You know nothing. You are the subject of an infinite rehearsal. What movements can memory afford when walking within an archive? Can an archive be a site for mourning? What topographies of memory and forgetting are rendered visible and invisible when walking within an archive? What makes an archive impossible? Can the structure and the procedures of an archive perform its impossibility? Archival work can be closely bound up with experiences of grief and bereavement. Making and keeping records, following leads, deciphering materials, categorizing, connecting loose ends, opening up new routes, making new records, organizing. All of these archival procedures play an important role in the grieving process as a means of continuing a type of relationship with loss and what has been lost. I'm interested in the kind of relationship to loss that archives may forge. Can the structure and procedures of an archive give room to different forms of mourning? Or put differently, can the mourning process take different forms depending of the way we remember? For the past 10 years, I've been assembling an archive to unravel my family's experience of migration, exile, going underground, and disappearance throughout the civil war in Guatemala. Along these needs, another urge looms. Can the archive operate as a site for collective mourning? Can it become a site to explore a mourning that aims not to overcome, but to work through collective trauma and conflicting relationships to the past while making room for shared vulnerabilities and resistance? This collection of texts, photographs, films, and newspapers re-inscribes me and these objects in a topography in which that which might be thought as belonging to the archive to elaborate this personal and yet collective history of loss and trauma, I wondered if the archive itself could be an appropriate memory device for mourning or whether it could only afford to draw a melancholic relationship with the past. At that point, I was still thinking within a Freudian binary scheme. Freud addresses mourning and melancholia as two mutually exclusive responses to loss. While both of them begin with the denial of a loss and an unwillingness to recognize it, according to him, in the case of mourning the object is interjected and therefore openly declared lost or dead, whereas in melancholia the loss remains pathologically unacknowledged. Some say that a clear-cut distinction between mourning and melancholia can actually betray the grieving process. For example, Jacques Zagida argues that when the lost object is assimilated, as it's expected to happen in a successful mourning, mourning is marked by an unfaithful fidelity that actually denies or betrays the infinite alterity of that which has been lost. In other words, a mourning that remains faithful to the infinite alterity of that which has been lost must fail in Freudian terms, and if it is never completely successful, it can never be fully distinct from melancholy and its aporias. Melancholy welcomes failure and the refusal of interjection. It makes room for a mourning that never quite allows us to forget that, quoting Derrida, to keep the other within oneself as oneself is already to forget the other, because forgetting begins there. This suggests that mourning must remain unsuccessful to some extent, and thus melancholic. Archives have many histories to tell, but most are not expressly written on their documents, pages, images, or objects. They are stories of politics, of collective action, of painful separation and reunions, of sacrifices made, of resistance, silencing, loss, and survival. An archive shelters memory, but it also shelters itself from the memory it shelters. Archives hide their absences, and by doing so, they forget. It is only from their structure and their procedures that it becomes possible to decipher what they repress. These repressive, unconscious, anti-archival force contained within any archive also points to its incompleteness, its openness, and its infiniteness. Along this line of thought, Ann Svetkovich elaborates on a different kind of incompleteness that characterizes archives of trauma. According to her, the objects that compose this specific kind of archives and the psychic life are always arbitrary. This is so because trauma can only make itself present outside the field of representation. It is an encryption, a ghost. It is precisely defined by its compulsive returning, given that it fails to inscribe itself symbolically. Since the absence of trauma remains hidden, archives of trauma are always, by their very nature, partial and infinite. An archive of trauma is an archive of memory gaps, of absent presences. It's a place to hold the unbearable nature of an event and the unbearable nature of its survival. nature of an event and the unbearable nature of its survival. It's a site to mourn collectively an event that has not yet come to an end. An archive of this kind is a space to co-witness and preserve traumatic histories in ways that challenge the meaning of the archive and memorials. It's an archive driven not by accumulation but by gestures of care. It's an archive that aims for effective power rather than a factual truth, that understands that the quest for history is a psychic need rather than a science. In the entrance of Cagitulam, the house of memory in Guatemala City, a poem by Humberto Acabal welcomes its visitors. It reads as follows. From time to time, I walk backwards. It's my way of remembering. If I walked only forwards, I could tell you what oblivion is like. Can walking backwards be a gesture, a guideline, a score to walk within an archive of