Con(tra) El Archivo: Artists in Conversation
Con(tra) El Archivo installation view, Filter Photo, Chicago, 2024. Courtesy of Caitlin Peterson, Filter Photo.
Con(tra) El Archivo, on view at Filter Photo in Chicago, is a group exhibition that examines how Black and Brown artists contest archival erasures and counter those absences in their practices. The Spanish-language exhibition title Con(tra) El Archivo uses parentheses to create dual meanings: Read without the parenthetical markers, the title translates to Against the Archive, while the other translates to With the Archive.
To learn more about this tension felt by the curator and artists, I spoke with artists William Camargo,¹ Arlene Mejorado,² and Irene Antonia Diane Reece³ and curator Alexa Ramírez Posada⁴ who discussed how artworks in the exhibition merge personal and collective histories and traverse temporalities and geographies.
Deanna Ledezma organized and led the following interview. Ledezma and Intervenxions staff edited it for clarity and concision.
I want to start by telling one another where we’re from. What place or places do you call home?
Camargo: I call Anaheim, California, home, which is also the home of the Tongva and Acjachemen people, and also the state of Guerrero where my family comes from.
Reece: I call “home” the South, even though I’m finding out that some people don’t consider Texas part of the South. Houston, Texas, Conroe, Texas, and Somerset, Texas, are also home for me, and I use them a lot in my work.
Mejorado: In terms of a physical home or region, I would say it’s the San Fernando Valley, the northern part of Los Angeles, neighborhoods like Panorama City and Northridge, Pacoima and Sylmar. I also feel a connection to being transnational, spending a lot of time in Mexico. The deepest sense of home is being with my grandmothers who are no longer here.
Ramírez Posada: I would say Mexico City and Chicago. As of recently, LA started to feel like home as well. My work and artistic practices have been thinking about the triangulation between Chicago, Mexico City, and LA.
How would you describe your curatorial or artistic practices?
Camargo: My practice is a response to an archive that’s invisible. I see my family archive as part of the history and invisible labor they contributed to Anaheim, in the shadows of this weird space called Disneyland. The photographs we see of me with signage work are always a performative and affective act that I do within a larger space. More broadly, I try to always challenge the history of photography and canonical figures. I see those as violent spaces for photographers of color and people of color.
Reece: I normally tell people my artistic practice is cathartic. The majority of the images are a form of grieving because the people whose photographs I am using are no longer here with us, or their archives have been tossed aside. I am trying to bring back care and gentleness not only for the archives but also in my practice when working with the living. I keep using Black family archives because I’m tired of seeing violence and oppression when art is dealing with Black imagery.
“I keep using Black family archives because I’m tired of seeing violence and oppression when art is dealing with Black imagery. ”
Mejorado: As I’ve been delving more into working with the archive, I turn to family photographs and the archives we care for to piece together things I don’t know about myself and my family. As soon as I started working through these archives, what resulted was work that doesn’t necessarily give me any closure or make me feel any more whole, but it gives me this self-validation. I keep thinking about how we, as artists, can make different blueprints or ways of approaching work that rewrite how photography is used.
Ramírez Posada: I see them as one and the same. In both practices, I always think about how my family is going to read my work—and not just read it—but digest it and then talk to me about it. Especially with this show where we are interacting with the familiar, the intimate, the home. I want whatever I make to always be in conversation with who built my home(s).
Con(tra) El Archivo installation view, Filter Photo, Chicago, 2024. Courtesy of Caitlin Peterson, Filter Photo.
What histories concern you in your work?
Camargo: For me, it’s looking into the histories of labor and struggles in Anaheim as well as the Indigenous history of this city. Anaheim is interesting because they have mestizos who were given land and then Indigenous folks who were put underneath in terms of racial and ethnic hierarchies and land ownership rights. Learning about the intertwinedness of those two communities, especially Southern California, are the histories I’m interested in.
Reece: For me, it’s the Black Southern archives and my family history, including investigating it, documenting it, and teaching folks within my community about the importance of your archives and protecting and preserving them. I am slowly getting into my mom’s side of the family archives and their history there. But that takes time because it’s very fragmented. There are very few images because they couldn’t afford a camera.
Mejorado: I’m thinking about histories impacted by the migration waves of the 1980s. There were these growth spurts in Los Angeles that changed demographics, groups who moved here from Mexico and Central America. Or even through my dad’s side, thinking of the ways that our family was directly impacted by the Bracero Program. There are clues to how we got here, but I don’t directly place the work in this bigger social-historical context. I almost feel as if I am working backward from an intimate space that often feels more reflective of the way that my family talks about themselves. They don’t really place themselves in terms of “Well, this was a big trend” or “Just like our family was going through this, there were thousands of other families going through the same thing,” you know?
