Drops of water. Memory hydration and digital archives *
Ana Rodríguez
(Anthropologist, coordinator of Sound Map of Uruguay)
In my family’s house, in the city of Montevideo, there is a varnished wooden cabinet with flat drawers, which was always called an archive. I remember the sound a couple of its drawers made as they slid down the rail that supported them; Now that I think about it, it was very similar to what a wooden brush would do. No chips would come out, just the smell of papers. Among those papers were maps of cities my parents visited when I was young. I also remember the pastel tones of the aeronautical charts that my father knew how to read, the black and white photos and the slides of those trips, which we would look at every often, sometimes with someone who was visiting us, projected in my dark room… Versailles, gold everywhere, great architectural constructions, a square somewhere in the United Kingdom where, one rainy day, someone watered a gardened area with an umbrella and a hose.
I was never interested in city maps, nor am I very good with them. I also remember the folds that were peeled and sometimes broken by their use. I also archive. Today, almost all of us archive and are archived (Blasco, 2009). Perhaps due to a certain tendency to escape from the here and now, for a gluttony of stories or to understand where my feet are, I frequently ask what the neighbourhood in which I live was like, so few meters away from the encounter with rural uses of space and land. Today it is a city but a few years ago there were vineyards. The bus passes but sometimes horses and cows that untie themselves from their moorings roam and go in search of the interstices of pasture, between the houses and the street, which still does not cover the river of cement channelled by public policies and a very particular conception of progress.
Those of us who have the immense fortune to work on what we like and have enough evidence that our work is valued by those who matter to us, whether we work in academic environments or in our own projects that are developed independently and collaboratively, we usually question with a certain periodicity if what we do really helps, if it contributes to the society in which we live, if we create the appropriate formats to socialize and share the results of projects and research. Working with collective memories has this implicit challenge. Does it make sense to bring to the people, with whom we have a ‘mate’ infusion by the fire or in a kitchen, a paper published in a serious academic review? Is that the best strategy to circulate the emerged memory and the knowledge built, many times by hand and collectively? On the other hand, years of field diaries, audiovisual records, sound recordings are accumulating and the yellow folders on computers or external memory devices gain weight as the recording devices fall in price and the qualities of the recording formats improve. Today almost anyone can film, photograph, record and share whatever they want. Not only those who work with non-official memories as a job make records, contribute to uncover stories, reconstruct processes and create archive with more or less open access. The bearers of the memories themselves make claims for justice, human rights, combat the silencing, document the existence of their community, and construct their own stories (Giraldo, 2018; Gutiérrez ed. alter, 2020). They are people who generation after generation have been stripped of their lands and uprooted from their territories, who look for their disappeared relatives, build testimonies and documents, generate archives that support and sustain their struggles, while the access to other archives is denied to them (Rodríguez ed. alter, 2020; Da Silva Catela, 2011).
We all archive, yes. But for different reasons, circumstances and histories, allowing and promoting access to these constructs is not so frequent. Far from detracting from professional archivists, in recent years it has been very comforting to note the openness they have had to the consideration and appreciation of the so-called minor archives. In addition to producing critical reflection on these “other” archives, today, activist archivologists and organizations are providing training that any citizen can access, even online[1]. These professionals engage with social experiences in which they can contribute with their science and also with their craft. The institutions where they find paid work, however, are slower and less inclusive in their interests.
The practices around archive collections are not restricted to safeguarding the assets but they are also “instruments to overcome oblivion in the face of exiled or denied life forms in official and hegemonic accounts” (Chavarría, 2017). Content dissemination and socialization is therefore necessary.
I am going to refer here to a personal starting point and to two experiences that take place in specific rural territories, which I take as a reference when considering internet as a means of accessing and disseminating sound and audiovisual records of collective knowledge, local histories and underground memories. Later I will comment on some aspects related to the reactivation of knowledge: the design of circulation paths, and formats and strategies for the dissemination of content, created and related in some way to oral, sound and audiovisual archives.
