The Unruled Column
By Kekena Corvalán
Camila Barcellone, Tati Cabral, Kekena Corvalán, Paola Ferraris, Anahí Fiorella Gómez and Celeste Medrano.
I want to address our practices of “artchive” as a form of vitality that sustains us and allows us to inhabit memory, celebration, and connection. This reflection arises from the exhibition that bears the title of this text, in which I participate as a curator alongside artists Anahí Fiorella Gómez, Camila Barcellone, Celeste Medrano, Paola Ferraris, and Tati Cabral. The exhibition opened on August 3 at the Parque de la Memoria in Buenos Aires and will move to the Museo de Bellas Artes in Santiago, Chile, on January 30, 2025.
The title derives from a specific experience of Anahí Fiorella Gómez, an artist from the Qom [1] community, who is the granddaughter of Matilde Romualdo and Lorenza Molina, survivors of the Napalpí Massacre[2], which occurred in the northeast of Argentina, in Chaco. On July 19, 1924, the Argentine state perpetrated a massacre against the Qom community, which had been subjected to an “indigenous reduction.”
Image credit. Anahí Fiorella Gómez, Camila Barcellone, Tati Cabral, Celeste Medrano, Paola Ferraris, and Kekena Corvalán.
This exhibition emerged from an artistic-curatorial camp titled “Learning from Chacú[3]: How to Procure Common Artifacts of Shelter, Food, and Memory,” held from March 17 to 24, 2022. This experience allowed us to visit and engage with Fiorella in her territory, where we learned about her family’s and her community’s history. We established friendships and camaraderie while producing common artifacts, such as books, artistic projects, and gatherings, to narrate our experiences.
This collaborative effort gave birth to our curatorial project, which includes two installations: Testigos son los cuervos (The witnesses are crows) (Paola Ferraris and Camila Barcellone) and Cuántxs podés contar sin llorar (How many can you count without crying?) (Celeste Medrano and Tati Cabral), in addition to two mural-sized Cuervos (Crows) (also by Ferraris and Barcellone). However, the central focus is Fiorella’s work, featuring over 20 pieces in fabric, paper, and wood, along with a site-specific intervention where Fiorella covered the exhibition space (designated directly by the park’s administration) with images of fish, rivers, wiphalas, eyes, legends, and a portrait of her grandmother.
Image credit. Anahí Fiorella Gómez, Camila Barcellone, Tati Cabral, Celeste Medrano, Paola Ferraris, and Kekena Corvalán.
We propose viewing this exhibition as an exercise in artchiving, which challenges traditional forms of memory-making. Our approach to recovering this history, embodying the “artchive” of this massacre, can help highlight that the memory policies of our communities do not always align with a dominant, binary, cis-heteronormative, urban, male, or militant narrative typical of traditional political activism.
To “artchivar,” on one hand, means to create an archive linked to aesthetic and poetic references, and on the other, it relates to “chivar” and being “chivas” in all senses of the term: “chivar” refers to sweating and also signifies being a goat, being angry, or being a rebellious woman. We feel that one way to sustain a distinct reading of this archive is through “artchivar,” traversing it embodied. We aim to create a soft, sticky, tactile, and embodied archive. The artchiva[4] is us[5], engaging with the sources in a new light, giving vitality to this “artchive” of Napalpí. Now, it is you, the readers of this text, who can also embody it, once you know this history or when you visit the exhibition.
Mural Cuervos. Photo by Nicolás Villalobos.
How does one consult this “artchive”? Interpersonally, co-created and co-designed. This archiving is grounded in the community: in the bodies that survived or descended from those who survived and can recount this massacre, like Matilde Romualdo, who narrates her story to our friend, artist Fiorella Gómez. Matilde had to forget her language to survive. When she felt ready, her grandmother began to tell her the story because, in addition to losing her family, Matilde and her community lost their language. They forget it, knowing that speaking Qom is to belong to a group targeted by the massacre. There is a phenomenon of diglossia that is not related to bilingualism, which is culturally valued; we all send our children to study English, French, or German. Being multilingual is viewed positively. Here, we confront the “B-side” of speaking multiple languages: a situation of diglossia where one language holds power while another is marginalized and discredited.
Fiorella begins to paint in this context. She realizes she must record the people and situations her grandmother recounts to ensure they are not forgotten. She starts to capture these faces based on her grandmother’s stories in a community that lacked photographs of its ancestors. Fiorella appropriates the practice of painting, reclaiming it as a device of the Fine Arts—canonical, exclusive, hegemonic, and modern-colonial—to create a possible archiving, a term I am beginning to coin as a curator and theorist, to inhabit and embody today.