trauma and loss? Walking is an ordinary gesture. It suggests orientations, paths, and encounters. When steps are firm, the earth trembles. Bodies vibrate, muscles get tense, the brain rages. Walking implies a transit, a transition, a passage from a here and a there. Walking can be a way of touching and being touched by the ground. Walking is repetitive, nonetheless never an identical repetition. It expresses singularity in space and time. Walking is a fracture against permanence. Its repetition presents itself always differential in its repetitiveness walking brings discontinuity to the forefront I wonder if this is what Laurie Laurie Anderson is thinking when she conveys the image of walking and falling at the same time with each step she says we fall slightly forwards and then catch ourselves from falling over and over again. If this is what happens when we walk forwards, what happens when our body does not move where our feet point? What if we can't quite control the orientation? Are we at the same risk of falling or stumbling when walking forwards or backwards? Does walking backwards rely on memory? Is it an act of return or retracing? An easy reading of Aqabal's poem could lead us to interpret it as a condemn as a commendation commendation commendation sorry to walk towards the past however walking in the direction of the past facing the past would already betray backwardness to walk backwards is a reminder that walking can be a conscious cultural act, rather than a means to an end. It is an unusual and uncomfortable movement that interrupts the regular orientations of walking. Walking backwards breaks the sense of time as continuity or progression. It produces pause, discomfort, slowness, attention and a perspective otherwise. Walking backwards carries an invitation to visit the past within the present. When walking backwards, life and remembrance are two parts of a whole, different but not separated. When walking backwards, we are reminded that life is made of the texture of ghosts, that encounters, dreams, possibilities, lineages, and hope are also marked by them. To walk backwards can be an invitation to live on the basis of the trace, to inhabit a present encroached by living dead traces, to acknowledge that traces are entities brimming with wisdom and that no matter the form they take, they foretell the founding correlation or resemblance between a then and a now that co-eval. Walking backwards speaks to the impossibility of mourning and the impossibility of an archive of trauma. It resonates with the oscillatory trajectory between a crisis of death and a crisis in life linked to trauma and loss. It speaks to how trauma shapes the way the body performs after having grazed with death, how it reframes identity and positioning in the world, and how trauma reaches others besides immediate survivors. It is a way of making room for the ghost or that which is repressed. Since migration and exile are structural conditions that shape this archive, translation is already a constitutive element of its procedures. This bodily and spatial relationship with memory has unfolded in a remembering practice that through translation makes space for alternative potential histories. Therefore, enjoining to imagine what might have been in addition to what happened. It connects with other post-memory attempts that focus on multidirectional memory of resistance and refusal, circumventing linear trajectories of memorialization that lead inevitably to disaster. How can the process of translating an object, an image, or a trace repeatedly give room to multi-directional memory? Translation literally means to guide or carry from one place to another. As an alchemic methodology that renders faithful to backwardness, translation gestures confirm the status of the archive as an enabling fiction and as a practice of fantasy. In this particular archive, translation takes the forms of infinite rehearsals of memory that involve an open-ended process of speaking with and sitting with the objects of the archive through fictional or imaginary dimensions of autobiographical accounts related to these objects. It is a methodology to reflect on how an object, a landscape or an image located at the edges of the intimate personal public and social history can unchain unexpected narratives or connections when seen repeatedly and collectively these rehearsals produce and circulate effective economies as they generate and exchange narratives of a shared history translation Translation as a way of walking backwards within an archive focuses on how despite the impossibility of comparing histories of violence these can be connected whether historically, politically or structurally. As Michael Rothberg has pointed out, it is only if we think of these violent histories alongside and in connection to each other that we can be open to resonances and entanglements between them. articulate dissenting narratives. They also contribute to a collective experience of mourning where grief and pain mobilize collective healing through braying open spaces of contestation, reconstruction, inter-vulnerability, empathy, and solidarity that unsettles the stories told from above that often have us believe that we are not human or deserving of life affirming lives, or for that matter, life affirming deaths. Within different timelines and histories, the objects of this archive participate in a space for collective mourning and potential histories as they produce stories and geographies that allow for the appearance of events and for our appearance as their narrators. As an individual and collective mode of remembering, these