Between 2006 and 2008 I contributed to the creation of an oral and audiovisual archive in which the inhabitants of the villages themselves produced the recordings, after some activities in which approach strategies and topics to be addressed were agreed and ways to ask were experimented. It was intended to give importance to people, their ways of life and language, linked most of the cases to rural areas of a northern department of Uruguay. For the region, far from the capital of the country, the proposal was novel and in a certain sense successful, since as a result video footages were made with explanations of the productive life of places that are now depopulated and of which there are no publications; life stories and explanations of rural trades in which men and women specialized, experiences of farmers, ranchers, musicians, possessors of multiple knowledge that allowed them to live and stay in small towns and places. However, after the motivation to carry out these memory exercises was satisfied, in which some took the initiative to “register” and others agreed to be “registered” or interviewed, in the immediate future no one needed to look at those recordings, those photos with information and written explanations, or to listen to those digitized voices. They are narrations and reflections of materialities that only with the passage of time seem to be valued and although their usefulness is well known by researchers, it is rare that any user, such as a library, requests access to this type of document. Perhaps for this reason and because it implies a certain structure of conservation and human resources for its management, shortly after the end of the project that gave origin to it, the archive went into oblivion until it was recently donated to a municipal culture department, who received it without greater emotion. The furniture in the family home is kept in perfect condition. In the city where I worked, far from the family home, the content of what I called “archive” made with the collaboration of a few people under the protection of a religious institution, today is packaged in cardboard boxes and in that way, it literally doesn’t exist.
How to access the deep meaning that people give to their own actions, when we are not part of that culture? Certainly asking is not enough. It is not due to lack of will and many times it is not lack of confidence. Meaning is accessed by feeling; and sometimes, even if it is very personal, it is recognized by sharing. The two experiences that I am going to mention refer to approaches to rural or peasant cultures carried out over several years, which followed completely different methodologies. In both cases, there was a moment of inflection in which those responsible or the creators decided to give public access to the fruits of their research and projects, formally adopting the archival identity: Patricia Chavarría Traditional Culture Archive (Chile) and Binaural Nodar Digital Archive (Portugal). These operations required defining strategies to occupy spaces on the Internet, as well as making decisions as to what to exhibit in that medium, in what format and duration, how to describe it so that someone chooses to consult it and how to contextualize with additional information external to the document, what type of licenses to use and what permissions to grant or not, to mention just a few key choices.
The Patricia Chavarría Traditional Culture Archive is named after its creator, artist and researcher in south-central Chile who has been immersed in traditional peasant chantings for more than 50 years. In the areas of Bío Bío and Maule this art is cultivated predominantly by women and through chanting Chavarría has accessed the deep roots of that culture. Represented as a circular diagram[2] in which agricultural production and cosmosensitivity dialogue and alternate, between spatial, intimate and collective dimensions, it proposes its understanding and knowledge through the access to photographs, filming, poetry, recitations, music and synthesis and interpretative writing about what she conceptualized as “the agrarian cycle and peasant worldview” (Chavarría, 2017). A calendar that represents linear time as conceived by western culture as well as the cyclical time of life, of the relationship between the individual and the group, the flow between heaven and earth, the invisible, the sacred and the resignified instituted, both intellectually and bodily.
The constituted archive, catalogued, ordered and managed became a tool that enables the production and recovery of senses of solidarity, affection, humanity and respect existing in the studied villages and peasant communities (Ibid.). It allows access to information and promotes its reactivation, which also ensures, from another level, its conservation. That is why I previously cited “an instrument to overcome oblivion.”
Another of the cases that I take as a reference is the path travelled by the cultural organization Binaural Nodar, coordinated and directed by Luís Costa, which has been interacting with various rural communities located in central Portugal, Viseu Dão Lafões region, for fifteen years. During this period, there were different approaches regarding the actions to be carried out in the territory of action and the weight and emphasis given to the component called “archive” has changed, while always working in areas of experimentation, creation and education, in both analogue and digital, multimedia formats.
The Binaural Nodar Digital Archive now has a privileged and prominent place on its website[3], so much so that it has acquired its own identity and is the section that gathers the greatest amount of information and elements[4]. In fact, it works as an interactive interface with a puzzle language, in which the figure that links the pieces is the concept with which they have been grouped (by project, by municipality or by geographical area with map language) and not nature or type of object (experimental video, sound record, sound piece, radio program, interview, etc.). It also includes an essential tool for users looking for specific information: a search bar that gives access to topics by providing labels with which all the materials have been characterized.
