives associated with any of the documents, to ponder rather than identify — all this without renouncing the involvement of locals in the telling of their stories, without relegating them to passive subjects in their understanding. At the same time, the work has helped to keep this form of neighbourly activity alive in a geographical area marked by depopulation and isolation, with the participation of several dozen residents throughout each of the sessions.

Conclusions Archive Territory may not be an effective archive, if the aim is to totalize the territory as a continuity, but on the other hand it is an ‘inhabitable document’, eloquent in the discontinuities it reflects. It does not comprise very many documents — a mere 2,500 at present — but these have the quality of actively involving curators and users, artists and lay persons, inhabitants and visitors to the archive and the territory. It is not guarded by Archons: instead, its guardians are ordinary people, locals who do not seek to impose any hierarchy or any viewpoint (other than perhaps in negotiation with Chus Domínguez and other locals), intent on contributing their non-fiction memory, with all the distortions that this might entail.

Politics and poetics are interwoven in the fabric of this work — the archive is not an oasis for the document — and one answers and responds to the other. Archive Territory has sought out the private rather than the intimate, and there has been a cer-

tain amount of expunging of documents in order to respect the delicate sensibilities of the latter vis-àvis the former. The hours shared by the entire team, including domestic curators, have produced very strong ties that demand a stronger sense of responsibility when it comes to discerning between and dealing with the two spaces, and this involves complex decisions and arrangements. The dichotomy, noted by a number of writers, between the home as the private place of memory and the archive as the accessible space of what has already been catalogued has been destroyed. Certainly mistakes will happen and they should be corrected. The work will need other visions and new readings, methodological contributions which dare, for example, to distinguish documentary series among all the materials, or to discard such series, but also to elaborate on issues such as reality or identity, to discover why many issues remain taboo.

If Archive Territory manifests itself as a monument to nostalgia, we will have done something very wrong. Evidently there are old — and not-soold — photos. The underlying time frame is from the late eighteen hundreds to the nineteen nineties, before the advent of the digital camera (the reason being a question of stamina, needless to say). This is a choral work, one that speaks of the past, present and future, or rather of a continuous, ever present.

It is not part of the team’s objectives to lay claim to a better past, or to seduce with a tender discourse soaked in sepia. The strong support the pictures provide for the project is always enveloped in the complexity of the relationship between them and their own artistry, film and art history. Their perception as documents and their presence in an archive are fraught with continuous crises.

Another sort of montage, an atlas in this case, served Aby Warburg in 1927 in tackling the mammoth task of reconstructing an entire pre-existing iconography, which had a decisive impact, in his view, on the representation of life in movement and in particular in the definition of the Renaissance.

Warburg’s great opus, entitled Mnemosyne Atlas, was an unfinished project, as Archive Territory still is. The way in which Warburg’s panels of images spark the observer’s intuition, composing a territory of iconography in perpetual flow with each gaze, is still surprising. Let us clarify that these lines are not intended to make any comparison between the two. We simply seek to learn from some of the con-

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clusions formulated by their investigations, among them the one that states that ‘the act of interposing a distance between oneself and the outside world can be described as the founding act of human civilization,’ which leads to a practice of art for the sake of its social end. Contributing to this distance is memory, to which we have given so much importance in Archive Territory, even if we refrain from constant mention of the fact: memory, identified in its collective role, as a shared production — a mnemonic contribution, Warburg would say — of heritage never lost.

The coexistence of an ontology of photography — which Roland Barthes saw as a place in which to capture, in the form of the ‘spectre’, the truth of being — and its own rhetoric is difficult. In the tension of this coexistence is found the relationship between photography — or even other types of image — and the real. Based on this relationship, Georges Didi-Huberman — philosopher, historian and renowned investigator of Warburg’s theses — introduces the idea of ‘knowledge by montage’,33 a concept that helps to define accurately the impulse that drives this work, the starting point for negotiation with the domestic curators. In order for images — in their photographic and cinematographic variants in our case — to ‘touch the real’ or at least approach it, as Didi-Huberman goes on to say, a critical construction resulting from a mindset must occur. To know by montage leads to thinking in its terms, to a precipitation of a clash between two images in order to give rise to a third, to an understanding of the photograph and the still in terms of their use value (perhaps it is here that they would amount to the quality of documentation), as a tool rather than as a end.

It is not easy to assess and define documents from the perspective of art or art history. Indeed the act of assessment, in works of this nature, is under constant pressure. That definition should not point, in this case, in any other direction than that of sustaining a group’s giving of itself to a territory — be it a region, a documentary or an archive — not a geographical representation but a phenomenological substrate. Our territory, that contained in Archive Territory, is a sensitive one, that is given to thought, summoned up in the collective imagination. To assess means to put value on that imaginary, here and now — thus there is no place for nostalgia — and to bring to the present

the founders of the same, its true documentary witnesses: people. The imaginary object is not an image, but a more ‘illuminated’ or more ‘audible’ or more ‘tangible’ part of a broader field, as Lyotard declares in this regard. Let us bring clarity, listen, reach out a hand. In effect, this work is not about black-and-white or colour photos but about thought, that which constructs and deconstructs people collectively. This giving of oneself has to do with the way we inhabit the world.

To analyze a work in progress is not a grateful task. There is a lack of critical distance and an overabundance of gaps. The perspective of a task entering its fourth year of research in 2014, as is the case of Archive Territory, is slightly less conditioned by this limitation, not being a one-off event and thus a captive of immediacy, since its duration over time throughout these campaigns allows for some provisional conclusions, such as those set forth herein. We know that things are missing. Today, this work remains a little Arcadia.

The conflicts that inevitably form part of any society are briefly introduced, as if to delve further into them would pose a threat to the surprising balance of the discourses and gatherings held so far. We must continue to care for spaces for dialogue of this nature and this means acquiring the ability to untangle their trickiest knots and to seek out the nuances.

An archive is ‘not the totality of texts that have been preserved by a civilization or the set of traces that could be salvaged from its downfall, but the series of rules which determine in a culture the appearance and disappearance of statements, their retention and their destruction, their paradoxical existence as events and things.’34 In this definition, Foucault definitively glosses a whole range of aspects. His words have hovered constantly over our work of the last few years: they resonate in the decisions taken, they put us on our guard in relation to a sophisticated bureaucratic form, the archive, that can mean forgetting or eradication rather than preservation. He does not say whether it may resemble a documentary, whether it may resemble Archive Territory.

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1 See territorioarchivo.org: http://www.fundacioncerezalesantoninoycinia.org/territorioarchivo/retrato-de-una-familia-en-castrodel-condado, accessed 11 March 2014.

2 See territorioarchivo.org: http://www.fundacioncerezalesantoninoycinia.org/territorioarchivo/vecinos-en-la-calle-nuevade-devesa-de-curueno, accessed 11 March 2014.

3 See territorioarchivo.org: http://www.fundacioncerezalesantoninoycinia.org/territorioarchivo/retrato-de-la-familia-diezrobles-en-devesa-de-curueno, accessed 11 March 2014.

4 See Isabel Barrionuevo Almuzara: De fotos y fotógrafos. San Cipriano del Condado. León: Ediciones del Instituto Leonés de Cultura, Colección Memoria gráfica de los pueblos de León, 2004, p. 7.

5 Susan Sontag: On Photography. London: Penguin, 1979, p. 180.

This passage is quoted in Identidades, a publication of special relevance to the work carried out in Archive Territory, see Florencio Maíllo: Identidades. Catálogo. Salamanca: Diputación de Salamanca and Florencio Maíllo, 2007, p. 15.

6 José Jiménez: Cuerpo y tiempo. La imagen de la metamorfosis.

Barcelona: Destino, 1993, p. 31.

7 Ibid., p. 32.

8 Archive Territory is a project that emerges from the context of a line of production, funding and normalization of the work created by artists and researchers for the Fundación Cerezales Antonino y Cinia. This line incorporates an analysis of the work of Spanish and international artists and researchers by the Foundation team, and is structured in such a way that the institution offers the possibility of supporting and funding periods of time for artists or researchers after reaching an agreement with them, without the need to present a specific previous project, but on the basis of the knowledge of and the correspondence with the objectives and concepts around which the institution carries out its work and the parameters, concepts and formats within which the artists and researchers operate. Once the agreement has been reached, it is the artist or researcher in whatever field who propose a structure of activity for that period. We should note, however, that in this process Archive Territory seemed in origin destined to be a project confined to the audio-visual format — foreseeably a video and hopefully a full-length documentary — concerning the nebulous issue of ‘composing the memory of the landscape’ that would inquire into the physical transformations and their connotations, over time, within the confines of a district. In some of Chus Domínguez’s previous works there is an evident concern with this issue. O tempo dos bullós (2005), quite specifically, and to a lesser degree No ámbito do Cauca (2004) are testimony to this. That said, from the outset it was clear that the form of documentary discovered by Chus Domínguez was rigorous enough to think about how to approach the project from a different angle and support its evolution.

9 At the end of 2012, the Fundación Germán Sánchez Ruipérez Centre for Socio-Cultural Development invited Chus Domínguez and the Fundación Cerezales Antonino y Cinia to extend Archive Territory to Peñaranda de Bracamonte. To this end, in collaboration with the Fundación Cerezales Antonino y Cinia, the Fundación Germán Sánchez Ruipérez provided the human and financial resources for this new activation, which has led to the

reproduction of a part of the methodology developed in the first phase of Archive Territory research and the contribution of new methodological findings reflecting the particular context of a markedly urban nucleus such as Peñaranda de Bracamonte. In addition, in 2013 the Fundación Cerezales Antonino y Cinia reinforced its contribution to the project by incorporating the work of the filmmaker Ismael Aveleira to extend the scope of Archive Territory to the village of Lugán, provide new documentation and continue to subject all of the work done to critical review.

10 As a film genre, the non-fiction documentary seeks to root itself in real materials, while shunning the reportage format and looking for other ways to record the world around us and our relationship with it. In relation to this genre, see Antonio Weinrichter: Desvíos de lo real: el cine de no ficción. Madrid: T&B Editores, 2004.

11 Thomas Keenan more subtly associates the Latin root of the term ‘documento’ (documentum) and it incorporation into English with the verb docere, ‘to teach’, ‘to show’. See ‘What is a Document?

An Exchange between Thomas Keenan and Hito Steyerl’, in Documentary, Expanded: Interventions in Social Media. Aperture (various authors), vol. 214 (2014), p. 60 passim.

12 This relationship between image and document in the field of non-fiction is expanded on in Alejandro Cock, Retóricas del cine de no ficción postvérité. Ampliación de las fronteras discursivas audio-visuales para un espíritu de época complejo. Barcelona / Medellín: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2009, pp. 39-76 [doctoral thesis]. Available online at http://es.scribd.com/ doc/34509578/Aproximacion-al-documental-y-al-cine-de-noficcion-postverite, accessed 11 March 2014.

13 We reiterate and retrieve in this text certain aspects of documentary appraisal that we previously reflected in a research article published in the minutes of the Jornadas Archivando 2013: La valoración documental, organized by the Fundación Sierra Pambley in León, on 7 and 8 November 2013. Available online at [PDF]: http://archivofsierrapambley.archives.wordpress. com/2014/02/cerezales_new.pdf y http://fundacioncerezalesantoninoycinia.org/node/1059, accessed 11 March 2014.

14 See Jean-Louis Comolli: ‘Documento y espectáculo’, in Ideas recibidas. Un vocabulario para la idea artística contemporánea (various authors). Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2010, pp. 108-123. Available online at http://www. macba.cat/PDFs/jean_louis_comolli_ideas_recibidas.pdf, accessed 11 March 2014.

15 See Mariano de Santa Ana: ‘Fantasmas en el archivo’, in Jorge Blasco and Fernando Estévez, et al., Memorias y olvidos del archivo. Tenerife: Lampreave, 2010, pp. 215-237.

16 Archive Territory contains original photographs, high resolution digital images, 8 mm and Super 8 mm films, audio recordings, administrative documents and video recordings of working sessions organized and arranged as a archive, which can be consulted and made visible to users, researchers and the general public through a programme of activations. This programme of activations consists of invitations to new researchers to work with the archive and endow it with new layers of reading and documentation, exhibitions, website, critical publications, a programme of filandón get-togethers, collaboration with and reproduction of the methodology of the project different in institutions and places, and lectures. All of these activations are

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developed by a working team made up of institutions, domestic curators, audio-visual artists, educators, archivists, filmmakers, web developers, specialists in data visualization, and curators and theorists of the image, art and the media.

17 The filandón is a kind of get-together characteristic of the province of León, in which stories are told and knowledge is shared about such popular subjects as botany, medicine, food, society, music and so on, usually while those are engaged in spinning wool or some other form of textile work. Since 2010 there is an institutional initiative to have the filandón declared a Bien de Interés Cultural or cultural asset as a preliminary to its recognition as part of humanity’s Intangible Cultural Heritage by UNESCO. 18 At the time of going to press, Carmen Rodríguez López is Professor of Library Science and Documentation in the Departamento de Patrimonio Artístico y Documental at the Universidad de León; Mela Dávila Freire is a visiting professor at the Universität Hamburg and a consultant in the field of the archive in contemporary art at the same university; Jorge Blasco Gallardo is director of the research group on archives, art, science and society of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona; the art critic and curator José Gómez Isla is Professor of Fine Arts at the Universidad de Salamanca, and Araceli Corbo is in charge of the archive and library at the MUSAC Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León. We must also recognize the contributions of Alfredo Calosci in the field of data visualization; Toni Buil, María Casais and Guillermo García in developing the WordPress templates and the databases; Miguel Ángel Llamas in the development of sound posts to complement the exhibition in Cerezales del Condado as well as the great capacity to assimilate the project of the very efficient, skilled and numerous team put together by the Fundación Germán Sánchez Ruipérez Centre for SocioCultural Development.

19 All of the images included in the Archive Territory documentary record have been geolocated using GPS to enable them to be read in terms of the physical geography of the territory. In addition, Araceli Corbo was involved in the organization of the website www.territorioarchivo.org as well as the editing and interpretation of the different conceptual maps that allow Archive Territory to be approached from a global perspective of the work and all its ramifications. In a same vein, the architect Alfredo Calosci, professor of Architecture at the Alghero faculty of the Università di Sassari, and of Design at the Università di San Marino, and a specialist in data visualization and graphic design, generated a visualization using Processing (http://processing. org), which allowed access to a panorama of the relationship between curators and domestic curators from the very first contact, the place of origin of the documents and the archive.

20 There is a list of the reproduced images at the end of this publication. Each one is identified with a selection of the fields that make up the archive file entries and those displayed on the website.

21 The file entry is the result of much discussion and sharing of criteria between the members of the Archive Territory team. The idea of distortion is something of a license, no doubt, and serves as an image of the rigorous testing of a method by way of conversation and dialogue — intelligible forms of sound, in short, which have modulated its configuration.

22 See Pedro Vicente (ed.): Álbum de familia, (re)presentación, (re) creación e (in)materialidad de las fotografías familiares. Huesca: Diputación Provincial de Huesca and La Oficina, 2013.

23 The documentation that makes up Archive Territory, from images to sound files and the administrative documentation of the carrying out of the work and the methodological aspects, is under a Creative Commons licence (http://creativecommons. org). This decision has been of great structural importance for the project and entails, on the one hand, a significant educational effort in explaining to the participants, many of them elderly, and to other users the conditions of use of this form of distribution of information; on the other hand, it reflects a commitment to new models of support for research, alternative to the proprietary model of copyright, in force in 2014. In this case the specific type of licensing is CC BY-NC-SA http:// es.creativecommons.org/blog/licencias.

24 See http://www.rmd.jcyl.es/web/jcyl/MunicipiosDigitales/es/ Plantilla100Detalle/1274785511218/1/1284187833988/ Comunicacion, accessed 11 March 2014.

25 And also folksonomies, a portmanteau term derived from ‘taxonomy’ and ‘folk’ coined by Thomas Vander Wal. In turn, ‘taxonomy’ comes from the Greek tasso, to arrange, and –nomia, distribution; ‘Folk’, meanwhile, comes from Old English folc, meaning the common people, the laity. As a result, the portmanteau ‘folksonomy’ refers to a system of classification developed by ordinary people working together, and thus a democratic system (http:// http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy), accessed 11 March 2014.