rehearsals, rather than attempting to represent an objective and complete truth of remembering, these rehearsals, rather than attempting to represent an objective and complete truth of an event, seek to document, co-construct, and poetically negotiate a narrative with multiple voices, perspectives, truths, and meanings in order to offer a nuanced understanding of situated and transitional accounts of social and personal histories. What can a rehearsal do to you? Tune in over time within with others, find the river, feel its scars, trace the wounds, imagine the sutures. What remains? Objects evoke conversations. Conversations evoke memories. Memories evoke landscapes. Landscapes evoke prophetic visions of the past. Landscapes evoke prophetic visions of the past. In the process of positioning myself within these histories of war and migration between Guatemala and Mexico, the Usumacinta River manifested itself as a main lead. Located in the in-between space of these occupied territories, commonly known as Guatemala and Mexico, this river draws a line that defines part of the border between these countries, then continues its course all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. I began to engage in a conversation with this river, wondering about its passages, its furies, and its stillness. I drew closer towards it with the same empathy with which I have grown closer to the archive of objects that I have assembled and from which it seemed necessary to move away, if only a bit, in order to begin the rehearsals of memory. As I visited the river I started to listen some of the questions and thoughts that run in its waters. Each visit involved at its core an active and timeless listening, a kind of listening in which the non-linear times in which knowledge, experiences, and imaginations intersect. A listening that has indeed marked my continuous but impermanent relationship with this body of water. Through repeated visits the river revealed itself as a line of time, a place to be with the histories and futures that are buried in the dominant storing of land as white, as nation-state, as Christian, as resource. A place to trace memory, belonging and grief, within waters plural and indivisible flows and layers. Everything converging in this body of water. Can water be singular in one river? Can a river be an archive? The traces of the war in my own archive took me to the middle basin of the Black River, an arm of the Sumacinta River located in Guatemala. This area borders a region that has been deemed strategic because of its abundant natural resources. In the midst of the war, the dictator, Carlos Arana, entitled the state and its army to displace the communities that inhabited these territories. Some years later, the remaining communities that refused this displacement were targeted on the false claim that they were part of guerrilla groups. This was a perfect alibi used by the government to justify the massacres. The creation of this strategic region is an example of how the configuration of territory in Guatemala is tied to a combination of war and extractivist policies that have carried out historically various processes of accumulation by dispossession. A close reading of this river throughout time also throws light on how extractivism has been predicated in Guatemala on a legacy of appropriation and exploitation of nature by convenient alliances forged at different historical moments between transnational or regional elites and the political class. As Diego Padilla suggests, the formation of the nation state has always included violent extractive operations that facilitate the exploitation of territories in favor of transnational and corporate processes of accumulation of capital. I arrived at the Chicxulam early in the morning as in previous times as had arranged a permission with the authorities of the dam to enter the facility. Once there, S would pick me up with his boat. Every time I visit, S drives the boat as close as possible to the gates of the dam. It's hard to say what motivates this ritual. Respect to the river, contempt to the dam, a gesture of accepting the inevitable, A gesture of accepting the inevitable? Perhaps a bit of all of them. We're both in the boat, standing still right before the gates. The same gates that in 1982 flooded 23 villages, croplands and 45 archaeological sites. The same gates that keep 2,500 years of history underwater. The construction of this dam was approved in 1975 as part of the government's development program. With the financial support of international institutions such as the Inter-American Development Bank and the World Bank, this program contemplated the construction of several staggered dams on the Black River's basin, and the Chicxulub Dam was one of them. Since its construction, the Black River Village was left with only two entry points, one through the river and another one by land. You can only have access to the first one through the facility of the dam and a 20-minute boat ride. The second entry point to the village takes around eight hours walking from the last bus stop. Even if it's been deemed one of its most ambition projects, the government did not conduct a comprehensive census of affected peoples, nor did it acquire legally the land for this facility. Also, it did not provide a proper compensation, resettlement, or alternative livelihoods for the 3,500 residents who got displaced, nor for the thousand who faced the flooding of their land and other property in surrounding communities. The international institutions involved in the project were aware of all these problems. Nonetheless, they