“I almost feel as if I am working backward from an intimate space that often feels more reflective of the way that my family talks about themselves. ”
Ramírez Posada: To echo what Arlene was just saying, I am also interested in the hyperpersonal—how our families tell us these histories about what they experienced firsthand. Then, we can go back to a book or a class and contextualize it and say, “Oh my gosh, this a wider thing impacted us in this way.” It always goes back to the hyperpersonal, and I think that’s why I was attracted to everybody’s work for the show. In some way or another, the artworks in the exhibition are all going back to “the home”—however that might announce itself.
Alexa, could you tell us about the exhibition title(s) and the use of parentheses?
Ramírez Posada: I keep thinking about the Photography Network symposium that we went to in Tucson. William, you said that the settlers of Western expansion brought Bibles, guns, and cameras. In some ways, photography not only formed evidence of violence but also was used against claims of violence. Once that history is formed, you can also form the non-history. And that’s what archives do, right? Who is in charge of preserving these memories and moments, these migrations and movements? Everybody in the show is using their own personal archives to create histories. We are thinking about the power of imagining what has been taken from us.
“In some ways, photography not only formed evidence of violence but also was used against claims of violence.”
How do you position your artistic practices in relation to “the archive” in the institutional sense? How is that distinct from your relationship with “archives,” as collections cared for and produced by families and communities?
Mejorado: There is a pervading or hegemonic definition of an archive, meaning what’s inside of an institution. When I think of an archive, I focus on what’s most directly connected to my community, and that’s what we’ve stored over the years and taken care of. You can see what we do is a form of archiving but not in a legitimized or institutional sense. We handle photographs. We contribute to their wear and tear. The goal is not necessarily about preserving photographs for the longest period of time possible. It’s more like an immediate self-preservation, in a sense sharing them, activating them, letting them vitalize us, feed us, help us keep going. So that’s been a gesture that I try to photograph.
Camargo: When I was thinking about “the archive,” it’s about inaccessibility. When I started my work and was trying to find documents in institutional archives, they’d ask me about my research or whether I was tied to a college or university. Looking at the histories of these institutions, they still are not centering Black and Brown archives, including having their archives shown to communities outside. Then, looking at my own family archives, I think those are more sacred. The Instagram account I run, Latinx Diaspora Archives, is about seeing the resistance and the joy that’s supposed to stay within a family audience. Now that we can view them more broadly, we think about the histories in those family photographs, during times when SB 1070 was going on or against these narratives of cholos and cholas destroying Southern California.
“When I started my work and was trying to find documents in institutional archives, they’d ask me about my research or whether I was tied to a college or university.”
Reece: I want to learn more about my family history, my community, or the location or land where I’m working, but with an institution, there’s this barrier. It feels weird going through archives of people in institutions that have ownership over those materials. Because I consider an archive to be an entity, like a person. Whereas when I’m working with families and their archives, it seems more personable and community-driven. I have no desire to work with institutions unless the format changes. I continue to work with my community, the Southeast, Southside of Houston, which is predominantly Black and Latin. Even when I’m scanning people’s archives, I don’t take them out of their homes. I go to their house, get to know them, and then scan the archives.
From left to right: Irene Antonia Diane Reece, embrace, 2024, pigment print with framed photo; Arlene Mejorado, Las tres hermanas estuvieron aquí (The Three Sisters Were Here), 2022, pigment print; Arlene Mejorado, Chiquilla en la ventana (Girl at the Window), 2022, pigment print; Arlene Mejorado, Familia en Tijuana entre las hojas, 2022, pigment print with bricks. Courtesy of Caitlin Peterson, Filter Photo.
Many artworks in the exhibition reference or include preexisting family photographs or visualize kinship. Could you each select a work from the exhibition and tell us how it engages with themes of family and kinship?
Mejorado: There’s a piece in the show called Las tres hermanas... or The Three Sisters... (2022) that was made while visiting my grandmother’s house in Guadalajara. My mom and her two sisters lived there when they were young. There are no photos of them from when they lived there. As my nieces and I were walking through the space and house, I saw them together, and I thought, “This reminds me of something.” The photos might look a little rigid, but we are actually being playful, doing different poses. It’s about a gap in the archive, but it’s also performative and intergenerational. My nieces become stand-ins for our ancestors or older family members. I think the body language reinforces this protection and inaccessibility to certain memories or things about the house or family members that I can never really know or see, but I can hint at it.
Arlene Mejorado, Las tres hermanas estuvieron aquí (The Three Sisters Were Here), 2022, pigment print. Courtesy of the artist.
Irene Antonia Diane Reece, embrace, 2024, pigment print with framed photo. Courtesy of the artist.
Reece: I’ll pick embrace (2024). The print is of my mother and grandmother hugging each other. My mother is holding a framed photo of her mother’s father, also installed as a three-dimensional object over the print. I made that image because I’m a full-time caretaker for my grandmother now. She’s losing her memory. She grew up with her dad because her mother died when she was really young. So trying to have her talk about her childhood memories is really hard, but she can remember things about her father. I’m trying to create these memories with her, so that when she passes, her memories live on. It’s a form of grieving, but it brings that person back to life.