26 See http://www.fundacioncerezalesantoninoycinia.org/territorioarchivo/folcosonomias, accessed 11 March 2014.

27 See Jacques Rancière: ‘L’inoubliable’, in Jean-Louis Comolli and Jacques Rancière: Arrêt sur histoire. Paris: Bpi-Centre Pompidou/Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 1997, p. 55 y ss.

28 Jorge Blasco: ‘Ceci norge pas une archive’, in Jorge Blasco, Fernando Estévez, et al.: Memorias y olvidos del archivo, op. cit., pp.

13-14.

29 Ibid., p. 15.

30 For an etymology of the term filandón see Janick Le Men: Léxico del leonés actual, III. León: Caja España de Inversiones y Archivo Histórico Diocesano de León, Colección Fuentes y estudios de historia leonesa, No. 95, 2005, pp. 743-746.

31 For an etymology of the term filar see ibid., p. 747.

32 At present there are different lines of research that engage the relevance and history of the communal, in fields ranging from anthropology to economics to cultural studies. One of these, which is defined around the commons and has proved especially fruitful, is concerned with the idea of shared knowledge. Its extrapolation we generated many questions and its pertinence has appeared during the discussion sessions. For a definition of ‘commons’ that embraces ‘general intellect’, see Peter Linebaugh: The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All. Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2008, p. 303.

33. See the conversation between Pedro G. Romero and Georges Didi-Huberman: Un conocimiento por el montaje. Available online: http://www.revistaminerva.com/articulo.php?id=141.

34. Michel Foucault: ‘Sur l’archéologie des sciences. Réponse au Cercle d’épistémologie’ (1968), in Dits et écrits, 1. 1954-1988. Paris: Gallimard, 1994, pp. 696-731, accessed 11 March 2014.

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Archive Territory: The Film Chus Domínguez Audiovisual Artist

What kind of response can an image — or rather a montage of images — give to the great dismantling of the world?

Georges Didi-Huberman1

About two years ago the Fundación Cerezales Antonino y Cinia2 invited me to make a video about the territory in which the Foundation is located and the inhabitants of that territory. Detailed below is the process I followed in the making of the film Archive Territory, of which this publication is a part.

The Idea The task that befalls us in the present is to turn over the futures buried in the past.

Requiem for Walter Benjamin3

The general idea had already been given to me. The next step was to define the development of that idea and how to carry it out. In the first stage of preproduction I visited the territory I was going to work on, a rural area at the confluence of the rivers Porma and Curueño, in the foothills of the mountains in the centre of the province of León, a half hour’s drive from the city of León, the provincial capital.

What I found on my tour of the area outside the summer season was a series of virtually deserted little towns in which there seemed to be no vestige of human activity other than that the houses and public spaces were perfectly maintained. There was no sign of industrial work and very few indications of agriculture or tourism, which came as a shock to me and posed a problem for the development of the project as I had initially intended to approach it. It seemed that the one option that presented itself was to work with the disappearance of a way of life, but I refused to do that: I did not want to make a work of nostalgia but rather some kind of projection into the future, enclosed in itself and in an aesthetics of desolation.

It was then that the possibility occurred to me of working with the photographs of the region to be found in local people’s homes,4 and that the collecting and sharing of these promised to provide a basis for thinking about what has been, what is and what can still be. Even now, with the project already well advanced, I still cannot clearly articulate this intuition, but in my work I like to be guided by intuitions, on the basis of which I try to construct not texts but films. It was only at the end of the development of the project that I found the quote that heads this section, in which that intuition is expressed.

I proposed, then, to start from the photographs, which would serve as activators or catalysts of a dialogue about the region and its inhabitants, about the life that had existed there and now seemed to be vanishing and the possibility or impossibility of that life continuing its flow.

At the same time, the fact of working with photographs — and, more importantly, with the owners of those photographs — afforded me a real, proactive point of view. Although the photographs always belong to the past, the voice that comments on them belongs to the present, and would be the true voice of the territory today. Moreover, given that the voice that comments on a photograph speaks in the present, in naming the people represented there it brings them into the present. We very often use expressions like ‘this is me’ in talking about a photograph, although decades have gone by since the picture was taken.

Furthermore, another idea struck me as likely to help ward off the pathos of nostalgia and the evocation of death associated with photography: the possibility of incorporating photographs taken in the future. Obviously there was a problem: a film is completed at some point in time; you cannot go on changing it indefinitely. But that is not the case with an archive, which is open to the addition of documentation without ceasing to be the same archive as was initially conceived. Indeed, this openness to the future would be almost a necessary quality for a ‘true archive’, which must be able to incorporate ‘the unexpected, the unprogrammable, the unpredictable, the unpresentable and the unrepresentable: an opening into the unknown which orients the archive towards future updates and inscriptions’.5 This gave rise to the idea of replacing the film about the territory with an open and continually growing archive, and also suggested the title of the

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project: Archive Territory. This pairing not only proposes an engagement with the territory in the form of a photographic archive, but also suggests the possibility of understanding the archive itself as a territory to be explored.

The Script I don’t tell the viewers what to think, I give them things to think about.

Nicolas Philibert6

Although the film is not a film as such, I will go on using the terminology of filmmaking. Let us continue, then, with the stage that comes after the development of the idea in any textbook about filmmaking: the writing of the script.

I have almost never worked with a script. I tend to take the same approach as the French director Nicolas Philibert, who said: ‘When I start shooting a film, I don’t have a script, just two or three ideas without any theoretical elaboration, whereas [Michael] Moore is an activist exponent of film as critique and what he tries to do is demonstrate something, so he needs to prepare everything in advance to arrive at that demonstration.’7 I also share the point of view of the Kazakh filmmaker Sergey Dvortsevoy: ‘I have never written a script. […] When I look at a person or a situation, I ask myself what is important; I don’t previously set myself a dogma, a course of action …

I try to understand the inner rhythm of the person or situation being filmed. And to forget my own. […] I want the film to be born of the things that happen around me and of not my way of seeing things.’8 This premise of the absence of a completed script can also be applied to the archive, and I think that this is one of the cornerstones of the project. Not knowing where the archive will take us — not wanting, in fact, that it take us anywhere — and having the sole intention that it afford us a new reading of the territory. This, for me, is to situate oneself in the realm of non-fiction (problematic though this term is).

In this regard, it was clear that the greater the number of people taking part, the greater the number of themes covered and of contrasting voices and points of view. This being so, one of the emphases of the project was to involve the participation of as many local people as possible, while taking into ac-

count certain initial restrictions in order to make the project feasible.

The area for collecting photographs was limited to six villages fairly close to one another but belonging to different municipalities in both of the region’s two valleys, and the most recent date for the photographs collected was set at the nineteen eighties.9 Naturally, the archive is open to including in the future documents from other locations and photographs taken at any time.

It is true that the attitude of being open to what may happen has certain limits. At some point you have to make decisions, and however opposed you may be to the demonstration of dogmas, you are always more or less consciously alert to issues that you think may come up, or — and this is even more dangerous, if anything — to issues that you would like to come up: I might mention, for example, issues such as identity, the disappearance of the rural world, gender, the Spanish Civil War and so on. But taking this into consideration helps you avoid falling into the clichés that tend to be trotted out in works based on the collective memory.

The Recording I do not do interviews. I do conversations. Because I have no catalogue of questions like you have.

Werner Herzog10

The script has led me to the houses of the region and I intend simply to talk about the photographs people have kept, record the stories that come up and ask for the loan of the pictures to make digital copies of them.11 I always tried to contact the people I visited in advance and give them references so they would feel confident about sharing their photographs, memories and privacy. In some cases it was easy because the Foundation had done a lot of work in the area; in other cases I tried to find family or friends to do the presentation, but often there was no previous reference, and the formula used (an unannounced visit and presentation of the project) gave positive results in about half of the cases.

So, there I am sitting at the kitchen table and the domestic conservators12 are showing me their photos. Sometimes there are just a few, sometimes there are several boxes or whole albums. In those cases in which there was such a large number of

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photographs as to complicate the process and tip their contribution to the whole off balance I made a quick intuitive selection together with the lenders, trying to ensure that the number and type of documents chosen were representative. In all other cases I looked at all of the photographs that were put in front of me.

I set up the microphone, turn on the sound recorder, and: how should I proceed? Should I ask questions about each photograph from a list of topics? The shift that Werner Herzog posits in the quote at the head of this section is interesting: from the interview to the conversation. An interview13 appears to be part of a ‘technology of truth’, as Hito Steyerl has said, quoting Foucault:14 it is situated under the references of journalistic objectivity, ethnographic science, judicial process … all of which are serious, intellectual and problematic, called into question from the claim to seek absolute truth, or at least from the possibility of representation of an elusive reality. In the field of documentary, of the cinema of the real, as it is sometimes called, the textbooks recommend the catalogue of questions mentioned by Herzog.15 That is the problem: a closed list, drawn up a priori, on the basis of which we will obtain the answers that will help us put forward not our previously constructed message but the issues to be addressed.

Sitting at the table on which the photographs are spread out, with the sound recorder running, I ask my interlocutors to talk about them, one by one, about what they call to mind; I try not to interrupt their stories and accept the pauses, which are often, ultimately, productive. In the event that the domestic conservators have difficulty starting a story, I simply ask them to say something about the people in the photograph, where they were and what they were doing (where they are and what they are doing). If I sense that the photograph may prompt more information, or if someone has mentioned a topic it would be interesting to expand on, I elicit that information, and, finally, if these details have not been mentioned, I ask certain questions in order to prepare a standard entry for each photograph (the date, who took it, the people in it and the location).

The shift away from the interview changes the approach to the truth, which will be present in the conversation as a reflection of a moment that has really taken place, and will even support lying on

the part of the speakers. The information reaches us not as a mechanical set of answers to a test, but through the numerous layers of signification present in the dialogue: the tone, the content of the story and its duration, the terms used or the breaking off of the account to attend to a pot of food cooking on the stove. All of these elements provide truth, they are reality. And all of them are capable of being analysed; they have all been recorded and thus become documents at the disposal of the next stage of the montage.

The Montage. The Public’s Encounter with the Work All the violence of the montage is in this process of transforming the filmmaker into viewer. […] (Once the film is edited and screened it is, of course, the viewer who is transformed in imagination into filmmaker and screenwriter, actor and author).

Jean-Louis Comolli16

The montage or cutting, especially for those of us who work in documentary film, is a process at once tedious and fascinating in which the film finds its final form through the selecting and ordering in sequence of the shots that will constitute it. But just as in the course of recording we posited an open, non-dogmatic approach, it is in the montage that the director’s personal vision appears.

The final editing of a film embodies an option, just one of the many possible forms in which the materials collected could be combined, and the utopian aim expressed by Jean-Louis Comolli in the quote above — converting the spectator into author — is really hard to achieve. Susan Sontag praised precisely the advantage that a film has over a book in terms of control of the discourse: ‘[The] book is not a wholly satisfactory scheme for putting groups of photographs into general circulation. The sequence in which the photographs are to be looked at is proposed by the order of pages, but nothing holds readers to the recommended order or indicates the amount of time to be spent on each photograph. Chris Marker’s film, Si j’avais quatre dromadaires (1966), a brilliantly orchestrated meditation on photographs of all sorts and themes, suggests a subtler and more rigorous way of packaging (and enlarging) still photos. Both the order and the exact time for looking at each photograph are

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imposed, and there is a gain in visual legibility and emotional impact.’17 Despite the interest and impact that the director’s cut may have,18 film presents itself as the more directed, the more controlled form, in that it determines not only which documents are seen, but also in what order, what part of these and for how long and what verbal discourse accompanies them.

But we are working with an archive, not a book or a film. We have to replace film editing in a timeline with another way of selecting and ordering the collected documents (basically, digital copies of photographs and the sound recordings relating to these).19 An archive offers flexible mechanisms for montage, which in our case even include the possibility of presenting all of the photographs (with the corresponding commentaries), and leaving it to the individual visitor/viewer to do the selecting and ordering, and thus to decide what to see and what sequence to follow: in other words, to make their own montage.

Exhibitions of photographs put together to be shown in a rural setting very often select their contents on the basis of nostalgia for traditional customs. This approach tends to leave out photographs deemed to be of little interest because they reflect the supposedly commonplace blandness of the quotidian, or to be of interest only in the private circles in which they were taken, but it is worth considering what happens if we share those moments of everyday life, paying attention to photographs that are not the product of aesthetic decisions and are often far from technically perfect; photographs that may also say very little in their own right, but take on significance when we relate them to others.

When Berenice Abbott proposed a complete photographic documentation of New York City with Changing New York (1935-1938), one of the contributors to the project questioned ‘the informative power of beautiful pictures’, suggesting that it would be more appropriate to opt for a greater number of pictures of inferior quality.20 Hito Steyerl, citing Didi-Huberman,21 gives an even more dramatic example of the value of any photo: of just four photographs taken by prisoners in the Auschwitz extermination camp that have come down to us, three correspond to what we would expect of testimony to absolute horror (the burning of corpses, women filing into the gas chamber), but the other picture only shows moving branches and the sky. And yet

it is a significant document: ‘By means of the viewpoint, the lack of sharp focus and the loss of control of the framing, this image expresses the historical constellation, the situation of complete surveillance, the growing darkness and the threat in which the photographs were taken.’

Just as any photograph can be of interest, any comments on a photograph deserve to be taken into account and incorporated into the archive. Nothing should make us regard a dramatic story prompted by a photograph of a man who had been taken out and shot, for example, as being better or contributing more than a matter-of-fact observation such as ‘this is my mother’.

In Archive Territory, we had an advantage when it came to showing the entire archive to the public: this being a growing archive, as yet in its early stage, the number of documents it comprises is relatively small, and this makes it easier to have a vision of the whole. It remained to design appropriate tools to ensure that the public had access to the documents (all of the photos with their corresponding audio recordings) and could move easily through this territory of images and sounds.

The options for access basically take two forms:22 making the documents available in a virtual space on the Internet (a website), and putting them on show in a physical space (which can be called an exhibition). In both cases, and in different ways in each case, we have to address the (problem of the) montage, or rather, how to ensure the montage in the hands of the user.

In the case of the website,23 it is envisaged that the most direct access to the documents should be via the first menu item, Album: when this is selected it displays all the photographs in small format, grouped into pages, always in random order, and a random selection comes up each time the Album menu is opened. Clicking on a particular photograph brings it forward at a larger scale, accompanied by an explanatory text and an audio player with the corresponding recorded commentary.

When the archive is accessed by way of the Album, the screen offers new combinations of images each time: new montages or ‘new spaces of thinking’, as Georges Didi-Huberman has said in relation to Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas. The French theorist also speaks of ‘the ability constantly to mount, unmount and remount heterogeneous bodies of images in order to create unexpected

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configurations and apprehend in these unperceived affinities or operant conflicts’.24 It should be noted, however, that in an atlas like Warburg’s Mnemosyne the montage depends on an erudite process of selection by the author, and in our case random activation by the users takes the place of authorial erudition.

The main menu of the website offers another three basic options for accessing to documents, according to geographical location, by way of tags we have called folksonomies, and via certain descriptors.

A map is, of course, an obvious way of getting to know an area. The representation of the place where the photographs were taken on the place itself offers us both information and suggestions for our personal itinerary. We thus find photographs grouped in particular areas, individual photographs, and photographs associated with specific localities, distributed according to the terrain and so on, and each of these categories is both an informative index and a proposed itinerary.

At the same time, it was essential that we take into account the voice of the people as a way of orienting the montage of the archive. From the collection of sound recordings associated with each photograph we picked out the words we felt were most representative and used these as tags (folksonomies)25 to characterize the corresponding documents. On the basis of this popular terminology we configured a cloud that is itself a semantic representation of the territory, in which the words are more or less suggestive signposts indicating lines of access to the documentary fonds. This cloud is also dynamic in terms of the addition of new documents: as with the photographs in the album, the words of which the cloud is composed are mounted and dismounted to provide new configurations.

As for the montage by descriptors, this is based on the set of terms used to categorize the documents, and enables them to be accessed in a standardized way in line with established academic criteria for photographic documentation (we have already mentioned some of these descriptors: author, date taken, location, locality, social context, type of activity…). We have also added a set of so-called subjective descriptors, in order to categorize the documents according to certain concepts or terms such as ‘present/future’, ‘community’, ‘solidarity’, ‘affection’, ‘religion’, ‘on photography,

‘no photo’ and so on. It is worth noting that these subjective descriptors were not chosen at the start but emerged as the gathering of photographs and comments made them visible to the project. The one exception was the descriptor ‘present/future’, identified from the outset to label those documents in whose description there was a clear association with the present or future, as this was a central idea in the project. It has to be said that only a few photographs have been classed under this tag, which is also of significance.