continued to loan money on the name of development. When the construction of the dam was complete and the reservoir waters rose in January 1983, military and civil patrols undertook the forced removal of the remaining population that refused to live at gunpoint. In this village alone, more than half of its population was killed. At that time, 10 communities in the river basin had already been either massacred or forcibly displaced. Only 10 years after this event, the Guatemalan Truth Commission declared that this state-sponsored violence constituted genocide. When we arrived to the community, I left my things in a multi-purpose room set up for lodging and workshops. This house is part of the Rio Negro Historical and Education Center, Rijiboy, a social center managed by the community. Since its construction in 2008, this center seeks to hold at the site of the events, the memory of the times, both glorious and gruesome, of this community's long history. There is a museum called Casa de la Memoria, with testimonies of the massacres that the community survived during the war, as well as the names and portraits of those who were killed. It also displays broken vessels and remains of the archaeological sites that were flooded by the dam's reservoir. He asked if I had brought the printed map and I nodded. This rehearsal of memory was suggested by J and S. It consisted in locating in a map the different towns and mountains that run along the middle basin of the river. La Lenten As I was saying, this rehearsal of memory was suggested by JNS. It consisted in locating in a map the different towns and mountains that run along the middle basin of the river, and naming them in their language, Maya-Achi. These names have been transmitted orally from generation to generation. However, they do not appear in any official map. In this rehearsal, naming and mapping became a way to remember and honor the past within the present, to retrace, to walk within the traces, and to make new ones, as a palimpsest of times that overlap. palimpsest of times that overlap. It is also a way of acknowledging how its flows have shaped and keep shaping our shared history. Last but not least, it reveals the river as a disquiet and impossible archive made up of infinite traces without an inventory. Thank you so much for this presentation. It really reminded me a lot about Colombia, I have to say. But I'm not going to monopolize the discussion on that. But we'll ask whether there are comments and questions already. There's already a chat question. In Latin America, silence in a sense has created the foundations of how we see ourselves in the face of past history. Could it be said that mourning, as a latent archiving system, is also constructed by what it silences, or omits, or only by what it reveals? I can question, I reveals? I can question. I can again repeat the question. In Latin America, silence, in a sense, has created the foundations of how we see ourselves in the face of past history. Could it be said that mourning, as a latent archivingiving system is also constructed by what it silences or omits or only by what it reveals? the suggestion of connecting archival practices with mourning does come with this idea of silent histories or silenced or muted not mute but muted or silenced but and and then it I don't I don't understand very well if mourning is what it shows or what keeps. Because mourning in itself, I don't think it shows or keeps something. I do think that there are practices of memorialization that are institutionalized and that kind of fake kind of mourning, which has been instrumentalized by states, for example. And then societies think that they have already gone through or overcome certain traumatic moments or events. And it's just these, I I mean I was referring to there like this fake mourning which which kind of objectifies what's been lost and sort of fixes it and then it just becomes something that you overcome or you interiorize and then you can forget about it and go on, no? And I guess what I'm suggesting here is that mourning can be a practice, or archive as mourning can be like a practice in which that which has been lost or what has been the source of trauma keeps being revised and open and infinite and it's never closed no like it's a wound that is never closed and it's also always a bit as a ghost no and that's why yeah i'm suggesting also this um fantasy part or this fictional part of the archive or opening this part of the fiction because drama also it's it manifests in itself in very different ways and and many times not in it is not possible to represent to represent it no so it's also i would say that mourning in that question, maybe it's, yeah, like also it's a way for that that doesn't appears, no? So that which is visible, but also that which is not visible or even conscious sometimes. Yeah, I don't know if I answered, maybe you can. I think I can take up this thread with my question because I think you referred to, was it nostalgia as this superficial or not as a form of dealing with the past that is not mourning because it's kind of, it petrifies the past. It's kind of, it petrifies the past. I also have the feeling that in some cases, reconciliation as a state politics can do the same because it forces a version of history that is not felt. And my question is connected to this. You very much talked about shared mourning and I always had the feeling in Colombia and elsewhere that this is really the problem because it's not possible because there's so many different versions of suffering and of trauma that exactly the sharing of suffering is the very