But what materials? It is not about the raw recordings, but elaborations, syntheses or cuts that have been made for public consultation, based on themes and approaches carried out throughout the history of the cultural organization, among which the cycles of linen and rye and associated practices, social changes in recent decades and emigration can be highlighted, although there are many others. The pieces are usually the components with which various products have been made: publications, documentaries, didactic materials for educational centres and museums, CDs of experimental and choral music, etc., to name a few. Each of the publications, records, documentaries or films has been presented at local events with the presence and exchange with those who have participated in one way or another in the development of these elements, as well as in other types of circuits in which issues of heritage and education are relevant. Sometimes the circulation path has some characteristics that allow it to reach more diverse audiences that live in the most immediate areas in which the work was made, such as the creation of radio programs[5] that broadcast locally as well as the publication on the Internet of each of the programs.
Of all the possibilities that Binaural Nodar has explored with respect to the design of strategies to disseminate, share and socialize the fruits of the projects in which it has participated, I am going to detain myself on a narrative that integrates soundscapes, field recordings, instances of work with collective memories, individual interviews and the voice of the researcher: the podcast series “Da serra para a fábrica” (“From the mountain to the factory”)[6] that was part of the European project “Where the city loses its name”)[7] that addresses the massive emigration of inhabitants from a specific rural area, the Montemuro mountain range, to the city of Lisbon, during the second half of the 20th century. There they settled in the Marvila area, where factories, industries, small warehouses and other job opportunities were concentrated. The podcasts reconstruct various aspects of life in precarious housing, made with light materials in small and crowded spaces, without sanitation and without services (electricity and running water): the so-called shantytowns. There are stories of family strategies, of children and young people who left their village to settle in an unknown world, and of collective strategies to build community and reproduce certain cultural aspects.
In the first chapter, “O meu mapa do bairro” (“My neighbourhood map”), the narrative device appeals to cartography in order to reconstruct a space that no longer exists, or at least is not visible to those who did not experience it. A certain map becomes materialized in the imagination of the listener, based on the choice of certain elements that do exist or pretend to exist: two interviews carried out at different historical moments, with different people, who, edited in counterpoint, dialogue; the sound design of vehicles that move between past and present and of spaces that connect the unnamed and the evoked; the discussion between people who lived in Marvila but today returned to areas close to their villages of origin and gathered around a table at a library in Castro Daire, they predispose themselves to share some of their memories, whatever was possible to say in that moment and in that place, and drawing a map on paper. The voice of the podcast author works as an integrating element, it doesn’t hide the authorship and gives himself poetic licenses to incorporate with his voice, experiences of several interviewees, proposing a collective voice fiction to make interpretations of what is said and what is not said.
If memories are like drops of water, working with memory recordings implies the construction of technologies that allow us to recall flows, learn to frame various liquid bodies, not to store them but to understand possible resonances and channellings, if the necessary agreements exist or are so desired.
I am grateful to the people who accept to be recorded, who speak to and think about the ones they don’t know, another in some place of time, who is the recipient of their explanatory effort, of the sensitivity that they engage in giving their version. I am grateful for their trust and I thank them for their questions and memories, which allow me, despite being in another place, to listen, to feel, to read (which is also to listen), to look and touch their lives. But I am even more grateful to the authors of the archives that are made available, for not resting on the word of their interviewees and for stubbornly and creatively appeal to the invention of opportunities, contexts and narrative devices that are able to humidify the less thoughtful layers of our society, with which they water (maybe without knowing it) our most buried seeds, those that awake from the unconscious in order to move and transform us.
* Originally published as part of the final publication of the “Where the city loses its name” project, funded by the Creative Europe programme, 2020.
Bibliography
BLASCO, Jorge, 2009: “Ceci n´est pas un archive”, in: Memorias y olvidos del archivo, Estévez, F., de Santa Ana, M. Editores. /online/ available at: https://issuu.com/jorgeblascogallardo/docs/010-029_blasco_v1. Retrieved in October 2020.
Colectivo Memoria en Libertad, 2019: Ésta es mi historia ¿Y la tuya? Imprenta AEBU, Montevideo.