Camargo: The print and vinyl installation Untitled (Anaheim) popo(larity) #1 (2024) has quite a bit of archival materials within it. One is a screengrab from a home video, one of my friends archived for me, that spoke to a time of pre-gentrification in my neighborhood. Everyone was there at my sister’s First Communion party—neighbors, cousins, people who have passed away. Then the surrounding pieces reference the police killings of unarmed Latinx men who I knew personally when I was growing up. I am tying those histories to my family history. These histories would probably be forgotten if not told by someone or by trying to make work about it.
From left to right: William Camargo, Untitled (Anaheim) popo(larity) #1, 2024, pigment print and vinyl installation; Irene Antonia Diane Reece, A vision, a queen, series: Billie-James, 2021, pigment print; Irene Antonia Diane Reece, This will be all I have of you , 2024, pigment print; Irene Antonia Diane Reece, I Imagine Years from Now When We Both, 2020, poem. Courtesy of Caitlin Peterson, Filter Photo.
Alexa, as the curator, how do you see the artworks working together?
Ramírez Posada: The installation process was central to the show in echoing how we talk about “the archive” versus our archives. Like Arlene said, when we engage with our archives, we touch, fold, and play with them. Seeing all the different ways in which these artists engage with archives––collaging, super-imposing, recreating––felt like a nod to those haptic qualities. As we were talking, I kept thinking about William’s photograph Chicanx Still Life #4 (2020). That one was central in the show because something about it felt so familiar since the first time I saw it back in 2022. I was like, “That’s where we find these photographs and documents and receipts. It might look like a mess to somebody else, but we know exactly where everything is– that’s our archive.”
From left to right: Irene Antonia Diane Reece, Untitled, 2021, print on panel with blanket; Irene Antonia Diane Reece, I promise not to forget you, 2020, pigment print; William Camargo, a park outing, from the Camargo family archive, 1993; William Camargo, Chicanx Still Life #4, 2020, pigment print. Courtesy of Caitlin Peterson, Filter Photo.
I’d like to end with a more speculative question: If you could access any archive, real or imagined, what would it be and how would you use it?
Camargo: I think it would be all the archives I imagine and love, like the Instagram collective archives. I am thinking about how we can access it all and have it be non-centered, nonhierarchical, and the folks from the community would lead it. I am more about activating it and making connections and relationships with people rather than the building up of materials. That’s an archive that I would love to be a part of, belong in, and feel welcome and safe.
Reece: I wish I had more of my grandfather’s archive. My granddad grew up on a farm, and it was very common to have house fires. He served in World War II. A lot of the archives of him are gone. They don’t have them anymore––not even pictures of them––when he was a child. Accessing stuff like that, if it were to ever exist, would be my choice. I’m hoping to look into the U.S. Army database and maybe they’ll have a picture of him. Just finding archives of my loved ones who have passed. I’m still not over them passing. Keeping their photographs, preserving them, and circulating them for my family because I’m our archivist.
Mejorado: I want to find more archives about the San Fernando Valley. I’m glad there’s more work starting to be done about Pacoima, which was one of the first Black suburbs in the United States that then became more Mexican and Central American. I would like to find more on my grandfather and great-grandfather who were braceros. And there’s this interview I had done with my grandma before she passed, it was a long interview, almost two hours. I did it with a mini-DV tape. My brother was a star soccer player at the time, and they recorded over the whole thing. She passed away, so I never got to do another interview with her. If I could recover anything, it would be that interview.
Ramírez Posada: I was born in Mexico City, and then I moved to Chicago when I was 8. That time feels like a dream to me. I have very few photographs of it and my grandparents, who I spent that time with, passed away a year after I moved to Chicago. Sometimes I just want to have something to validate that time. So it’s super speculative, for sure. I wish somebody had been secretly recording it or something. That’s the archive I wish I could access.
Con(tra) El Archivo is on view at Filter Photo in Chicago until December 20.
¹ William Camargo is a photo-based artist and educator born and raised in Anaheim, California. He is a photography lecturer at the University of Southern California and Cal State Fullerton. Camargo is the founder and curator of Latinx Diaspora Archives, an archive Instagram page that elevates communities of color through family photos.
² Arlene Mejorado is a lens-based artist from Los Angeles working with analog and digital photography, 16mm film, video, archives, zines, and mixed-media installations. Informed by her upbringing in a migrant household, Mejorado is interested in repair work, countering erasure and mending fragments in personal, collective, diasporic, and migration experiences within stories and narratives.
³ A Houston, Texas native, Irene Antonia Diane Reece identifies as a contemporary artist and visual activist. The topics surrounding her work are racial identity, African diaspora, social injustice, family histories, re-memory, and mental and community health.
⁴ Alexa Ramírez Posada is a practicing artist and curator born in Mexico City, raised in Chicago, now based in Los Angeles. Her work is informed by Queer x immigrant x Chicanx/Latinx history, media, and theory. She utilizes printmaking, multimedia, and archive-based methods to process the effects of violent border nations, displacement, and ensuing nostalgia. Posada is a Mellon Undergraduate Curatorial alum at LACMA and curates as an extension of her art practice.