thing that is impossible and that is then often forced by state politics. Now there's a time for reconciliation and that's another form of violence then. Would you agree and how would you say, how is then this the collective moment in mourning, how can it be even taken into vision in a situation where there's this competition of grief and the competition of victimhood that is so often the case? I mean, that's why I also talk about the impossibility or impossible archives, no? Because I think suggesting that there could be a possible archive that can include everyone's grief and everyone's experience, it's in trauma, it's just basically impossible. But acknowledging this impossibility I think makes it possible to work with it and then it opens up the space for yeah like for to think of the archive not in this monolithic way in which it's something that houses or keeps everyone's experience or memories, but it's more like this kind of, yeah, like maybe collective conversations. I mean, it reminds me a bit of what Elena was talking about in the interpretation workshops that could be like, for me, in my understanding of how I'm thinking this collective morning, it can be even like an interpretation workshop can be a space for that, because it's a space where people are actually relating to an object, relating to a shared history and processing it, even if it's not, like, if they didn't meet for that. But when you're talking about it, when you're evoking something, then you are processing it, and then this idea of, so my research parts departs from a family archive, but it actually tends to open it as much as possible and sort of like de-center the family archive and sort of like see how it is entangled with other. it is entangled with other, so not to be like a self-referential archive, like, oh, this is the story of my family and this is how we lived it, but more like, oh, this is my family, and then one object of the archive takes me to another place and to another collection and another person who's also dealing with other experiences or other groups of people, and the possibility of thinking the archive of these as this kind of ever growing or this impossible like containing thing uh i think that's the the well what it underlies like exactly like this this um experience that you had, this impossibility. Are there more comments? Yes, please, Ana. I think you already started now answering to what I wanted to ask you about. And I wanted to to hear more about your strategy of decentralization because you come from from this family archives, from from the context of the civil war in Guatemala, and you any work on this on this river at the border with Mexico and on this extractivist project and genocide. And I want to hear more about it because I feel from your presentation there is something, a part of it, it's a part that has to do with methodology, as you started saying now, like with coming out of this perspective of the family history and out of this particularity. But from your presentation, there are moments when you talk about the need, about the need to move away from this object, and maybe this need is something that has to do with trauma and pain. And maybe it's something located somewhere else than methodology. And I would like to know how this comes together. Yeah, I mean, I think it has to do with my, like understanding my own do with my, like understanding my own position or the ARC or my family's position also maybe, and the voice that it sort of embodies this archive, which is of course people that were implicated in different dimensions in the resistance during the war, but for me, it was a bit always important to give room to other, also to other experiences, to other collections that I know that are being made and being processed at the same time that I'm doing this. So for me, that's why the methodology relies on this translation or movement or transference from one place to another, because I feel the need of also questioning like how the position is never fixed. No? So it is important to position myself, but also to understand that this position is in relation to something else, no? Always. that this position is in relation to something else, not always. So when I was elaborating on the archive, at some point I felt that even if it was like a leftist resistance archive or it spoke about resistance, still it was kind of like I felt ambivalent of this archive in the sense that there is a very hegemonic narrative in the accounts of the war in which apparently it was the guerrilla and the state confronting each other. And actually the guerrilla, I mean, I would say that this really gives a very passive role to indigenous communities that have been resisting for 500 years or more, no? And this is something that, yeah, like this archive and the rehearsals that are trying to be activated sort of tries to convey that sort of the guerrilla movement kind of joined an ongoing resistance and that this has been going on since the colonization and that these hegemonic narratives were possible because they were strategic at some point because nobody in the world was doing anything with this genocide as happens. And then NGOs started to sort of say like, yeah, like the state is attacking these very innocent indigenous people that, you know, and this confrontation is about the guerrilla and the state and then these narratives sort of like solidified and it has had like a very, I think very problematic effect in the way people are telling, like we are telling ourselves this story and it also puts this role to the guerrilla that yeah, that it's problematic in my