Finally, another browsing/montage indicator is based on the relationships between the photographs themselves, and between photographs and localities. These relationships, deduced from the local people’s comments, have been highlighted, because together make up a network that can be matched to the idea of ​​region, territory, and taking them into account also contributes to an ecological vision in which the archive-system is composed not only of the elements/documents it contains, but also of the relationships between these.

The second general option for accessing the documentation consists in making the documents available in an exhibition space.26 To do this, we adapted the building that is the temporary home of the Foundation, the old Cerezales del Condado schoolhouse, converting it into an open space in which the workplace of the Foundation’s technical staff became part of the exhibition, an indicator of the ongoing work that an archive requires.

Original-size prints on paper of the photos were set out on a large tray table, arranged in no particular order. The visitors had free access to these, and in moving the photos to look at them they created new montages, which were found by the visitors who came after them. Didi-Huberman has remarked on the role of the table as an exhibition format that favours different configurations, in contrast to the ‘authoritarian’ and ‘definitive’ vertical frame, and has pointed out various references for the table which have suggestive resonances for this project: kitchen table, work table, dissecting table, offering table and editing table.27 In addition, the table invites contact between the people gathered around it and thus facilitates collective montage.

Encounter is, of course, essential in a project that seeks to summon up the memory of the territory.

Elsewhere in the room was a circle of chairs lent by the domestic conservators: chairs that not only rep-

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resented them, but invited the visitors to sit down and talk to one another in and about the archiveterritory, either informally in the course of their visit to the exhibition or at one of the meetings organized by the Foundation’s educational team.

There was also a computer from which to access the online digital archive in real-time, with a largeformat projection of the screen on one wall of the room. When people browsed the archive online, their choices, the parts of the site they visited and their montages were projected on the wall and thus became an essential part of the exhibition space.

In this way the associations between the randomly ordered photographic documents and the interests of the viewers/visitors to the exhibition propose another way of reading the territory, and in particular their way of reading it, since the arrangement of the photographs on the tray table and the projection on the wall are the direct result of the actions of the public, and it is this participation that allows the archive to happen.

This approach is not new. Just as Chris Marker, after the nineties, transcended the classic editing format (‘his multi-channel works seem to reflect a denial of montage as the creator of meaning, or its reduction to a random effect’),28 the method proposed for the production of the archive shifts the moment of selection and ordering of materials to the public’s encounter with the archive, when people are compelled to explore that Archive Territory.

The Film, Again What is cinema?

André Bazin29

I have argued that the archive form offered numerous advantages over the film form in terms of the philosophy of this project, and that accordingly film had been set aside in putting together this archive on the territory. But what is cinema?

On the one hand, Chris Marker with La Jetée (1962), or Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin with Letter to Jane (1972), among other filmmakers and films, showed it was possible to construct a film with a series of photographs, still images.

The movement inherent in cinema (and in its etymological origin) could reside in the montage, the story, sound, etc.

On the other hand, doesn’t cinematic practice consist in the elaboration/collection of an archive as the basis for putting forward a montage of that archive? If we refer back to the filmmaking textbooks, for both feature films and documentaries these talk about the need to distance oneself from the recorded material in order to be able to look at it objectively when it comes to the montage or editing, quite separate from the recording stage. This means that the editor is actually working with archival material, even though that archive was created expressly in order to make the film. It is worth noting again here the expertise of Marker, who ‘does not present the images (in their immediate or concrete value or sense), but offers them to the eye and to analysis as traces or ruins (in Benjamin’s allegorical sense).

It matters little, then, whether they are his or someone else’s, even if he know how and why he shot them, time has released them from that original function’.30 In this way, cinema would always be an archive work.

In another sense, hasn’t film linked to artistic practices worked hard to achieve its own deconstruction and dematerialization? We must inevitably refer again to Chris Marker, with his expanded cinema in exhibition rooms, on CDs, on the Internet and so on, but if we focus on the most radical avantgardes we find ‘an idea of film disconnected from its hardware’ and from its ‘technological apparatus’ (projector, film, screen) and limiting itself to working with its ‘inherent properties’, namely: ‘the luminous event, the montage, the spatio-temporal modularity, duration and process’.31 Can we find some of this software in Archive Territory?

And ultimately, in these times of appropriation and rewriting, of Creative Commons licenses,32 of diluted authorship and collective creation, can’t we consider any work as part of a possible film?

Couldn’t this, then, be Archive Territory, and yet a film after all?33 Foreword (displaced) Ladle Pour soup for our days Pour sleep for our nights Pour years for our children John Berger34

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We asked for a foreword for this publication from John Berger, perhaps the author who has undertaken the most acute analysis of visual images and also on the future of the rural world. Other commitments prevented him from writing that foreword, but he suggested we use his poem ‘Ladle’ instead: a (very fine) poem about a peasant mother who shares out food among her hungry children. The rural world is there, yes, but what about the references to the photographs, and to the archive?

Once again, intuition made me bring it to these pages. Though Berger may not have had the time, make no mistake: his suggestion is neither trivial nor merely poetic. His lines-images-time collide and intersect with the voices of the people as they talk about their photos, with the sound of the pot bubbling on the kitchen stove, with the silence of the streets. And, above all, they remind us that, apart from our analyses of the photographs, of the archive, of the territory, the important thing is that there was, there is, there should be soup on the table.

1 Georges Didi-Huberman: Atlas. How to Carry the World on One’s Back? Madrid: MNCARS/TF Editores, 2010, p. 139. Although this phrase is immediately followed by the heading ‘Warburg and the Great War’, we believe that it can be perfectly extrapolated to the current world situation, or, if you will, to the current situation of the rural world.

2 A private institution that focuses on the development of the territory and the transfer of knowledge to society by way of two lines of action: the production of culture and ethno-education (information obtained from the website www.fundacioncerezalesantoninoycinia.org).

3 With this quote Suely Rolnik prefaces her text Furor de archivo, acknowledging this to be a free interpretation of various ideas of Walter Benjamin’s. Estudios Visuales No. 7, (CENDEAC, 2010).

Available online: http://rev.estudiosvisuales.net/pdf/num7/08_ rolnik.pdf, accessed 23 December 2012.

4 Although the project has also considered the cine film and video materials to be found in the houses of the region, in view of the small number of these I will refer only to photographic images in this text.

5 Anna Maria Guasch: Arte y archivo. Madrid: Akal, 2011, pp. 303-304.

6 Interview in the newspaper El País (2 January 2004).

7 Ibid.

8 Carlos Muguiro (ed.): Ver sin Vertov. Madrid: La Casa Encendida, 2005, p. 84. These remarks were made before the director announced he was giving up documentary film on account of the control being exercised by the television companies and began working on feature films.

9 This decade marked the definitive turning-point in terms both of rural depopulation and changing land uses and of the spread of amateur photography and the penetration of the consumer society into rural areas, so that the photographic fonds from this period on reveals a shift that would be worth incorporating into the archive, including the current flood of images from mobile phones, webcams and the social networks.

10 In ‘Fascinado por un crimen’, interview by Beatriz Navas in Caimán. Cuadernos de Cine No. 10 (2012).

11 We drew up a document detailing the granting of the owners’ permission to copy and disseminate photographs and recordings and our commitment to return the originals within a maximum of seven days.

12 The domestic conservators are the people who have allowed us to copy their photographs, and it is they who really conserve the originals that are the basis of the archive, which will therefore be distributed between numerous homes in the region.

13 Jorge Blasco analyses in critical depth elsewhere in this publication (pp. 244-248) the use of interviews in the preparation of the archives.

14 Hito Steyerl: ‘Can Witnesses Speak? On the philosophy of the interview’, eipcp (European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies), 2008. Available online: http://eipcp.net/transversal/0408/steyerl/es, accessed 23 December 2012.

15 Herzog, who in addition to being a filmmaker runs a far from orthodox film school, is categorical on this point later in the interview: ‘I think it’s an ability you either have or do not have, and cannot learn. Having a list of questions doesn’t help in these cases. These are conversations between people.’

16 Jean-Louis Comolli: Ver y poder. Buenos Aires: Aurelia Rivera/ Nueva Librería, 2007, p. 163.

17 Susan Sontag: On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973, p. 3.

18 In other later works Marker avoided the definitive montage, as will be discussed later.

19 Although in the present text we only mention the photographs and recorded comments, the archive contains documents of other kinds, which have been generated in the process of setting it up, from administrative paperwork to video recordings of the working sessions.

20 Olivier Lugon: El estilo documental. De August Sander a Walker Evans 1920-1945. Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2010, p. 25.

21 Hito Steyerl, op. cit.

22 Three options, if we count this publication, although it does not include the sound documents.

23 http://www.fundacioncerezalesantoninoycinia.org/territorioarchivo/.

24 Georges Didi-Huberman, op. cit., p. 182.

25 This form of tagging is similar to that found on the Internet, where visitors to a website collaboratively classify the content with field labels are known as folksonomies, and we have used the same term, even though the meaning is slightly different.

26 I do not consider this to be the right place for a complete inventory of the expository mechanism, and confine myself to outlin-

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ing certain sections that may give the reader an idea of the expository spirit.

27 Georges Didi-Huberman, op. cit., p. 18.

28 Antonio Weinrichter in Caimán. Cuadernos de Cine No. 5 (56) (2012), p. 11.

29 André Bazin: [Qu’est-ce que le cinéma] What is Cinema? Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967, title and p. 19. The author explains in the preface that ‘the title What is Cinema? is not so much the promise of an answer as the statement of a question that the author will ask himself.’

30 Antonio Weinrichter: ‘Montage Marker’, in Maria Luisa Ortega and Antonio Weinrichter (eds.): Mystère Marker. Pasajes en la obra de Chris Marker. Madrid: T&B Editores, 2006, p. 178.

31 Esperanza Collado Sánchez: Paracinema. La desmaterialización del cine en las prácticas artísticas. Madrid: Trama Editorial / Fundación Arte y Derecho, 2012.

32 The material generated in this project is licensed as Creative Commons.

33 Every film is a collective work and its realization needs a team, and especially in this case, where we relied on the active participation of the inhabitants of the region, the real protagonists of the film. In addition, a group of people whose names can be found in the credits listed in this publication collaborated on the development of the project. In navigating the (for me) unfamiliar territory of the archive, the commentaries of the people who signed the other texts in this publication have been invaluable.

The curating of the project, the gathering of documentation, the web design, the uploading of data on the Internet, the graphic design, the educational programme, communication, the mounting of the exhibition and more were only possible thanks to the intense work of a team. To all of them — domestic conservators and artistic and technical team — this text is dedicated.

34 John Berger: ‘Ladle’, from Pig Earth. New York: Pantheon, 1979 (Spanish trans. La razón del campo. Veintiún poemas. Málaga: Centro de Ediciones de la Diputación Provincial de Málaga, 2011, p. 53).

From the Interview to Nowhere Jorge Blasco Gallardo Head of the Archive, Art, Science And Society Research Group at ESAGED of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Interviews; hundreds of interviews every day. Interviews on matters of current affairs, celebrity gossip, economy, health, history, memory, etc. And who does them? Journalists, artists, historians, people searching for the disappeared, anthropologists, sociologists, scientists: almost every discipline has its mode of interview. Interviews that seek a solution, that allow nothing to be left open. It is necessary that the interview should be a statement in itself. The interviewee is not allowed to doubt: he or she has to be sure and true; otherwise that section will not be included in the final cut that will see the light of day.

We know that we live in an insecure world that demands certainty of all forms of discourse, without which they will be dismissed as insufficiently scholarly, academic or orthodox, despite the existence of the Nouvelle Vague, Queneau, Ponge and the rest, long since elevated to the highest ranks of culture.

Nothing deactivates a discourse better than giving it heritage status. No need to burn a book, just have it bound in leather, with gold leaf on the spine and cover, and put it in a good official library for it to burn out, if I may be allowed the metaphor.

99.9% of the interviews we read or hear say things that we already know or — and this is the worst thing — want to hear.

Spielberg or Lanzmann can collect millions of interviews and they will all be telling the same thing in different ways, with their beginning and their end, and everyone is happy until something happens — if it is not happening already — that has nothing to do with what actually happened, something just as savage, serious and cruel, which thanks to the constant repetition of the past tragedy takes us by surprise: after the nightmare of the mounds of bodies there is nightmare of the investment funds, if it wasn’t there all along.

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But the point of all this was interviews, and how some of us would like them to be, or at least a small percentage of them. Endless interviews, mundane interviews that have within them a certain je ne sais quoi. Interviews that, in themselves, go nowhere, or rather, lead to unease rather than to collective catharsis.

‘From the Interview to Nowhere’ is the title of this text, of course. But the interview exists, interviews exist whether we like it or not, and the mere fact of working in this medium makes it necessary to reflect the interviews we ourselves do. It is not only the interviewer who is responsible for the story; the interviewees have an active part: they are not puppets, though some interviewers would like them to be. The interviewees know a lot about telling a story and indeed tend to tell stories with a beginning and end, with goodies and baddies, with anecdotes; nothing to do with the mode of ‘realism’ that some of us may prefer. This leads us to conceive the interviews in two ways: in isolation, published on the chosen support or, alternatively, constellating them together with other information organized as a systematic set of materials that can be called an archive, a directory or a collection, which as such are complex tools for thinking a montage of sometimes unexpected meanings in a medium that we also inhabit, namely the database and its derivatives.

In the creation of ‘non-fiction’ narratives, real tools are very often neglected in favour of a cinematic tradition that, great though it is, cannot take us to the places this documentary approach can reach. The document, the interview, demand freedom of movement for its audience. Of the creative artist they demand the design of tools — over and above the writing of stories — that allow people to access to documents in a montage in which things that were never to sit side by side are brought together and take on meaning: author tools, author archives, author search engines, author classification tables, and so on.

One hundred years of film history set against the passage of civilizations that have chronicled their existence by organizing their traces, or rather documents. Items, perhaps.

In reality, this whole mess of words is opportune because it is necessary to speak of the urgency with which culture must address the great potential of the archives and above all of the tacit narratives that are inevitably created in them, beyond their

epidermis or plastic form, as a mode not only of research but also of creation; a tacit, mutable nonfiction account that wells up from the depths when the necessary elements are collected and created.

Although a great amount of art has been produced in relation to the archive, little has been seen in the museum; a very different thing is the Internet and those working on its structures from the code, making this a form of poetics and politics.

What is to be done, then, with thousands of interviews when to some extent they all refer to a common ground or territory, whether it be the Holocaust or the experiences of African Americans and racism in the United States? It is fascinating to have this material on one’s computer by way the Internet, but its potential is not fully exploited and it ends up being strangely linear and not nearly disturbing enough.

On the other hand, the aim should be to reach a conclusion, to arrive at a sharp response that restricts discourse to the established thematic groups and categories, which can then at last recount what was said in the introduction to the projects in all its rich detail.

It would seem that we have not learned much from the danger of constructing a self-righteous linear History. Obviously, there is a victim and there is a perpetrator, no matter how complex it may prove to unpack this assertion; that said, this is the starting point today, insofar as the endless repetition of witness accounts of tragedy tend to make of it, for those who have not experienced it, a nightmare, a somnolence that can facilitate both denialism and revisionism. Given the freedom of the network, we should not end up working with the nineteenth-century linear discourse of the Internet.

There are other ways. They may have their flaws, but they are there. Ways of enabling us to take part in past history in present time than simply reviewing the past in black and white. And we do not have to go very far. Although we may have forgotten, war in Europe is not something remote, and the distance between the Sarajevo Olympics, the Bosnian War (and remember that there were other wars in the former Yugoslavia that have received next to no analysis by pseudojournalists with a card but little propensity to think) and the present is a very short one. If in the historical domain it is precisely the linear identity-centred repetition (this is not the place to expose the hard core of vested interests) of the story of nations and territories — both mental and

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earthly — that allowed extreme violence to usurp the place of peace, it is high time that interviewers, journalists and historians reflected on their responsibility, that buck they pass sideways with very dirty hands. And the artists, too, fortuitously launched into terrain that once seemed off limits to them, have committed ​​grave errors. We could all find cases. The purpose of this text is to accuse not individuals but the situations they provoke.

This is where we return to the problem: the artist and the interview.

How is it that so many works of art can be described in terms of the preceding paragraphs?

