Experimental Practices in the Argentinian Northeast: Imago-Material Assemblages and Other Decolonial Inventions with Archives

Abstract

This article aims to share a series of reflections about a research- creation experience which joins experimental processes and gestures in a group of pieces in different media and formats: audiovisual, performative conference, video-installation and webpage. The starting point is German anthropologist Roberto Lehmann-Nitsche’s photography collection portraying the Napalpí massacre of indigenous peoples that occurred in Argentina’s Chaco region in 1924. This collection, housed at the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut (IAI), is linked to audiovisual records about the persecution of the Qom people during the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic. From a theoretical and methodological point of view, this investigation poses a nonlinear connection between the two time-periods through the notion of “precedence movement”, in which all expectation of immediacy with the past, and, more specifically, with the archive, is obliterated. In this sense, it explores various aspects of “material imaginations” and discusses the epistemic, poetic, and political potentialities of “anarchivistic assemblages” as a form of resistance against historical and contemporary abuses of power. The relationship between art, archive and surveillance technologies is questioned through a reflection about experimental decolonization strategies, which attempt to defy dilemmas relating to research using/with archives, situating themselves on the inter- and transdisciplinary borders.