point of view as well and I would like to like hinge, like to find all these hinges in which in which yeah like these these resistance that has been going on for for many years sort of takes the lead in the narrative and and and so matter, like even leftist interpretations of what happened still keep invisibilizing the main, yeah, like the anti-colonial movements that have been going on for such a long time in these territories. The idea to go to the Usumacinta River for me, it was a way to... I found it hard also to make a project being raised in Mexico and working with an archive of Guatemala and also feeling guilty that my family had the opportunity to at some point fly and migrate and stay in Mexico, no? Or part of it, not all. So also this is something that I've carried with me for many years and I think I was looking looking for how I could relate to this. I was thinking of this river and how it really crosses the two countries. I thought, okay, I will try to connect to this river and see what the river speaks to me somehow. And it was through following this river, as I describe it a bit in the text, that I found in the archive some reports of the massacre because one of my family members was working in a human rights institution. So there was these reports of this and it was in this river and somehow like the coincidence sort of led me there and then I thought, what is this place? And I was researching on it and apparently they, like it was a surprise to me to find that they had this a museum of historical memory in this place, no? And then I thought, ah, it would be great to share my archive and to sort of ask them like to share my archive and to ask them to share with me also their archive in this museum or what they are building there. So it was also like a way of finding these connections and entanglements of different collections that are being made also with different, for example, the museum I found out then that it was made by the German development help or something, aid or something like that. And I mean, and these were the same people that were financing the dam or like, so everything is very problematic when you start diving into it, no? So, sorry. I think there's another question from the chat. Yeah, the comment is, thank you for the very interesting presentation. Can you elaborate a bit on what we have seen in the video or videos? And I can add a small addition to that question for me too. And you have different parts of the video and some of them are your personal family photographs and the other ones are also some collected photographs as well or they are all from your personal and how you put them together is there a link with your this walking backwards when you say and yeah the first question was can you Can you elaborate a bit on what we have seen in the video? Yeah, I... So some of the photographs are photos that I took in my visits to the river. And that's how it starts. Like the first images are from the visits. Then the video that was on this side was a rehearsal of memory with the map that happened and and this video maybe I don't know if it was noticeable but it's going backwards now so instead of being written the river is because there were the names of the place. So I decided not to include the work I'm doing there because I don't like to disclose this kind of work. So the way I decided that this could be shown could be with the names in Spanish being erased. So the names of the places that we were discussing are written in Spanish in this video and they are being erased. And that is what is happening in that video. And then there is photos of my family archive, but it's somehow, yeah, like I found it, I still cannot integrate it completely. So for me it's still kind of fragmented. And then the books. So I have like some clandestine publications from the guerrilla and also the library of my grandfather. I'm working with these books that my grandfather had in his library and these clandestine publications that were circulating at that time with covers that were not real. And then when you open the book you see, and they are like political education books. Yeah. Famous Marta Harnika, Austrian Chilean guerrilla. She came from Chile and then went through all the guerrilla movements. She appears everywhere. Very interesting figure. Marxist, yeah. And I decided to put them like this also. I mean, I was discussing that with Hunde earlier. Like I've been thinking how to, like how to work with this, with the concept of multidirectional memory and how can it formally be worked out. And somehow for me, these kind of overlappings and putting together these different times and kinds of images and objects try to convey a bit this idea of multidirectional memory. So I think we should call it a day. Thanks a lot again for your presentation. Just probably one thought that came to my mind. I just read a book. It was besides others on the Bororo tribe, and what they did, and I found very, very exciting, was for the funerary rites, it was always the other fraction who was responsible for the funeral of the opposite fraction. And I found that such a convincing idea on how to deal with this problem of mourning. And they literally delegated it to the enemy, the funerary rites. And that was very exciting for me to hear as a different mode of mourning, not to have mourning as an identitary thing, but to have it decidedly as something that has to be done by the other. And it was like, well, it could be a game changer, actually, if we disconnected mourning from identitarian programs. But that's just an idea. So thanks a lot again for your presentation.