DA SILVA CATELA, Ludmila, 2011: El mundo de los archivos, in: Justicia transicional: manual para América Latina. Félix Reátegui Editor, Brasilia: Comisión de Amnistía, Ministerio de Justicia, pp.: 381-403 /online/ available at: https://infotoxico.wordpress.com/2015/01/19/el-mundo-de-los-archivos-ludmila-da-silva-catela/. Retrieved in October 2020.
CHAVARRÍA, Paula Mariángel, 2017: Archivo de cultura tradicional Patricia Chavarría – Hacia una política de gestión documental y archivo /online/ available at: http://www.archivodeculturatradicional.cl/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Hacia-una-Politica-de-Gestion-Documental-y-Archivo-Archivo-de-Cultura-Tradicional-Patricia-Chavarria.pdf. Retrieved in October 2020.
GIRALDO, Marta, 2018: “Archivos comunitarios de sobrevivientes del conflicto armado: remedios contra el olvido”, in: Memoria política en perspectiva latinoamericana, Peter Lang Publisher, pp. 61-76 /online/ available at: https://www.academia.edu/37136120/Archivos_comunitarios_de_sobrevivientes_del_conflicto_armado_remedios_contra_el_olvido. Retrieved in October 2020.
GUTIÉRREZ Álvaro, ORTIZ Felipe, BARRÍA Ghislaine: Archivo Popular de Rodelillo como instrumento de Construcción de Memoria Social, In: Revista F@ro, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad de Playa Ancha, Valparaíso, Vol. 1, Nº31 (I Semester 2020) pp. 27- 46 /online/ available at: http://www.revistafaro.cl/index.php/Faro/article/view/622/587. Retrieved in October 2020.
MASOTTA, Carlos Eduardo, 2016: El gesto y el archivo: la fotografía y la anamnesis argentina. Revista Photo y Documento, No. 1, Universidade de Brasilia /online/ available at: https://ri.conicet.gov.ar/handle/11336/91201. Retrieved in October 2020.
RODRÍGUEZ, Mariela, SAN MARTÍN, Celina, NAHUELQUIR, Fabiana, 2016: “Imágenes, silencios y borraduras en los procesos de transmisión de las memorias mapuches y tehuelches”, in: Mariana Lorenzetti, Lucrecia Petit y Lea Geleren: Memorias en Lucha Recuerdos y silencios en el contexto de subordinación y alteridad. Ramos, A., Crespo, C., Tozzini, M., (Dir.), Editorial Universidad Nacional de Río Negro, Viedma. Cap. 5, pp. 111-140 /online/ available at: https://books.openedition.org/eunrn/231?lang=es. Retrieved in October 2020.
Websites, applications and digital resources:
Da serra para a fábrica: https://soundcloud.com/binauralmedia/sets/binaural-radio-rural Podcast BRR! Binaural Radio Rural, chap.1. Text, voice, composition and sound edition by Luís Costa. Sound recordings by Maile Colbert, Nely Ferreira and Luís Costa. Musical performance by the Concertina Group of the House of Castro Daire in Lisbon. Length: 26:57.
Community Archiving Workshop https://communityarchiving.org/about-caw/
Orígenes: https://apporigenes.blogspot.com/p/instrucciones-para-utilizar-la.html Application. Co-designed by Tehuelche, Camusu, Aike and Kopolke communities of Southern Patagonia and Simon Robinson. Downloaded in October 2020.
[1] RIPDASA, the Ibero-American Network for the digital preservation of sound and digital archives, has a series of webinars published on its YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoWU8W45oSNgmCSbgw5vE4Q/videos
[2] Agrarian Cycle and Peasant Culture: Contributions for the dissemination of Traditional Culture in Digital Media. Available online: http://www.archivodeculturatraditional.cl/cicloagrario/
[3] https://www.binauralmedia.org.
[4] https://www.archive.binauralmedia.org developed following the funding granted to the European project Tramontana Network about multimedia rural archives.
[5] 55 programs broadcast since 2012 on Radio Lafões (São Pedro do Sul) and available at https://soundcloud.com/binauralmedia/sets/binaural-nodar-radio-docs.
[6] https://soundcloud.com/binauralmedia/sets/binaural-radio-rural