The interview is a process that does not begin in the questions or end in the answers, but that complex process is all too often obviated or simply resolved by the white room of the museum or by a scenography, also museological, with all of the codes we are accustomed to associating with the installation of a documentary video in the terrain of art. It is not, of course, a matter of a ‘making of’ but of enabling the medium and the configuration of the work ‘speak’ about its process, about its tools, about its scenes, about what archives, for better or worse, do with such precision.

Going back now to the former Yugoslavia, that region is the source of a project which is simple in IT terms but interesting in the way it permeates various sectors of the population, or rather, people and their territories, whether these be their nation, their traumas, their wounds, geography itself or any other territory that human beings frequent. The project, with a simple name, Archives of Memory, is funded by one of those international organizations that sometimes get it right. At first sight it is a simple database made up of testimonials, drawings and photos of people with certain traumas produced by the war from the Pristina area. But when we look more closely we see that the project is not just a ‘memory’ project but also an effort to treat and work towards recovery from war trauma, involving patients and therapists of different ethnicities within the same territory. The protagonists of the project include not only ‘victims’ but also therapists from these same groups, since the ultimate goal is to train psychologists from the places where the gap is open and memory is trapped. The project is all of this, and interviews are one of the tools that have been used, but also important is the way they were done, when someone decides to tell something so

as to become part of an online archive that potentially everyone can see. The whole thing is subtly woven and each stitch is a gesture, with its form, its movement, its dance. In her article included in the second volume of Culturas de archivo Silvia Salvatici gives an excellent description of the procedure.1 Of course, this is inscribed as a score in the structure of the so-called archive, an archive that is not limited to what is registered, an archive that is happening and where the absences are the basic elements that allow it to exist and for other territories that were but had been said not to be worked, constructed and modelled. They share the territory, they share the archive. In the last analysis the territory and the archive construct and destroy each other. The maps that determined how the territories of Latin America were demarcated are stored in archives and are integral to the formation of nations and their borders.

The preconceived ideas of the settlers construct territories that by means of the map were settled and prepared for future wars. Africa made ​​with the set square and the compass. The Spain of the autonomous communities, where not only the so-called ‘historical’ communities have grievances and demand that the archive construct the territory in a different way, while the territory seems to make it clear that it has to be changed. But both territory and archive are much more than a map and a large expanse of land: both contain the past, the dreams, the wars, the deaths, the lives, the imaginaries, the frustrations, the failures, the stupidity, the intelligence, the geology, the topography, the myths, the biochemistry, the hate and the love that are the content of a container that they themselves constructed: the territory and the archive.

The one is not an image of the other; they construct each other until they end up melting.

Any attempt to separate them will be a failure, a gesture of clumsy historicism or out-dated ethnology. We perpetrate the territory and the archive and then have the audacity to want to pillage them at will, while looking down on those who ‘inhabit’ the place, by interviewing them, for example.

The work that has begun with Archive Territory has a peculiarity: it does not ask in order to find out, but asks for the sake of asking, like the talk at a filandón get-together that are being recovered in six villages of the Condado-Curueño region. To do something for its own sake, for the pleasure of doing it, is to really be in the territory, in the

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archive, to make incursions into it and be part of it while territory and archive change the person who dared to enter the houses and the imaginaries that can be seen in the work. The medium is the photograph. It isn’t the first time asking about photos has been done in the history of the interview. Of course in most cases it is done with a purpose, to tell something, with a prior intention well prepared by a world in which the documentary — or should we say the ‘documentaroid’? — is deeply rooted in our customs.

Let’s not be naïve: anyone who immerses themselves in the archive and in the territory always has an intention and a purpose; the difference is when they enter in order to stop having those things rather than to satisfy them. They live the present of the interview and then, if they escape, on getting out again they encounter the defining moment of liberation from their prejudices: to put all they have recorded in order, or in disorder, but in any case to find the arrangement that enables the elements to relate to one another in an environment and not in a closed room.

Leaving aside a word as authoritarian as ‘order’, we have to ask ourselves, in replacing taxonomies, ‘categorical’ categories and other tools, about how to share that territory-archive, how to ensure that that archive-territory keeps on happening and is not represented, described or, at worst, exhibited. How to get an interface that makes anyone who touches belonging to that archive-territory that was born as a target and has become a way of being and acting.

The archive, archives, the normalized ones, as valued as they are reviled, have a long history in the matter of making available or sharing traces of life which immerses those who consult them. Many have seen in the archive a way of understanding the world, which would not exist without its documentary trails.

In that centuries-old tradition, in the structures and in the classification tables we can read — almost better than in written texts — the changes in mentality, the actual occurring of life that has vanished and vanishes at every instant, that which at each moment was considered objective or truthful.

The fact that today archival studies is a science reflects the complexity of the times in which we live and what we consider objective at this time. Perhaps in the basic principles there lies that common place where things are shared, where what hap-

pened happens but in a different way, and is no less genuine for that.

The reason why archival studies has been so little used by the artists some have labelled ‘archive’ is one of the mysteries of the last few decades, as Foucault, to cite someone dear to me, was well aware.

This Archive Territory is constituted by the moment of the interview, its recording, the collecting of images, the lost moments of the photographs, and also by the unique moments of the interview, the only remnants of which are scraps of audio archive.

It is also articulated by, fused with and permeates basic principles of archival studies, which are subjected to a ‘stress test’ in living alongside this great experience that is the Archive Territory project.

The most standard fact sheet has been on the table at the moment of dialogue with the rest of the territory, as has the classification table. Both have undergone tensions and modifications, and have provoked similar tensions and modifications in those who have dared to ‘defile’ them.

Better to defile a fact sheet than defile people from six villages in León.

This is where the information in its fullest sense comes out. Everything is information, even the way of organizing it, and this will define especially the territory that is archive and the archive that is territory. It will be this point, then, that must be treated with the same delicacy with which the interviewer approaches the interviewee, if possible.

A great deal of effort has gone into modelling these tools, and probably their ‘archival’ mistakes are their greatest successes. This is also where the software has begun to require that the information sets be given a form. Another effort: to ensure that the software does not ruin the experience, that occurring in which this project consists in the past, present and future. How to lade the words with images and the images with words without losing the possibility of being in the project rather than consulting the project? How to let go of our idea that something is being represented?

This is a good starting point from which to engage the science of a place where we habitually are, a place that requires that we really be there in order to ‘see’, to grasp the meaning of the document. The museum continues to confuse many visitors — and not a few artists — even after years of struggle against the visual as aesthetic paradigm.

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Things are still pretty even when their intention has nothing to do with any conventional conception of beauty! Beuys’s work becomes ‘beautiful’ in the museum! It is true that documents also run that risk, but they occupy a documentary context that many museum works ignore. They ignore the fact that the work is also its documentary context and become sphinxes with a contemporary look adapted to current fashion, now archive, now genre, now ‘anarchive’.

The archive obliges us to understand the documentary context if we are to locate the information and ‘see’ the truth. Even today the museum still allows contemplation in the least enriching sense, because we know that there are other uses that are closer to what seems to be sought here.

It is not the task of this text to explain the Archive Territory project, and it will not try to do so, but everything that has been said up to now describes the work from the perspective of a privileged witness who has caught the project bug and now cannot get rid of it.

Examining the results is the act of someone who wants to be in the project and not just visit it or stroll through one of its activations: the exhibition.

Don’t come to look. This, in its way and with the necessary modifications, is an archive and a territory, inseparably. If nonetheless you opt for the visual enjoyment of old documents and the inevitable aura they give off, at least be so good as to keep quiet, so that the participants, whoever they may be, can navigate in peace.

1 Silvia Salvatici: ‘Relato del recuerdo. Identidades colectivas e individuales en el Kosovo de la posguerra: “Archives of Memory”’, in Culturas de archivo / Archive Cultures. Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca / Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies / Valencia: Servei de l’Àrea Cultural de la Universitat de València, 2002.

New Uses for Old Images.

Shared Management in the Exploitation of Photographic Archives Mela Dávila Freire Author and consultant in the field of the archive in contemporary art

We live with such easy assumptions, don’t we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it’s all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we’d forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn’t act as a fixative, rather as a solvent. But it’s not convenient — it’s not useful — to believe this; it doesn’t help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it.1

As has so often been said, there is no doubt that photography made its definitive entry into the canon of art history in the second half of the twentieth century. However, a review of the theoretical and historiographical debates in the recent literature suggests that in many ways the question of photography continues to occupy an invariably ambiguous position, at the intersection between a series of conflicting values: between the document and the work of art, between realistic representation and fictitious staging, between the unique original and the infinitely reproducible copy … and also between the potential to trigger memories and the ability to make them disappear, superposing itself on them and edging them out of the observer’s memory.

In similar fashion, photographers themselves also occupy an ambivalent position: not having entirely transcended their artisan origins and ascended in full to the condition of artist, they are ranked both in the collective unconscious and — with more serious consequences — in institutional assessment somewhere halfway between the two categories.

This ambivalence may be one reason — but not the only one — why even now that the inclusion of photographic work in contemporary art collections is so widespread there is still heated debate about who should take charge of photograph archives, which in the meantime are gradually being shared

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out among non-institutional associations, local libraries, public administration archives, newspaper archives, historical documentation centres and even, though as yet to a lesser extent, art museums.

This last is precisely the case of the archive of the photographer Xavier Miserachs, which in 2011 was deposited with the documentary collections of the Study and Documentation Centre at the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA), making MACBA the first contemporary art museum in this country to undertake the conservation and management of the complete documentary legacy of an individual photographer.

The MACBA’s Study and Documentation Centre was set up in December 2007 with a remit to identify, collect, conserve and provide access to the documentary heritage — huge and at the same time diffuse and widely scattered — which illustrates and complements contemporary art practices. The launch of the Study and Documentation Centre was MACBA’s response to the increasing importance that documentation had acquired in the field of art in the course of the twentieth century as a result of such factors as, among others, the progressive dematerialization of art and the shift of the interest towards process rather than product and the specific situation at that time of the Spanish State, whose fabric of art institutions and private collections had only been in existence for a few decades and had not yet had time to consolidate the documentary legacy of twentieth century art. The Study and Documentation Centre came into being with a commitment to fill this gap and at the same time expand and enrich the notion of ‘document’ in the field of contemporary art. Along with a major reference library, its fonds therefore include very heterogeneous collections: not only the personal archives of artists and art critics, but also documents generated by art galleries, various ‘raw’ materials used by artists in the creation of certain works, video recordings of a large number of performances, some particularly important collections from publishing houses, MACBA’s historical archive of its own activity… and, of course, artists’ books, which make up the group of ‘documents’ most obviously linked to the artworks in the museum’s collection. A decisive factor in the process of defining the documentary collections of the Study and Documentation Centre was the belief that works of art and documents are linked by a close relation of contiguity: for MACBA,

artworks and documents constitute adjacent parts of the heritage continuum and are therefore distributed between the art collection and the Centre on the principle not of subsidiarity but of conservation and accessibility.

Within the discursive framework designed to structure and order the growth of the documentary collections that were to make up the Study and Documentation Centre’s fonds, photography has occupied a prominent place from the outset: ‘Photography, not only as an art genre but also very particularly in its condition as document constitutes another major thematic axis. The regular acquisition of historically significant photography books […] is complemented by the work of conserving the personal archives that the Study and Documentation Centre has taken on, centred on the legacies of local photographers and photography critics who attained significance during the second half of the twentieth century, a period which suffers from an acute lack of research and analysis, due in part to the continuing difficulties of gaining access to the documentation that illustrates it.’2 In this period, and in the specific context of MACBA, Xavier Miserachs occupies a position of undeniable centrality, and from the outset the custody of his archive was a key priority of the Study and Documentation Centre.

Xavier Miserachs (Barcelona, 1937-1998) joined the Agrupació Fotogràfica de Catalunya in 1952 and exhibited with Ricard Terré and Ramón Masats in two shows in 1957 and 1959 which obtained considerable notoriety and marked the beginning of the ‘new avant-garde’ in Spanish photography.3 From 1961 on Miserachs combined his work as a professional photographer with personal creative projects, which he published in some of the epochmaking photo-books of the nineteen sixties: Barcelona. Blanc i negre (1965), Costa Brava Show (Kairós, 1966) and Los cachorros (Lumen, 1967), milestones of the Spanish avant-garde photography of the time.

In later years Miserachs continued to expand his activity as a photographer, working in advertising, reportage and on commissions from publishers, and as a correspondent for the magazines Actualidad Española, Gaceta Ilustrada, La Vanguardia, Interviú and Triunfo, for which he wrote numerous articles.

Towards the end of his life he became increasingly interested in writing and in putting down in print his conception of photography. His last two books,

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Fulls de contactes. Memòries (Edicions 62, 1998) and Criterio fotográfico (Omega, 1998), were published in the year of his death.

After the photographer’s death, his two daughters, Arena and Mar Miserachs, inherited the rights to his work, and took on the custody and management of his documentary legacy. This legacy, spanning the forty-four years of Xavier Miserachs’ activity as a photographer (between 1954 and 1998), consisted of vintage prints and tests made by Miserachs himself, and about 80,000 photographic images, of which approximately 60,000 are negatives and 20,000 are transparencies in various formats, as well as some 2,500 contact sheets. There are also numerous documents relating to Xavier Miserachs’ professional activities, including, among other series, a collection of correspondence (1964-1979) and a small number of notebooks and scribbling pads in addition to his personal photography library, with many of his own books as well as titles by other authors, a selection of specialist magazines and so on.

In the latter half of 2009, through the mediation of Jorge Ribalta, who was then advising the Study and Documentation Centre on matters of photography, MACBA contacted Miserachs’ daughters, and at the same time initiated a thorough investigation of methods of managing photographic archives as a basis for evaluating, together with the Miserachs family, the possible advantages of having a public institution take charge of the photographer’s archive, in order to give maximum exposure to the fonds and promote and facilitate research into his work without detriment to its status as family property.4 In the autumn of that year, when the institution and the Miserachs family had come to an agreement on the management of the fonds and were engaged in drawing up the legal document embodying this and in the preparation and public presentation of the agreement, a major public controversy irrupted in Catalonia which suddenly placed photograph archives in the public spotlight and triggered widespread interest in rescuing them from oblivion.

The immediate cause was that the Spanish Ministry of Culture had just purchased, for the sum of 800,000 euros, the negatives of Agustí Centelles, one of the outstanding photographers of the Spanish Civil War, in order to deposit these in the Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica in Salamanca.

The great symbolic weight of both the collection

of negatives and the institution they were being consigned to, together with the fact that the Centelles legacy was to be taken out of Catalonia, led to a sometimes bitter public debate that nevertheless had some positive consequences: not only did it focus a good deal of attention on the precarious circumstances of many uniquely valuable photograph archives and the lack of institutional coordination to ensure their conservation, it also prompted working photographers to reassess their attitude to their own archives.5 Meanwhile, the as yet private process of negotiating the agreement between MACBA and the Miserachs family duly culminated in the signing of an accord on February 3, 2011, and the transfer of the archive to the Study and Documentation Centre. Under this agreement, the museum and the family assumed joint responsibility for the legacy, in the following way: the physical material archive, which in legal terms is known as the corpus mechanicum, was deposited with the MACBA for safekeeping, while the family retained possession of the corpus mysticum or intellectual creation embodied in the physical archive (without which it would not exist). Specifically, the Miserachs family ceded to the museum for a period of twenty five years, free of charge, custody of the legacy (with the exception of the vintage prints and tests), as well as the responsibility for conserving and cataloguing the fonds and making its content known in any medium, including exhibitions, publications, public events, digital formats and so on. The museum, for its part, took on, together with these responsibilities, the obligation to promote the study of the fonds in a proactive fashion — by organizing, among other things, an exhibition of Miserachs’ work and by encouraging research into the content of the fonds in the context of its postgraduate programme6 — and to supervise the reproduction of Miserachs’ photographs and any other material forming part of the legacy, with the collection of royalties in each case.7 Reflecting as it does the mutual desire to find innovative ways of undertaking the shared management of the Miserachs legacy, the agreement between the family and MACBA also included a number of pioneering conditions. Of note among these is the family’s authorization of the posting of images from the legacy in low resolution on the Study and Documentation Centre’s profile page on the Flickr social network8 and the dissemination of

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a limited number of photographs by Xavier Miserachs, selected in consultation with the family, under a Creative Commons licence of the CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 type, which allows the images to be reproduced free of charge provided that reproduction is not for commercial purposes and the authorship and origin of the images is properly acknowledged and attributed.9 These two initiatives were received with great enthusiasm by the specialists, and the first albums of Xavier Miserachs’ work on the Study and Documentation Centre’s Flickr profile page, in the days immediately following the public announcement of the agreement, received a tremendous number of visits for a collection of this nature.