By Anahí Fiorella Gómez, Camila Barcellone, Tati Cabral, Celeste Medrano, Paola Ferraris, and Kekena Corvalán.
We want to express our deep gratitude to Florencia Batiti, director of the Parque de la Memoria, who made everything available to us and offered Fiorella a unique, loving, and respectful embrace above all. Florencia, along with Cecilia Nisbaum and the entire community of workers, dedicated themselves entirely to preparing the exhibition. This assembly is also part of the artchiva[6]. This aspect is important to us because what occurred is that each person, as they learned this history, also became artchiva[7]. By engaging with this narrative, each individual retains something, preserves it within themselves, multiplies it, nurtures it, and allows it to grow. This perspective stands in contrast to the current state of specific art archives, often immersed in material, symbolic, and economic disputes, where museums and artists[8] may strive to render their archives as compact materialities, perceived as secure, confident, closed, complete, and organized—thus curable and interesting for curation, conservation, and collections.
It is also true that an “artchive” is a discursive phenomenon. It generates thoughts, reflections, research, and writing, all of which are always embodied, for it is we who attribute meaning to it. Memory exists because there is a body that perceives it, feels it, dances it, touches it, and enjoys it. Our “artchives” are never alone; they always seek us.
¿Cuántxs podés contar sin llorar? Installation by Tati Cabral and Celeste Medrano. Photo by Nicolás Villalobos.
“Artchives” are sustained performatively; they are not fixed or institutionalized. Instead, they are embodied. An “artchive” is a world filled with absences that we seek, just as we search for those who are absent. It is an opaque, complex world. Each “artchive” encompasses multiple worlds and perspectives, and rather than being a process of selection that determines who and what is part of the archive, an “artchive” continuously adds even elements that were not necessarily present. This is its vitality, as it serves as a repository that recovers, in an exercise of justice, the memory of all forged from individual and collective love.
An “artchive” is always a “to be continued.”
Image credit. Anahí Fiorella Gómez, Camila Barcellone, Tati Cabral, Celeste Medrano, Paola Ferraris, and Kekena Corvalán.
[1] The Qom, are an ethnic group from the Pampas region who live in Central Chaco. In the 16th century, they began inhabiting much of northern Argentina, including the provinces of Salta, Chaco, Santiago del Estero, Formosa, and the Gran Chaco region in southeastern Tarija, Bolivia. In contemporary times, many of them have been driven to the outskirts of cities such as San Ramón de la Nueva Orán, Tartagal, Resistencia, Charata, Formosa, Rosario, Santa Fe, and Greater Buenos Aires due to poverty in their ancestral rural areas.
[2] The Napalpí Massacre was carried out by a force of over a hundred men from the Argentine National Territory Police, resulting in the deaths of between five hundred and one thousand people from the Qom and Mocoví-Moqoit peoples on July 19, 1924, in the area of El Aguará, near the indigenous reduction of Napalpí, located in what was then the national territory of Chaco. The massacre was committed by national police forces, with the participation of civilians, under orders from Governor Fernando Centeno, who was directly overseen by President Marcelo Torcuato de Alvear, a member of the Radical Civic Union (UCR).
[3] The Chacú is a form of gathering and hunting for food practiced by South American indigenous peoples that follows these rules: always ask permission from the land, never kill young animals or females, and what is gathered or hunted is not the property of each individual hunter but is given to the women, who store and distribute it for the entire community.
[4] In Spanish, the author has added the vowel A at the end of the word to accentuate the change from the word archivo in masculine to the word archiva in feminine and continues using the neologism ArtChiva, which includes the letter T.
[5] In Spanish, the author uses inclusive language, and avoids the masculine “nosotros”, used to refer to everyone, and exchanges the last vowel, instead of the (o) she uses the letter (e) “nosotres”.
[6] In Spanish, the author has added the vowel A at the end of the word to accentuate the change from the word archivo in masculine to the word archiva in feminine and continues using the neologism ArtChiva, which includes the letter T.
[7] In Spanish, the author has added the vowel A at the end of the word to accentuate the change from the word archivo in masculine to the word archiva in feminine and continues using the neologism ArtChiva, which includes the letter T.
[8] In Spanish, the author uses inclusive language, and avoids the general use of the letter (a) used to refer to everyone, and exchanges the last vowel, instead of (a) she uses the letter (e) ¨nosotres¨.