The public presentation of the agreement took place on February 21, 2011, a few days after the signing and transfer of the legacy to the museum.

Thanks in part to the sudden upsurge of interest in photographic archives prompted by ‘the Centelles case’ only a few months earlier, the news was met with an unexpected amount of interest in the media and society. On the whole, public opinion and the political institutions linked to the world of culture and museums responded very positively, while the country’s documentary photographers varied in their evaluation of the move and raised a number of objections, particularly to the fact that MACBA had paid nothing to the owners of the archive and the. In the opinion of many photographers, this demonstrated once again the institution’s lack of recognition of the cultural heritage generated by the profession. For MACBA, however, this was a particularly important aspect of the agreement, in that in view of the cost of conserving and properly cataloguing an archive (not only of photography but in general), the museum is already in itself a clear expression of financial commitment by an institution that only a few months earlier had expressed its determination not to devote its resources to the purchase of archives.

Once the excitement of the public presentation had died down, the team at the Study and Documentation Centre got down to defining the cataloguing methodology, because the Miserachs archive, with its 80,000 images, was in fact the first major photographic archive to be acquired by MACBA.10 Having established the parameters of cataloguing, the Study and Documentation Centre began to incorporate the archive into its documentary fonds, a process that has brought to light the

complexities of managing an archive similar of this nature.

For example, the scanning of a photographic archive confronts many risks that can threaten its very survival in a technological environment in continual rapid transformation, in which media and formats can be superseded even before they have been widely adopted. Among these risks, some of the most dangerous are the absence of generally accepted standards for digital formats and specific description metadata for photograph archives, the lack of consensus as to what is the ideal software for managing large sets of digital images, and the costs of the servers that make it possible to manage such extensive archives.

At the same time, the choice of platform for making images available online is a far from trivial matter. In contrast to the cost and the human effort that would have been required for the archive to develop its own software for the dissemination of digital images online, Flickr offered clear advantages: the software is free, is already online and is tremendously popular, all of which speak in favour its future continuity and therefore the survival of the images stored on it. It is important to bear in mind, however, that this being proprietary software — private property, in fact — its owners have the final word on its stability and thus on its contents, and they have taken on very little in the way of obligations to the many users — including institutions — who have loaded it with content.

What is more, although a presence on a platform such as the social network Flickr offers tremendous potential accessibility, and in theory allows the user some degree of ‘interaction’ with the archive via tools such as tagging and geolocation, among others, in practice this potential has not been realized in the actual participation of users. Certainly, the number of queries registered in the Flickr albums devoted to Xavier Miserachs has not been negligible, especially at times when coverage in the ‘traditional’ media acted as a draw or prompt, but experience indicates that users have not been attracted by the opportunity to exercise an active role in engaging with the archive, which seems to suggest that a social network is not necessarily the best vehicle for circulating contents of this kind.

Similarly, the potential circulation offered by the Creative Commons licence chosen to disseminate ten of the archive’s most iconic images has hardly

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taken off, despite the favourable reception of the initiative. In this case it seems likely that a general lack of awareness of the range of Creative Commons licences and what each one is best for has a lot to do with the lack of interest from potential users. But it is also possible that the current polarization of positions between those who call for the open circulation of digital content with no copyright restrictions and those who wish to conserve at all costs the privileges of authors and institutions has undermined initiatives such as this, situated halfway between the two extremes.

Finally, on a less pragmatic and more conceptual level, as the process of cataloguing progresses and our knowledge of the contents of the Miserachs legacy deepens, our appreciation of its substance and richness continues to increase, as do our certainties about gaps in information generated by the configuration of the archive itself. To give a specific example, on the basis of Xavier Miserachs’ correspondence we could draw up a fairly reliable chronology of his work for magazines such as Triunfo, Destino and Interviú. However, the archive does not in fact have the negatives of the shots he took for these clients, because the negatives were systematically kept by the magazines that had commissioned the work and never returned to the photographer. This means that a significant part of Miserachs’ professional work is missing from his archive, which only has copies of some of the magazines in which the photographs appeared. However, the temptation to try to fill these gaps raises questions about the coherence of the method and the best use of resources which are not easy to answer: should the institution attempt to fill the gaps in an archive, or should it confine itself to noting their existence? Does it have the human resources to undertake research of this nature, and if it does, should it do so, or should this task be delegated to the users as potential researchers?

Tensions such as these are by no means the only difficulties; of note among the others are those deriving from MACBA’s responsibility for policing the reproduction of images from the archive. In weighing up an application to reproduce an image from the Miserachs archive, what is the ideal way to reconcile the moral right of the photographer, as the author of the image, with the right to privacy or to their own image of the individuals who appear in the photographs? To what extent does the management of reproductions imply control over the uses

made of Xavier Miserachs’ photographs? In the best case, this control will seek to maintain or improve the artist’s reputation, but it may end up causing his work to be read in a particular way … Is this the proper role of the institution with respect to the artist’s legacy? And if this is the role it assigns itself, what are its limits?

As the cataloguing of the Miserachs archive proceeds, other and equally complex problems will no doubt arise. The responses that are valid in the context of the Miserachs archive may not be appropriate in other cases, but will surely help pave the way to greater collaboration between private archives and public institutions in the conservation of the photographic heritage.

Quite apart from the question of how the management of this archive is defined and formalized, however, the Study and Documentation Centre will soon face the next phase of the project, involving the definition and implementation of strategies to stimulate use of the contents of the archive. When that time comes, thanks to its condition as a graphic document of the past (albeit the very recent past, which many users of the archive will recall, or precisely for that reason), the Xavier Miserachs photographic archive will undoubtedly find itself addressing questions that can be extrapolated to any other photograph archive, in that any photograph, regardless of who took it, is a document that becomes ‘historical’ and ‘culturally significant’ with the passage of time.11 These questions have a lot to do with the use of photography as a mechanism that activates memory, a use that literally embodies the expression ‘an act of memory’ in the sense of ‘building’ or ‘fashioning’ memory from photographic images instead of retrieving it from recollections of past experiences. In the specific case of Xavier Miserachs, whose book Barcelona. Blanc i negre is of crucial importance for the construction of the collective image of the city in the second half of the twentieth century, the revival of this facet of his archive, combining and superimposing it on the ‘lived’ memories of potential users of the legacy, may end up producing some particularly revealing tensions and contrasts about the ability of the photographic medium to reconstruct history in its own image and likeness, ‘that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation’.12

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1 Julian Barnes: The Sense of an Ending (2011). London: Vintage, 2012, p. 63.

2 Mela Dávila Freire: ‘¿Es una obra, o es un documento? El Centro de Estudios y Documentación del MACBA’, in Glòria Picazo (ed.): IMPASSE 10. Llibres d’artista, edicions especials, revistes objectuals, projectes editorials, edicions independents, publicacions especials, edicions limitades, autoedicions, edicions d’artistes, publicacions digitals. Lleida: Ajuntament de Lleida, Centre d’Art La Panera, 2011, pp. 300-308.

3 In the words of the photography critic Josep Maria Casademont, whose personal archive is also conserved at MACBA’s Study and Documentation Centre.

4 This research revealed that at present there are countless different models for the management of photograph archives, based on radically different premises, starting with the very definition of ‘archive’, the meaning of which is not agreed on even by people professionally involved with photography. This diversity of models also reflects to some extent the different ways of understanding copyright law in different parts of the world.

5 It must be said, however, that in the political arena the ensuing debates were centred on establishing which of the Catalan institutions should take charge of these archives, instead of considering the alternative possibility, advocated by MACBA, of concentrating efforts on the definition of standardized criteria of cataloguing and conservation that would that make it possible to coordinate the work of the different entities that are now and will be in the future responsible for the upkeep of photograph archives.

6 The MACBA’s Independent Studies Programme, whose first course started a year before the opening of the Study and Documentation Centre.

7 MACBA agreed to share these royalties with the estate at a ratio of 20%-80% respectively. It should also be noted that in the context of this agreement, the term ‘reproduction’ referred to the copying of photographs and other documents in the fonds in any format or medium, and expressly excluded the making of what is usually known as a ‘photographic copy’ (an enlargement of a negative printed on photographic paper and intended to be exhibited or sold), with the Miserachs family retaining the exclusive right to do this.

8 <http://www.flickr.com/photos/arxiu-macba>.

9 Creative Commons Attribution-NonComercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Licence Spain. http://creativecommons.org/licences/by-nc-nd/3.0/es/ 10 The method adopted treats each contact sheet as a single item, in order to carry out the cataloguing of the large volume of material in a reasonable time, and bearing in mind that all of the images on the same contact sheet will usually be of the same subject. To catalogue the contents of the images, the Study and Documentation Centre has created a hierarchical structure for the materials based on the BIMA protocol (Image Base, the name given to Barcelona City Council’s documentary image database) produced by Sílvia Domènech for the Arxiu Fotogràfic Municipal de Barcelona.

11 ‘Photographs are documents of cultural significance.’ Akram Zaatari: ‘Photographic Documents / Excavation as Art / 2006’, in Charles Merewether (ed.): The Archive. London and Cambridge, Mass.: The Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT Press, 2006, p. 183.

12 Julian Barnes, op. cit., p. 59.

Archive Territory, Archive Time. The ‘Projective’ Image of the Past as Signifying Process and as Polysemic and Polyphonic Discourse José Gómez Isla Professor of Fine Arts at the Universidad de Salamanca, art critic, and curator

Technical, social and historical characteristics of the visual archive Sociological studies of popular photography and the family album have proliferated over the past five decades, especially since the nineteen sixties,1 when the photographic medium began to be seen as a perfectly normal practice in most middle-class households. But this apparent democratization of the image cannot be accepted as such if it is not accompanied by a culture of access enabling ordinary citizens to produce their own images.2 In other words, the supposed democratization of the audiovisual media culminates not when we have all satisfied our need to perpetuate ourselves in the form of our own image, fixed for eternity, but, and above all, when we all have the opportunity to become producers of our own images rather than mere passive viewers of these: ‘only from 1888, when George Eastman launched the first Kodak, did amateur photography really become popular’.3 During the more than 170 years of photography’s history this process has been taking place very gradually. In its origins, and during the latter two thirds of the nineteenth century, the practice of photography was thought of as something complex, for professionals, and cameras were still sufficiently expensive and difficult enough to use for the taking of continue a portrait to be left to the experts. So much so that in the early twentieth century most of the people who wanted a portrait of themselves still delegated the laborious technical process of taking the picture and then processing and printing it to professionals. So, as can be seen in most of the

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photographs that have come down to us from that era, the usual thing was for people to go to a professional studio (when the photographer was still considered a member of a highly specialized minority profession) for portraits of themselves and their nearest and dearest.

However, we can say that for something like half a century now (since the practice of photography started to become popular and the number of photographers increased exponentially) the majority of the photograph albums and photograph archives that we have kept in our homes are the products of self-confident amateur photographers who are less and less likely to visit a photographer’s studio. With this trend there is a clear inversion of social roles between the producers and consumers of images, until both come together in the same individual: traditionally, the man of the house, who would take it upon himself to immortalize the ‘great moments’ in the lives of the people around him.4 This not only allowed us to compose our own customized personal photographic biographies, but also, and above all, it paved the way for us to take our own photographs in everyday contexts, in private settings far less artificial than the fancy painted backdrops and papier-mâché scenery of the photographers’ studios of the time. This level of popularization and access to the technical means effectively placed the bulk of the practice in the hands of the aficionados, and at the same time this same circumstance has also led to an astronomical increase in the number of shots taken, to the point where it seems that by now every last nook and cranny of the world has been documented.

It is hardly surprising, then, that the reading that has begun to be projected on this Archive Territory that Chus Domínguez has developed from the current context should take in the range of times and circumstances, historical, social and cultural (and also inevitably conditioned by technological factors), in which the photographic and film documents of the Condado-Curueño district presented here were taken. Obviously, the specific personal intentions, both of the people portrayed in these photographs and of the people who took them, have changed gradually over the intervening time, and it is surely worth noting that they have also been conditioned to a great extent, both in appearance and in signification, by the very same technical circumstances

and innovations with which the images were produced in each period.

This being so, it would not be the same to analyse the meaning of a photograph taken in what A. D. Coleman called the directorial mode,5 painstakingly prepared and staged in a professional studio and with stereotyped poses determined by the rigid aesthetic criteria of the early years of photographs (the mid-nineteenth century) as to analyse the uses and meanings of, for example, the spontaneous and more or less ingenuous snapshot (the candid photography pioneered by Erich Salomon) of a religious procession or a village festivity taken by a local man or woman with a fairly rudimentary understanding of how a camera works. Obviously, the two images are the product not only of different individual projects but also, and above all, of completely different socio-historical programmes, so we must also see them as embodying two diametrically opposed ideologies and poetics.

On a supposed technological determinism in the practice of photography Some deterministic approaches have formulated their theories of the discursive specificity of the photographic medium in terms of its technological particularities in the field of mass communication. Theorists like Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan (of the Toronto School), who imbued what is known as Medium theory with their personal view of the potential influences of technology on society, assumed that the ‘dominant discourses’ were constructed through the communications media.

According to this view, every new technology brings about a redefinition of the socially established relations for the use and symbolic reception of that medium, so that the technological developments of the mass media would be more than mere linear extensions of our communication skills.

These technologies also interact socially, and influence and may even reshape the socio-economic, cultural and communicative model of the society in question. Human history would thus be unthinkable without a history of the technologies that have accompanied it. According to Harold Innis, to some extent these technologies effectively model and determine the communicational and social relations of their time. In sum, the effects produced by communication technologies would be reflected in the

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very way we perceive and think the messages sent through those technologies. The essential thing for society is not so much what the media say but how they say it. Consequently, each new technological artefact would be able to substantially change the way we engage with and understand the world. If, as McLuhan said, ‘the medium is the message’, we also tend to think that technology determines the social model. Thus, for example, we would find it logical that the invention of an optical instrument such as Galileo’s telescope should consolidate the Copernican revolution in humanistic and scientific thought. We attribute to technology, rather than to the scientific impulse as such, the capacity to bring about a radical change of mindset. As we have seen, we believe it was optics (the telescope and the microscope) that triggered a social revolution in their day, taking us from the geocentrism of classical antiquity (adopted by medieval Christian thought) to the heliocentrism of modernity. Technology, then, would have an extraordinary power to decide the course of history and define the social structure of each era, thus committing us to an outand-out ‘technological determinism’.

Joshua Meyrowitz would defend this position by arguing that it is ‘no more deterministic than widely accepted analyses of how the paths of rivers and other geographical features have shaped general patterns of human settlement and exchange.’6 Similarly, in his essay La era postmedia, José Luis Brea attributed to technology an equally powerful capacity to articulate new linguistic modes and communicative models: I will always link the development of a technical mechanism with that of a specific problem of the emergence of languages: not so much because I regard technology as destiny as because, rather, I regard it — technology — as language: or more precisely because I am convinced that a history of forms would be impossible without considering the technological mechanisms that articulate the relationship of symbolic production with the world, with the real. […] It is equally unrealistic to think that an art form can come into being without being irreversibly linked to a technical development.7

From this deterministic explanation it could be argued that it is technology itself which allows the evolution not only of the languages directly linked with it, but also of the new aesthetic and communicative discourses that emerge as technology changes.

Even so, it is worth questioning the validity of the determinist argument that ‘technology has an increasing and almost irresistible power to decide the course of events’.8 From this perspective, the events that govern social changes would be the inevitable consequence or result of technological innovation: in other words, a given technology would have been able to act as the real engine of change. This explanation would give technological artefacts an overwhelming ‘causal power’ to decide the course of history. However, we must pay attention to the nuances.

A ‘hard determinism’ would give artefacts an almost autonomous capacity to decide the social changes they supposedly cause. However, a ‘soft’ explanation of determinism would question that hypothetical autonomous capacity of technology. After all, no technical artefact, however powerful it may seem, has ever been capable of independently performing any action not previously programmed by humans.

In this way, soft determinists insert the technological sphere in a wider and more complex social network that includes conditioning factors prior or simultaneous to the appearance of a given technological artefact. These conditioning factors would be socioeconomic, cultural, political, ideological, religious and even geographical and climatic.

In short, this ‘soft’ perspective gives technology the power to shape society and at the same time to be shaped by it, in so far as technology itself can also be regarded as a social construct. In other words, if the implementation of a technology leads to changes in the social structure, this is because it almost always comes about as an expression of some prior ‘epochal need’.9 Consequently, we can also consider present-day audio-visual technology to be a product inherent in the human framework, that is to say, as a necessary tool with which to reproduce and reflect the social and cultural model of the time.

Determinism as ideology However, if we adopt the ‘soft’ version of this deterministic position we must assume that audiovisual technology also has as much power to shape the world as any other. We can no longer see it as a ‘reflection’ of reality, but rather as a powerful ‘constructor’ of new and different realities. That power is concentrated in the ‘transformative’ potential

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that any photographic or film production acquires from its registering of an initial reality, and this in turn inevitably changes the way we think about that reality. This transformative power, or ‘technological momentum’, as Thomas P. Hughes has called it,10 thus implies a more or less implicit form of ideology.

It would be another thing entirely to try to discern whether the ideology borne by the photographic ‘artefacts’ in this archive is confined to the photosensitive technique to which the photographer must submit, or whether they are also bearers of the individual and collective ideologies of the photographers themselves (be they professional or amateur) or of the social ideologies implicit in the production of these images in their day.

It therefore seems indisputable that in one way or another (either by their construction or by their modes of use) the technologies of audio-visual communication have significantly modified and transformed our individual modes of social relationship (the new uses and customs). But what would still require to be demonstrated is whether the ‘technological momentum’ has significantly reconfigured the model of society as such. These critical positions have analysed the political uses to which both the economic system and the groups possessing power have devoted these technologies. That said, the efforts of the so-called theories of information and audio-visual communication have focused primarily on noting the social and psychological impacts and effects that the symbolic products generated by these audio-visual technologies have been and are capable of producing.11 In its day, the critical theory of the Frankfurt School conjectured that all technology presupposes a form of ideology in the modes of operation it generates.12 Herbert Marcuse argued that the concept of ‘technical reason’ is in itself a form of ideology and social domination, and that in some sense this ideology is already implicit in the construction of the artefact itself: ‘It is not that certain aims and interests of domination attach to the technique a posteriori and from the outside; rather, they enter into the construction of the technical apparatus itself. The technique is always a socio-historical project: in it is projected what a society and its ruling interests intend to do with people and things.’13 It may be that applications of the audio-visual image are where the constant and mutual ideological contaminations between technology and

discourse become most visible. And it may also be here that we can unravel this dual enigma of photographic technology conceived as either a political ideology or a poetic strategy, or as both at once.

Individual ideology or collective ideology in the practice of photography?

Evidently, when we view it from the requisite temporal distance we begin to understand that what is passed on in each photograph is not just the individual intentionality of the author of each image but, and above all, the prevailing ideology of each historical moment, as if it were an epochal culture medium in which the images have been submerged.

And this is made perfectly apparent by the kind of more or less visible ‘watermark’ that the photographers of a certain period have left in the way of representing and interpreting the world through their images, which has little to do with how we today conceive of everyday reality. As Kracauer notes: [The] grandmother in the photograph, too, is an archaeological mannequin which serves to illustrate the costumes of the period. So that’s how women dressed back then […] The grandmother dissolves into fashionably old-fashioned details in the eyes of grandchildren […] They laugh and at the same time they shudder.

For through the ornamentation of the costume from which the grandmother has disappeared, they think they glimpse a moment of time past, a time that passes without return. Although time is not part of the photograph like the smile or the chignon, the photograph itself, so it seems to them, is a representation of time.

Were it the photograph alone that endowed these details with duration, they would not at all outlast mere time; rather, time would create images for itself out of them.14

Nor can we deny that the specific personal intentions with which each individual portrayed or wished to be portrayed are equally diverse and singular, and in many cases correspond to the universally generalized idea of preserving as a still image an event which at that particular time was considered sufficiently important to be worthy of being registered (‘immortalized’, we tend to say) by means of the camera.

But one thing is abundantly clear and visible in this Archive Territory. Alongside each individual intentionality, or the varying degrees of technical ex-

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pertise with the camera, or how expensive or cheap the photographic equipment used and the circumstances obtaining in each case in the taking of a picture of good or bad quality in technical and aesthetic terms, there is an implicit common discourse that has ‘varnished’ with its own ‘collective style’ most of the photographs that have come down to us from a particular era. As Pierre Bourdieu argues: [Via] the mediation of the ethos, the internalization of objective and common regularities, the group places this practice under its collective rule, so that the most trivial photograph expresses, apart from the explicit intentions of the photographer, the system of schemes of perception, thought and appreciation common to a whole group.15

It is also important to clarify here whether we can call that collective discourse, established through relationships from and with the archive, ‘poetic’.

And this does not mean that we necessarily assert the artistic value of the documents that constitute it. Apart from the eternal dispute about whether photography can be considered an art in its own right or not as compared to other disciplines with which usually has very often been compared — most often painting and drawing — and regardless of what position the practice intends to occupy in the exclusive upper echelons of art (as an applied art or as an art in the highest sense), the fact is that the majority of photographic practice has had other uses and functions which have almost always gone beyond the mere construction of a beautiful or well composed image, according to the aesthetic canons of the time. That said, we cannot deny that photography, with its peculiar ‘amateur style’, has revolutionized the very essence of artistic creation.

As Walter Benjamin observed, ‘much futile thought had been devoted to the question of whether photography is an art. The primary question — whether the very invention of photography had not transformed the entire nature of art — was not raised.’16 Nevertheless, further discussion of this point would be of very little relevance to the project being presented here, however much poetics and aesthetics are constantly bound up in it.

The portrait: just a photographic genre or more than a question of genre?

In most of the cases that concern us here, the genre of portraiture (whether individual or collective) outnumbers by an overwhelming majority the rest of the images brought together in this Archive Territory. This clearly indicates that the interest of the photographers and their subjects (the individuals portrayed) is far removed from the ultimate intention that characterizes any other artistic creation.

Here the images aim only to fulfil a social function, reaffirming the sense of personal and group identity.

As we have said, the presence of the portrait as majority genre (along with travel and wedding photographs) is vastly greater than that of other types of document. But that hegemony is not unique to this archive, spread across the whole district. Invariably, the portrait stands out by far in any family album to review, compared to any other type of generic photographic construction (such as the landscape, the still life or the nude), or other genres associated with scientific or even aesthetic interests (such as macrophotography, fictionalized images or some kind of technical experiments with light and texture closer to the pictorial abstraction to photorealism). This is an incontrovertible statistical fact. With only a few exceptions, in almost all of the documents collected for the project (which, lest we forget, come from the private family albums of hundreds of homes in the Condado-Curueño district of León) we invariably find people portrayed, whatever the context that the picture records may be. Because, of course, the ultimate goal has been to immortalize and solemnize the most memorable moments in the lives of the families to whom these images belong.

The archive project spread throughout the district Going a step beyond the registered referent (the ‘what has been photographed’), we can now ask ourselves ‘how’ the need to create this Archive Territory — in this very concrete form and at this precise point in the history of the district — came about. We can also ask ‘why’ and ‘from where’ an audio-visual artist such as Chus Domínguez has the expressive intention (or discursive need) to give a new twist to what already exists, namely an archive that is in reality more a cultural construct created by Chus himself than a real archive.

The fact is that until Chus came along with his project, we could not really speak of an archive,

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because the documents were geographically dispersed all over this district of León, in the possession of many different people, without the unity and concentration that characterizes an archive.

The very idea of setting out to explore a fictitious photograph archive, house by house, as a territory capable of incorporating a new reading (or poetic interpretation, if you will) of a photographic collage that has always been scattered all across this territory calls for an explanation. It might seem at first glance that the focus of this project is purely sociological. However, if we scratch the first layer of paint even a little we can see that the project goes a lot further than that. Its position is equidistant between the social, the poetic, the political, the historical, the aesthetic and the communicative. This being so, the approach to this territory Chus proposed is multifaceted, like that of a photomonteur, like that of a filmmaker editing footage, or like the best polymorphic Cubist version of a subject, with several simultaneous points of view.

If we take a first cursory look at this ‘archival cluster’, it may seem a priori that the various albums and documents have too little in common to be able to engage in a dialogue with each other. However, Chus’s intention has been to draw out the hidden poetics within all those scattered private albums, which constitute an extensive archive of cultural identities. This ‘cultural construct’ planned by Chus questions itself by placing documents in relation to others, obliging them to establish a dialogical logic.

In this sense, the project itself is self-critical, from the moment it began to encourage the creation of networks of exchange between people from nearby towns and villages, between neighbourhoods and even between families in the same village. The ends if proposes are open. They are not predetermined by the author. Rather, he is a kind of voice-over narrator questioning his own reason for being, conscious of his own subjectivity as a usurper in the role of a fictitious archivist. Because Chus cannot help but conceive the project not as an ordinary archive but as an audio-visual montage like the ones he has worked on as a creative artist. But in this case, I think he himself knows it is not possible to establish, with the graphic material collected, a logical, diachronic, sequential montage like that of a documentary or an audio-visual narrative. This new ‘visual territory’ he offers us must be understood more as a montage or collage that develops in depth,

through the superposing of several narratives. As Kracauer says, ‘In a photograph, a person’s history is buried as if under a layer of snow’.17 Similarly, in this archive, the underlying relations between the photographs and their narrators, between present and past, constitute that same layer of unfinished history.

What imposes itself, then, is a multilayer poetics covering aspects such as the relationship between the time of the photograph and historical time, and the various authorial narratives that come together in this project, namely: a) that of the author of the project: Chus Domínguez; b) that of the individual authors of each photographic document, and — the most important — c) the relational poetics that is established when we, as active viewers, bestow a collective and identity-based meaning on this local archive.18 Similarly, the fabric of our lives is made up of the relationships we have woven with others. Our own biographies are nourished by our experiences with others, the succession of our planned or unforeseen encounters, our links with certain people who often do not even belong to our family or our immediate surroundings. This makes it extremely important to place one photograph archive in relation with another and to contrast the scattered images that the project has managed to bring together in the Condado-Curueño district in order to make visible that kind of ‘collective identity,’ now more visual than experiential, which is generated only through this new Archive Territory. With his particular artistic sensibility, Chus seeks only to help bring it to the surface so it can construct itself like a kind of ‘social biography’ of the whole district, a biography with which everyone can identify as beings in transit,19 feeling they are part of a larger project that is able to extend not only into the past, but also into the future. This being so, the idea of the project Archive Territory is that these images go beyond their condition as private documents to become part of the collective imaginary of the individuals who compose it, a territory capable of generating new narratives as self-constructed identities of ‘word-images’ like the ones Javier Abad speaks of: So the word-image attaches to an extensive field of ways of telling things through diaries, collages of texts and photographs, conceptual maps, diagrams, cartographies of identity, etc. Through the elaboration of

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these different narratives it is possible to re-interpret the experience of life and its multiple perspectives, because in this way the master narratives are recognized and ‘interrupted’ so as to construct from a critical stance alternatives that configure other lives in ours.20

It is there, in that placing in relation of a new archive, surprising, public and collective, that Chus Domínguez tries to and does bring about a series of activations produced through the Cerezales Foundation, as a centre for the dissemination of the project and as its expansive core. By way of the local people’s activations in relation to the archive, these photographs take on not only new value, but also a new meaning as ‘narrative identities’:21 ‘Thus, the concept of “narrative identity” recognizes identity as a narrative of narratives and at the same time makes the change possible in so far as it is also a social and narrative construct.’22 Beyond language: the ineffable nature of the photographic medium The indescribable emotion that old photographs give rise to often causes us to overlook any technical deficiencies they may have. And the affection we feel for our own photographs comes not so much from what they seek to say — that is, their subject (a party, a wedding, a family or group portrait, a journey, a casual get-together of friends or classmates…) — but and above all from the force acquired by the weight of the past. The gravity of these fleeting shadows that have been caught forever in the snapshot is the real subject of any photograph archive: an instant that comes back (transformed into present, into evoked memory) through the very act of contemplation of the image of what ‘once was’. We can agree with Roland Barthes that when we look at any photograph what we actually see is a kind of anterior future, something that is at once going to be and has already been: ‘What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.’23 We are thus, inevitably, in the presence of a magical ceremony of the evocation of the past through the image, the exaltation of a time lived and remembered, or even imagined and recreated, by way of the photograph. We are even powerfully affected by the portraits of certain people whom we never

knew, such as our grandparents or great-grandparents, or the former teacher from the school we went to who never actually taught us, because the picture she appears in was taken over a hundred years ago.

We are at once charmed and moved as we stare open-mouthed, amazed at the dress of the time, and even at how dramatically the places, the scenes of our childhood, have changed. The same landscapes through which we move today were traversed by our ancestors in these pictures even before we were born. The dirt road that appears in an old photograph provokes a strong reaction when we compare it with the paved road that now occupies its place, and the old adobe houses of yesteryear produce a deeply unsettling feeling when we contrast them with modern buildings and holiday villas. And we are equally stunned by the drastic changes that have been made to the village square. It brings a tender, wistful smile to our lips to witness the celebrations of days long gone in these same places, the festivals, the processions, the get-togethers, the weddings and the popular or important events that photography restores to us. In this way, the evocation enters into play as a reconstruction of the past.

As Susan Sontag says: [A] photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. Like a wood fire in a room, photographs — especially those of people, of distant landscapes and faraway cities, of the vanished past — are incitements to reverie. The sense of the unattainable that can be evoked by photographs feeds directly into the erotic feelings of those for whom desirability is enhanced by distance.24

We can see how photography now takes on an added value, and how suggestible we are in the presence of any innocent document of the past, in direct proportion to the distance between the time when the photographic picture was taken and the present moment of our looking at it. Through a surprising visual conjuring trick, our eye is permitted to settle avidly on a time we never had access to but which, thanks to the magic of photography, can be updated and reproduced ad infinitum whenever we want. The more we look at a photograph to draw out the secrets it conceals, the greater the ‘weight’ of the gazes that have rested on its surface and sought to unravel the same enigmas the faded image continues to pose to us, as it did on the day it was taken. Like the image that Proust offers us,

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there was a time when some people innocently believed that a work of art acquired its true value from the number of eyes that have focused on its varnished surface: Certain people, whose minds are prone to mystery, like to believe that objects retain something of the eyes which have looked at them, that old buildings and pictures appear to us not as they originally were but beneath a perceptible veil woven for them over the centuries by the love and contemplation of millions of admirers. […] a thing which we have looked at in the past brings back to us, if we see it again, not only the eyes with which we looked at it but all the images with which at the time those eyes were filled.25

The value of the photograph as ‘kairos of desire’:26 the past in the present By way of this new contemplative participation in the archive, what Chus Domínguez’s project sets out to do is to provide a new set of meanings (this time collective) which the passage of time has silently incorporated into the images, as graphic documents of the past and mute witnesses of our own history. In Archive Territory the value placed on the photographic document derived not so much from its aesthetic quality as from the peculiar relationship it establishes with other documents and with the individuals with which it has lived and shared a time and a territory. The project’s ultimate aim is to call together a whole series of narratives (story lines linking the past and the present) that may be of value not only as accurate interpretations of the meaning (fixed and unambiguous) of the images but also and above all as elements whose place within the whole precipitates a poetics through the archive that until now was only found in the individual photographs in an isolated, fragmented form, as a latent, invisible element. In fact, when we gather around the family album we inevitably ‘activate’ a series of stories about the past events and circumstances to which the image refers and to other collateral aspects of the photograph itself, which though outside of the visual field, allow us to interpret those events and circumstances in the light of their direct witnesses or the people portrayed, with a new approach each time.

This is a new archive that, far from having exhausted its interpretations, always inspires new

readings — readings that are superimposed on those that have gone before, as layers or deposits that do not cover over but enrich what lies beneath them. Moreover, the individual personal interpretations we make of the photographs (distanced as we are from the circumstances in which they were taken) will have nothing to do with those we may make a posteriori when we come to look at this ‘expanded archive’ with people who can talk about it in the first person, from their own experience and the evocation of a past they lived and shared directly with the people that appear in the images.

However, our initial interpretations, arrived at intuitively, from our ignorance of the past time the photographs allude to, will be no less valid because for being produced from the present. Our epochal perspective also has a part to play in contributing new meanings, new uses, and in enhancing the images’ ‘power of attraction’. The interpretations (past and present, authorized and unauthorized) of that vanished world not only ‘correct’ but also add to ours. It is this universe of intertwining past and present discourses that the latent poetics that Chus Domínguez, like Baudelaire's ragpicker, seeks in the archive can really emerge.

The photographer — and the consumer of photographs — follows in the footsteps of the ragpicker, who was one of Baudelaire’s favorite figures for the modern poet.

‘Everything that the big city threw away, everything it lost, everything it despised, everything it crushed underfoot, he catalogues and collects […] He sorts things out and makes a wise choice. He collects, like a miser guarding a treasure, the refuse which will assume the shape of useful or gratifying objects between the jaws of the goddess of Industry.’27

However, this interpretative poetics will impose itself not as a single, monolithic discourse but as a set of small poetics doomed that overlap one another, ensuring that the ‘choral’ narration of the archive will open up new readings, new meanings and new story lines on the basis of these still images. This is why the ‘keywords’ that will be used in this Archive Territory are so crucial, drawn as they have been from the popular imaginary of the district. Chus likes to call them folksonomies, because through them we can activate a rich and varied tapestry of poetics which can only be deployed by contemplating them.

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It is equally important that a visual artist of Chus’s sensibility has yielded up his own authorial voice in order to let the images themselves and their interpreters speak and be heard, and from this there emerges a unique poetic and aesthetic whole. It is only thanks to the activations Chus has proposed that the evocative poetic narrative of the image can make itself visible in the participating viewers. It is this intangible tapestry of stories, interpretations and meanings which now aims to become transparent, as a complex polymorphic mesh of networks that has been threaded by a number of actors outside the district. Above all, this has been possible thanks to the selfless generosity and patience of those ‘guardian angels’ and rapporteurs who have compiled and conserved the private photograph archives now brought together here.

However, given the indefinable aura that attaches to any photograph that speak to us of a remote past, and the distance that separates us from the reality it documents, at times the image inevitably takes on a certain added value, a value it may not have possessed in its day and a value its author never intended it to possess. Over and above its poetic or aesthetic qualities, the theme or the persons portrayed, or the event captured in a photograph, there will always inevitably be some degree of ‘memorialization’ of the image, or rather a certain ‘solemnization’ of the traces it bears. When we look at it we feel compelled to make a symbolic ‘ocular reverence’ to what it shows. The photograph thus acquires the magnitude of something very precious, almost irreplaceable, as if it really were a work of art, although it may be of relatively little artistic interest in most cases. In the words of Susan Sontag: A photograph of 1900 that was affecting then because of its subject would, today, be more likely to move us because it is a photograph taken in 1900. The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past.

Aesthetic distance seems built into the very experience of looking at photographs, if not right away, then certainly with the passage of time. Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.28

However, we should not let ourselves be misled by the consternation a photograph produces, because we is not dealing with a process of unconditional admiration for the form in which the authorship

of the image was exercised. Quite the contrary: in most cases the author is invisible. It is as if they had practiced a ‘style without style’. Consequently, the process of memorialization I mentioned above consists more in the nature of the evocation, in something that goes beyond the way the image has been constructed, beyond admiration of a particular photographer or a particular way of taking photographs, achieved by a particular point of view or framing decision, choice of focus, angle, light and so on. In this case, we are not looking at the purely formal qualities of the image (although we know how to appreciate these when they are worthy of consideration); what we are always looking for is something that goes a little beyond the formal concretion of the physical result. If, as we said, an old photograph almost always takes on a certain ‘solemnity’, this is due to an unquantifiable capacity to invoke the past (like a medium summoning a restless spirit), a capacity unmatched by any other type of visual representation, such as painting or drawing.

The consternation produced by the encounter with the subject of the photograph: the painful experience of contemplation When we look at a photograph of the past we experience a sort of consternation: there is something that ensnares us, but it always goes beyond the visual field of the image itself. In contemplation of the image whenever we sense the presence of an inevitable spatiotemporal out-of-field. Roland Barthes defined that which is ‘beyond’ what the image shows, coining the concept of photographic punctum.29 For Barthes, the punctum is that which pricks us, upsets us or subjugates us, and yet we are unable to name: ‘What I can name cannot really prick me. The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.’30 In contrast to the purely descriptive and referential aspect of any image, which Barthes called the studium (the formal and physical details of recognizing people, places or clothing), certain photographs always manage to impose an indescribable emotional aspect, a ‘fulguration’ as Barthes calls it, which completely changes the meaning of the image: ‘Occasionally (but alas all too rarely) a detail attracts me. I feel that its mere presence changes my reading, that I am looking at a new photograph, marked in my eye with a higher value. This “detail” is the punctum (that which

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pricks me).’31 In such cases, when the consternation occurs, the photograph as object, the product of a technique or discipline, quickly becomes invisible.

It is precisely this unnameable quality that a photographic image only possesses for someone who is familiar with it and knows the context in which it was taken (who knows the particular circumstances of the people and places depicted) that gives the image its true emotional sense. However, this is a value that cannot be transmitted or communicated verbally.

Someone who is not part of the family context of a photograph that fills us with a great sense of uneasiness might pause to contemplate documentary aspects they could identify, such as a rural landscape, children playing, a group in front of a building, a celebration, a studio portrait, etc. However, their contemplation will not be aware of this emotional charge the picture has for those of us who are personally involved in what is represented. In addition to recognizing the elements recorded in the picture (places and people), we also fully identify with them and feel emotionally involved. For us, the act of contemplation will mean the evocative activation of a particular moment, the one captured forever by and in the photograph, while for anyone not connected with that moment it will be read as a time irretrievably lost, an irretrievable past. This act of affective contemplation longing triggers an infinite nostalgia for a moment that will never come again.

In this case, the photographic medium becomes a kind of ‘invisible umbilical cord’ between the image and the referent to which it directly alludes, and, in turn, ‘links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze’.32 Only with difficulty can it be read as a recreation, however much posing and construction of the composition there has been in front of the camera. It is true, of course, that in the majority of cases we can discern a certain amount of posing in the photograph, a certain amount of artifice, genuine naturalness having been sacrificed for a more photogenic result. Even so, as viewers we cannot escape the ontological character that the photograph exudes, for all its artificiality: our gaze dives into the image, loses itself in it, without noticing the technical tricks of its construction, the traps set for us by the act of photographing as an act of representation.

As Roland Barthes pointed out, ‘Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photo-

graph is always invisible: it is not it that we see’ but its referent.33 When we looking at it we never say ‘this is a photograph of so-and-so’, but instead directly remark the person represented, completely forgetting that this is only a visual representation of her and asserting confidently that ‘this is so-and-so’ and not a picture of her. The picture thus becomes a completely transparent object, a kind of mediator between our present and the past to which it inevitably alludes.

Poetics, narrative and collective identity In Archive Territory, photographs from these albums scattered throughout the district serve as coupling elements whose function is to fill in the blank spaces that have been left isolated in the truncated and fragmented narrative of the past. As Susan Sontag notes: ‘Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation and fantasy […] Strictly speaking, one never understands anything from a photograph. Of course, photographs fill in blanks in our mental pictures of the present and the past.’34 So it is important for this project that the activations generated by means of the documentary archive should overlap, should be juxtaposed in the form of a relational ‘collective writing’ in order to create a new narrative in which the images only take on meaning as part of it. The oral discourses that have been built around these images and documents at the get-togethers for people in the district who wanted to take part in the project have no other purpose than to recreate that narrative interrupted by the shutter of the camera, incorporating a logic of meaning into the mute images, which cannot speak for themselves.

A photograph can only present, display, register.

We can all talk about it, yet a picture is unable to speak for itself. It cannot affirm or deny anything about what it shows. The most it can do is make itself invisible through the intensity with which it presents us with the referent it captures. It becomes both transparent and opaque at the same time.

Once again it is Susan Sontag who hits the mark on this point: Photographs are often invoked as an aid to understanding and tolerance. […] But photographs do not explain; they acknowledge. […] If photographs are messages,

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the message is both transparent and mysterious. “A photograph is a secret about a secret”, as Arbus observed. “The more it tells you the less you know.”’35

The discontinuity inherent in every photograph (torn from the continuum of history) denies the viewer any expectation of signification. This discontinuity, according to John Berger, always produces ambiguity. The temporal cut of the snapshot opens up an abyss ‘between the moment of recorded time and the present moment of looking at the photograph’.36 Only through the story that we build on it as viewers, projecting it beyond the captured instant, can we reinstate that photograph in its historic course and so give it an appropriate meaning. Here again it is John Berger who sustains the argument: ‘In the relation between a photograph and words, the photograph begs for an interpretation and the words usually supply it. The photograph, irrefutable as evidence but weak in meaning, is given a meaning by the words.’37 Obviously, there are many discourses that can be constructed around the interpretation of the archive, and some of these may even be contradictory, intersecting and growing around the images that enable this multiple narrative to emerge into the light. Indeed, that is the true mission of this project. It is not, then, a matter of bestowing a new aesthetic value, which many of the photographs recovered in this common archive undoubtedly already possess.

Consequently, the task of the project is not to assess the artistic intent behind each image, but rather to ensure that the ‘poetics’ emerge spontaneously by situating certain images in relation to others, thus generating new discourses in ways that the isolated individual images by themselves clearly would not.

Of course, we must also take into account the mechanism of photography’s ability to transform what it documents. Many artists and theorists — especially since the Surrealist movement, which assigned unprecedented importance to the medium’s ‘transfigurative’ power — have talked about that sort of visual defamiliarization (ostranenie) that every photograph possesses. When we look at a photographic portrait we perceive the ‘I’ as ‘Other’, or as Barthes says, the ‘cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity’.38 Any record, however banal it may seem, is capable of making the most everyday event striking, unprecedented, and the familiar an initiatory experience. Thus, the photo-

graphic act is able to shape a surprising new reality, made new by the automatic recording of its real referent. Estrella de Diego speaks precisely of this power of ‘transubstantiation’ in her comment on Eugène Atget’s photographs of the deserted streets of old Paris: ‘Atget photographs what is happening in the house next door, the taste of the strange in the familiar’.39 But, far from staying anchored in a closed, monosemic and unequivocal discourse, Archive Territory promotes something more: polysemy, the open work, the poetics that emanates from the gestation process itself. This is an archive that is constantly growing. We can speak of it as the project of a contemporary artist, Chus Domínguez, who, thanks to his personal probing of the territory and its people, of the district and of the images that have been constructed from it, has ended up turning his project into a kind of ‘palimpsest’. Like those medieval manuscripts in which a number of texts were overwritten on the same parchment, some having been deliberately deleted to make room for the later ones, but we can still make out the ink marks of the older inscriptions, in Archive Territory several types of script (oral, visual and audio-visual) are also superimposed and help transmit a new kind of ‘choral’ and ‘polyphonic’ poetics, so to speak.

Here we can appreciate the superposed voices of the discourses of the past and the new discourses, which by way of a new collective memory promoted by the archive have been able to activate the entire collection of photographic and film documents when these are contemplated and discussed retrospectively. We can say that in this project there is in effect a constant production of a kind of ‘multilayer poetics’ that allows us to hear the harmonious respiration of several voices at the same time and on different supports (photograph, sound, written text, audio-visual) by way of the archive, the audio-visual fragments, the website, the exhibition of photographs and the gatherings of local people.

In Archive Territory a number of different and distant discursive intentions are obliged to dialogue with one another: a) those of the original protagonists of the images (whether these are the photographers who took them or the individuals portrayed), and also, of course, b) those of the custodians of the images, who have kept and treasured them like gold for so many years, or c) those of the presentday commentators and interpreters of the archive

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who, like good musicians, gifted at interpreting a score written by someone else, are able also to establish that open dialogue with the past and in so doing enable the now-distant voices of the people who shared time and place to be heard again. Because the images in this archive allude directly to other times and spaces that may be gone but live on through their photographic representation and the collective memory that the project has managed to reactivate.

Only in this way is it possible to generate a new fabric of collective identities through which there will always appear, as in polyphonic music, the individual notes of the participants in this network of dialogues between past and present that I would now like to rename Archive Time.

11 Cf. Mauro Wolf: Los efectos sociales de los media (1992). Barcelona: Paidós, 1994.

12 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno: Dialectic of Enlightenment. Philosophical Fragments (1944). Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.

13 Herbert Marcuse: ‘Industrialisierung Kapitalismus im Werk und Max Weber’, in Kultur und Gesellschaft, II. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1965.

14 Siegfried Kracauer: The Mass Ornament. Weimar Essays (1963).

Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995, p. 48.

15 Pierre Bourdieu, op. cit., p. 44.

16 Walter Benjamin: ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936), in Illuminations. London: Pimlico, 1999, p.

220.

17 Siegfried Kracauer, op. cit., p. 24.

18 Nicolas Bourriaud: Relational Aesthetics. Paris: Les Presses du Réel, 2002.

19 Cf. Javier Abad Molina: ‘Imagen-palabra: texto visual o imagen textual’, a paper presented to the Congreso Iberoamericano de las Lenguas en la Educación in Salamanca, 5 — 7 September 2012.

20 Ibid., p. 5.

1 Perhaps the fullest and most important sociological study to date is the one coordinated by the celebrated French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and his research group, sponsored by KodakPathé and published in 1965 under the title La photographie: Un art moyen. See Pierre Bourdieu: Photography. A Middle-Brow Art (1965). Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990.

2 Cf. Jeremy Rifkin: The Age of Access. The New Culture of Capitalism. London: J. P. Tarcher/Putnam, 2000.

3 Gisèle Freund: Photographie et société. Paris: Seuil, 1974 (Spanish trans. La fotografía como documento social. Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 1994, p. 177).

21 Cf. Vicente Blanco Mosquera: Identidad narrativa (estrategias del arte), unpublished doctoral thesis submitted to the Faculty of Educational Sciences of Granada, 2012.

22 Javier Abad Molina, op. cit., p. 6.

23 Roland Barthes: Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography (1980). London: Vintage, 2000, p. 4.

24 Susan Sontag: On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973, p. 26.

25 Marcel Proust: In Search of Lost Time. Time Regained (1927).

London: Vintage, 2000, p. 241.

4 ‘[…] bear in mind that there is a very close correlation between the presence of children in the household and possession of a camera, and that the camera is often the common property of the family group […] 64 per cent of households with children have at least one camera, as against 32 per cent of households without children.’ Pierre Bourdieu, op. cit., p. 57 and 117.

26 Roland Barthes, op. cit., p. 59.

5 A. D. Coleman: ‘El método dirigido. Notas para una definición’ (1976), in Jorge Ribalta (ed.): Efecto real. Debates posmodernos sobre fotografía. Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 2004, p. 129-144. Original title: ‘The Directorial Mode: Notes Towards a Definition’, Artforum 15:1 (September 1976), pp. 55-61.

31 Ibid., p. 87.

6 Joshua Meyrowitz, ‘Medium Theory’ in David Crowley and David Mitchell (eds.): Communication Theory Today. Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 1994, pp. 50-77.

35 Ibid., p. 121.

7 José Luis Brea: La era postmedia. Salamanca: Centro de Arte de Salamanca, 2002, p. 26.

8 Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx (eds.): Historia y determinismo tecnológico (1994). Madrid: Alianza, 1996, p. 14.

9 Cf. Robert Heilbroner, ‘Do Machines Make History?’ (1967), Technology and Culture (8 July 1967), pp. 335-345.

10 Cf. Thomas P. Hughes: ‘El impulso tecnológico’ (1965), in Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx (eds.), op. cit., pp. 117-130.

27 Susan Sontag, op. cit., pp. 88-89.

28 Ibid., p. 31.

29 Roland Barthes, op. cit., pp. 64-65.

30 Ibid., p. 100.

32 Ibid., p. 143.

33 Ibid., p. 34.

34 Susan Sontag, op. cit., pp. 33-34.

36 John Berger and Jean Mohr: Another Way of Telling (1982).

New York: First Vintage International, 1995, p. 88.

37 Ibid., p. 92.

38 Roland Barthes, op. cit., p. 44.

39 Estrella de Diego: ‘Los cuerpos perdidos’, in Los cuerpos perdidos. Fotografía y surrealistas. Barcelona: Fundación ”la Caixa”, 1995, p. 19.

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The Knowledge of Memory through the Semantics of the Present Araceli Corbo Head of the Library—Documentation. MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León

The value of creativity as a social value, established on free access to information, produces a transparent generation of knowledge based on collective effort and collectively obtained resources.

Daniel García Andújar1

Archive Territory is an art project by Chus Domínguez which offers a reading of the territory of the Condado-Curueño region of the province of León on the basis of photographs and documents made available by local people. The loaned photographs have been used to configure an archive that will enable a sociological, anthropological and identityfocused reading of a particular or collective global memory.

The photographs are the basis for the creation of the archive; all of the households and families that have opened their doors and shared their collections have made their own personal archives available in order to form another archive, which will speak of a common history. The owners of these archives describe each image with a particular semantics, a natural vocabulary that enshrines an intrinsic reading of the past and reveals the future.

Each term may carry a powerful charge — political, economic or cultural — which will mark the differences and equalities between the very people who make up the territory, uncovering the memory of a community.

The power of words is one of the pillars of the archive, and it is words, together with the photographs and the relationships between the elements, that will provide an archive-project of this nature with a solid and stable structure.

For me as an information professional, in a dynamic archive in continuous construction such as the one in which we find ourselves, the analysis of

semantics, the structure, the use of certain tools and the relationships between elements are the keys to defending a piece of work that becomes exciting in the process.

Documentalists have always used the language in the processes of information management. In their role as intermediaries between the organization of information and its retrieval, they need to access the contents of documents in order to interpret them on the basis of lexical, syntactic-semantic and contextual knowledge. Little wonder, then, that it should be semantics that guides us when we search and browse the Internet. The information is on the Net, but knowledge may not always be, because of the lack of a good system of classification and the establishment of relationships.

We are currently in the logical process of evolving towards the so-called semantic Net, which is designed to provide the Internet with meaning and enable computers and people to work together. It is developing universal languages that allow users to find answers to their questions more quickly and easily, because the information is better structured.

Relationships are established between concepts and form a chain to knowledge, because knowledge itself is not the enumeration of autonomous data but the establishment of coherent valid relationships.

At present, the language that organizes Internet content is not only a language selected and controlled by an expert (human or machine) or an information professional. This controlled language based on rigid standardization has been displaced by a series of keywords selected by the user, by social indexing, by collective classification or various folksonomies. This is a result of the advent of Net 2.0 tools that allow easy free-of-charge publication of information by users, letting them write their own content and vote on its classification and be ‘part owners’ of their creations. On each website this personalized classification involves the users assigning their own vocabulary, in natural language, to classify and describe the sections and elements of their site. The information hosted on Internet is constructed through the participation of all those individuals who want to express themselves or use the platform to make their actions more visible.

However, we say these people are ‘part owners’ of their creations because much of their output (video, audio, etc.) is hosted on the servers of large

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companies in order to benefit from their facilities (in the cloud), in return for which the creators relinquish some of their rights to their work or may be subject to changes in copyright resulting from policy changes in relation to the content stored and/or acquired by other large corporations, which effectively determine the ownership of the information on their servers.

The ideal way to store a digital archive is to choose a specific paid hosting service where control of the archives and documents is in the hands of the promoters of the project (individual, institution, etc.), who effectively retain their status as creators, administrators and owners of the information. Cloud storage has the same characteristics as what is known as cloud computing in terms of agility, scalability and elasticity. This form of storage in a huge virtual space accessible from anywhere, transcending geographical and spatial boundaries, is well suited to documentary materials of personal and collective interest and facilitates research, allowing as it does for the maintenance, growth, conservation, modification, deletion and copying of the documents that form the. Given that the introduction of any document into the archive involves scanning, it is essential that no information be lost in the transition from analogue to digital as a result of either the choice of format or the processing of the document.

In addition, the original analogue document will be processed and conserved according to the traditional independent standards relating to scanned documents whose conservation is already guaranteed by their new digital existence.

Returning to the production of content and new ‘infrastructure’ for the virtual space, the participatory and integrative construction of individuals seeking greater freedom of expression and dynamic exposure effectively demonstrates how the creation of personal archives, including artistic or art archives, calls for less standardization and less strict standards than that of administrative archives. The definition of a coherent structure tailored to the needs of the material and the users allows the archive to be searched and the information and knowledge it contains retrieved. It is precisely the intrinsic creativity of these projects that leads to the freedom in their configuration. The authors/creators/editors/curators of these archives enjoy a great deal of autonomy when it comes to choosing a classification and a structure that will afford access to the information

they have selected or to knowledge, according to the guidelines they have set.

The author determines not only access to the archive but also the relationships between concepts and materials. The relationships thus established may mark out the artist’s preferred itinerary, but the artist can also open up exploration to the archive to the intention and the happy accidents of the journey undertaken by the user, thus clearing the way for improvisation and discovery. For archives where memory is conserved, this exploration may stimulate the user’s curiosity, open up new lines of research or bring to light information from the past that will shape the future.

With regard to making this new world of relationships possible, it is important to note that there are a number of programmes providing specific support for such projects. For example, there is free software, which is more than just a working tool or a simple programme that helps us construct an optimal working mechanism. It is an ideology in itself, opening up a world of technical and creative possibilities, free of licences and with a very strong support community in constant development. A good example of this would be a very accessible, relatively simple and easy to install tool like WordPress.

In contrast to other modular CMS (content management systems) such as Joomla and Drupal, WordPress does not require advanced computer skills or detailed maintenance. It offers some very important advantages and even has specific packs for content management, in addition to facilitating the dynamic and accessible presentation of information.

WordPress has a number of themes or templates that are straightforward and clean to implement and fully editable for tailoring to specific personalized and innovative projects. These open source designs allow the artist or archive creator to draw the data output. What we have here is a union of technology and dynamic graphics that makes cyberspace an environment for personal creativity. It also has plugins that extend its functionality, so you can use image galleries and even perform positioning analysis.

Developed as specific software for creating blogs and chronological online posting, the .org version installed on the server allows a variety of actions such as breaking the timeline or creating new hierarchies. It can generate organic presentations that nest to form a mosaic of content, as well as a hori-

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zontal navigation tool in which the vertical scroll bar disappears.

The first step in transforming data into information is to play with its organization. This is one of those simple but crucial processes that hardly seem to be worth the effort until we discover something we had not seen before. We need to be aware that the way things are organized affects the way we interpret and understand the different fragments (and, in the other direction, how this mediates our opportunities of expression and therefore of perception). […] The point of this understanding is that there are usually better ways to organize data than the traditional ones that first come to mind. Each organization of the same set of data expresses different attributes and messages of the set. It is important to experiment, reflect, and choose which organization best communicates our messages. We also need to keep in mind that […] it is up to us to choose the one that is most appropriate to our audience […] or to our visual interests.2

Breaking the timeline or creating new relationships also gives the digital archive greater content mobility and potential for growth, since feeding the database is simply a matter of adding content and even opening it up to public interventions. An archive is the representation of the collective, and the public interest in access to the data reflects a social demand for what has been, to enhance our knowledge of our memory and activate it from an individual and/or collective perspective. Our interest in our past is always latent — perhaps with a view to understanding or obtaining information about the future.

In navigating a structure of common concepts and relationships, the user can create different routes and different readings. Such readings offer a new vision, constructing a theory of memory. The richness of the disparity in the route presents different views of the document set, allowing us to ‘create’ and ‘reveal’ meanings. This being so, it is therefore useful to generate systems that organize the same content in different ways, allowing us to make new discoveries and reach new understandings, not always in the ways to which we are accustomed. This is known as the navigability of the user experience, which includes other features such as usability and accessibility.

An archive may contain documents in different formats, especially in the case of an art archive, given that artists can use a number of digital media to express themselves. These elements can be created either by the author/manager/curator of the archive or by users, and can be stored on the same server as the archive itself or on an external location (such as YouTube, Vimeo, Archive, etc.) to take advantage of the services these sites provide. Using these external storage sites offers facilities for publication, archive compression, viewer design and display functions, audio and so on. The choice of these external servers is also due to their popularity with users as places to search, and some advanced users even favour them over conventional search engines.

They also generate code that can be embedded on any platform or space designed in HTML, making it possible to combining the various elements in a single location offering a combined reading.

The contribution made by these elements, together with the conjugation with other documentation provided by the people involved with the photograph (sound files, for instance), will enrich the archive, because reducing an art archive to photographs is completely inadequate when the public has the potential to interact and participate. It is very important to keep records of the different experiences that people can have of the same work (in this case a photograph) and doing so enables this practice to ‘document itself’.3 Like the rest of an archive’s content, these sound or audio-visual elements must be fully described and classified. They must have associated attributes that bestow meaning. This facilitates the establishment of relationships between records, allows them to be recovered and improves the SEO of the archive, because the records feed the search engines as their principal intermediaries.

Each element supports a related title, an alternative text, an analytical description and the allocation of tags and/or categories. Thought should be given to choosing the titles of the pages, to having descriptive meaningful URLs, to naming posts, to designating categories and tags, and to titling each image and introducing metadata and so on into its ‘imprint’.

These actions also allow disabled people to access content, with the readers implanted in the machines for people with impaired reading or mobility deciphering the contents on the basis of the meta-

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data and the descriptions of each of the elements, be they image, video or audio resources. These descriptions also define the visibility of the website and provide excellent retrieval of information, and thus of knowledge.

In addition, the archive can have many of the features and services of 2.0 tools when it opens up to the public participation in the form of comments, permission to introduce new content, vote or express opinions on the contents, and so on. It is important to find the best way to channel this potential. It would be interesting to include content syndication (RSS), as this would increase the number of visits and the amount of updated information available to the user in each feed.

A reasoned structure or representation of the images also facilitates access to knowledge and, in the case of an archive, to memory. The current high level of interest in the archive reflects the growing social interest in access to the past and the recovery of a memory that describes us both as individuals and collectively. From a personal standpoint, this encounter can generate satisfaction with the rediscovery of past experiences, and also in the case of an artist of international significance whose work deserves detailed study: in the work entitled Photo Album of the Family D Christian Boltanski draws attention to the stereotyped use society makes of photography by reproducing a series of family snapshots. He makes us aware of how much our photo albums resemble one another, containing as they do images of the social rituals that mark out our existence: holidays, weddings and births, group portraits of our class at school or work colleagues. The most intimate images are shown to be the most common, belonging as they do to a collective imagination that speaks simultaneously of the individual and the social.4 At the same time, we must stress that an archive that is not accessible is meaningless. In an age of universal access, in which the amount of content is literally boundless, what cannot be seen, discussed and studied is doomed to disappear. Public access is as important as the archive itself.5 The crucial issue of the ‘question of access’ is addressed by Daniel G. Andújar in his project Technologies to the People, which places the emphasis on facilitating public access to the information society and encouraging more people to become part of the Net. The project has been designed and created pri-

marily for minority social groups, with the premises that the new technologies provide the conditions for a fairer and more democratic world. Andújar’s work is totally in sync with the Net 2.0 and the creative processes of the ‘connected multitude’ or the ‘communicative utopia’, in that it synthesizes a model of understanding in which the Net, in its constitutive complexity, is seen as a public space outside of any delimited physical space, in which an interwoven social, cultural and ideological mesh is in constant construction.6 There are other important Spanish archives whose semantic classification is particularly noteworthy: first off there is Archivo F.X., a project by Pedro G. Romero that works with a vast archive of images of the anti-sacramental political iconoclasm in Spain between 1845 and 1945, photographic, cinematic and documentary images that are ordered according to an index of terms that come from visual constructions and critical theory. The information is organized in two main indices: one, ‘Tesauro/Test de aura’ [Thesaurus/Aura Test], is strictly composed of the index entries that are the basis of the archive, in the form of hundreds of items presenting the thing (photograph, film, document) and the term that names it (work, author, movement), most of which are also accompanied by the exhibition of the pairs of texts that give meaning to the Archivo F.X. project; the other, ‘Cronología/Cartografía’ [Chronology/Cartography], displays, ordered by date, the numerous manifestations of Archivo F.X. (exhibitions, laboratories, publications) since its first public presentation in 2000.7 Then there is the AIAN Narrated Anonymous Image Archive, designed and produced by Jorge Blasco Gallardo, who takes as his starting point the construction of a database of audio-visual records of ordinary people illustrating for the project private photographic images from their family albums with an oral narrative. Articulated around this main archive are other databases or subarchives which cross-reference these records to explore in greater depth the relationship between image, word, memory, forgetting, the construction of reality and the connections between major cultural narratives and the relating and construction of personal memory.8 These are some examples of art archives with similar characteristics, in terms of semantics and collective participation, to the project by Chus Domínguez.

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Archive Territory is an eighteen-month research process, activated at different moments and based on the recovery of photographic documentation from 1900 to 2010 and the geolocation of the places that appear in the photographs, which set out to track and map the evolution of the territory. The aim is to recover a shared history of the area and to establish a sociological, anthropological and identityfocused reading of a local collective memory, with more global interpretations and annotations of this future.

Archive Territory uses the Net as a publication, with recovery and navigation between the constituent items, serving at the same time as a line of artistic exploration (as the projects described above do). New tools of classification and publication have been used to retrieve an ‘analogue’ memory that makes the process of consulting and compiling domestic archives an enduring collective public undertaking. It thus serves as a starting point from which to re-think questions such as the use of a digital archive for the development of a personal archive.

Having considered this Archive Territory and the other projects referred to here, we could say that the answer is positive. A digital archive is in itself a type of archive.

Bibliography: Baigorri, Laura: ‘Technologies to the People: Aproximaciones artivistas al tratamiento de la información’. In Zehar, Arteleku-ko Aldizkaria magazine, No. 50 (March 2003), pp. 20-27.

Blasco Gallardo, Jorge (ed.): Culturas de archivo/ Archive Cultures. Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 2002.

Didi-Huberman, Georges: Atlas ¿cómo llevar el mundo a cuestas? Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 2010.

Estévez González, Fernando; de Santa Ana, Mariano (eds.): Memorias y olvidos del archivo.

Valencia: Lampreave, 2010.

Guasch, Ana Maria: Arte y archivo, 1920-2010: genealogías, tipologías y discontinuidades. Madrid: Akal, 2011.

International Symposium: Media Libraries and Archives for the 21st Century. Gijón: Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, 2010.

Maíllo, Florencio; Vega, Bienvenido: Los HidalgoAcera, retrato de familia: los años 60 en la Sierra de

Francia a través del archivo fotográfico de D. Bienvenido Vega. Salamanca: Globalia, 2007.

Maíllo, Florencio: Identidades: texto, catalogación, documentación, estudio y digitalización del archivo del fotógrafo Bienvenido Vega. Salamanca: Diputación Provincial de Salamanca, 2007.

Moure, Gloria, et. al.: Christian Boltanski: adviento y otros tiempos. Santiago de Compostela / Barcelona: Centro Galego de Arte Contemporáneo / Polígrafa, 1996.

Ribalta, Jorge: Archivo universal: la condición del documento y la utopía fotográfica moderna. Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2008.

Romero, Pedro G.: Archivo F. X.: Salónica. Sevilla: Archivo F.X., 2007.

Romero, Pedro G.: Silo: Archivo F.X. Burgos: Cámara Oficial de Comercio e Industria de Burgos / Madrid: Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofia, 2009.

Warburg, Aby: Atlas Mnemosyne. Madrid: Akal, 2010.

1 Daniel García Andújar: 'Prólogo', in David Casacuberta Creación colectiva. En internet el creador es el público. Barcelona: Gedisa, 2003, p. 9.

2 Robert Jacobson (ed.): Information Design. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2000, Ch. 11.

3 Beryl Graham, co-editor of CRUMB - Curatorial Resource for Upstart Media Bliss at the University of Sunderland, in the debate on ‘Production and Selection of Contents: What to Conserve?’ at the International Symposium on Media Libraries and Archives for the 21st Century. Gijón: Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, 2010.

4 Amalia Martínez Muñoz: De Andy Warhol a Cindy Sherman. Arte del siglo XX, 2. Valencia: Universitat Politècnica de València, 2000, p. 223.

5 Alessandro Ludovico, editor of Neural Magazine, in the debate on ‘Production and Selection of Contents: What to Conserve?’ at the International Symposium on Media Libraries and Archives for the 21st Century. Gijón: Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, 2010.

6 Miguel Ángel Gaete: Arte, hacktivismo y subversión social en la web 2.0 (17 July 2010), at: http://www.danielandujar.org.

7 Information obtained from the description of Archivo F.X. on the project’s website: http://fxysudoble.com/es.

8 Project hosted at: http://www.exploradorarte.com. Museo de Arte Español Patio Herreriano (not currently active).