by Marilúcia Bottallo 

Curiously, or even paradoxically, concepts related to memory and its necessary preservation have become increasingly widespread as a hallmark of the contemporary world. There is, it seems to me, a nostalgia for memory that permeates the discourse of the most varied instances of life, almost as if it were a way of compensating ourselves as human beings for the systematic technological intermediation and dematerialization taking place, whether in interpersonal interactions, artistic manifestations, or even in vigorously consolidated structures such as archives, museums, and libraries. These institutions, although regarded by the fields of science and the arts as the norm when it comes to preservationist concerns, have been undergoing revisions. As such, it is worth remembering their ideological character. These specific formats for dealing with memory records have been, and to a large extent continue to be, instrumentalized through the concept of “cultural imperialism”¹ that Susan Sheets-Pyeson uses when referring to science museums, indicating how museums and universities have “naturalized” values foreign to certain cultural groups through the idea of a “civilizing” superiority in treating them as “truths”, according to André Lalande’s concept.²

Various technologies have been widely used as a way of conveying the false notion of ideological impartiality based on the supposed indifference of technical processes and methodologies. These, in practice, are linked to the principles of classification – imported from the biological sciences – which provide answers as to what “documents” are based on meaning forged through metadata repeated to exhaustion. They are also present in the use of advanced systems that allow data and sources to be tracked and retrieved in ever shorter times.

This state of affairs is a mark on procedures associated with safeguarding institutions, but it usually masks – or fails to even call into question – a necessary reflection on what should – or shouldn’t – be preserved as a source and, even before that, how to understand the very notion of a source. The idea of “selection” is an obligatory part of the process of consolidating memories. However, this process is not “natural” and many indices of individual and collective memories are continually obliterated, as the sources themselves have been and continue to be scattered, especially if we only consider certain preservation models. The perspective of reconstitution needs to take into account other methodologies that must go beyond the more traditional conceptions of history that prioritize written documents as reference matrices.

Maurice Halbwachs,³ in dealing with the organizational structures that shape memory and the way we remember events and experiences, allows us to understand how memory is fluid, is constantly reconstructed, and is shaped by its social, cultural, and historical context, marking its relationship between individualities and collectivities. We are therefore in a field in which different concepts of “memory” are at the epicenter of serious disputes over the possibility of operating with the notion of representation. The construction of the image of different cultures and even individuals and their contemporary demand for revision reveals a silent battle that, under the tutelage of “institutional authority”, seeks to break with the systematic process of invisibility of countless cultural groups, peoples, nations and their ways of life, aesthetic and religious expressions under the argument of what is considered true, real, correct, good, beautiful, but above all, of the great matrices of thought identified in the processes of so-called history, science, civilization…

As such, historical archives and, more specifically, art and artists’ archives are positioned in a hybrid field, both in terms of what they collect⁴ and their structure for organizing and retrieving information.

Art archives have been responsible for preserving a series of references associated with movements, individuals, and ways of understanding the system itself through the systematic organization of different types of documents. However, why are some sources and references preserved and others simply disappear?

Let’s take as a reference the Fundação Bienal’s self-imposed challenge to problematize the Arquivo Histórico Wanda Svevo by commissioning a study undertaken by Gustavo Caboco Wapichana and Tipuici Manoki to think about the very nature of the archive, posing the question of what an (art) archive is – or could be – for Indigenous peoples. The results can be seen in the form of a digital and interactive artwork produced by the pair with the provocative title Ausências ou sintomas? [Absences or Symptoms?] and which opens with a quote/affirmation/reflection by chief Aritana about the 13th Bienal in 1975: “Isso tudo não me diz nada” [All of This Tells Me Nothing]. This work can be viewed via a digital publication. It contains a serious consideration both from the point of view of the concepts and its poetic proposal about what archives can represent. With regard to the very few documents found, the artists analyze the possible meanings of the absences related to Indigenous art and culture. In the same way, they reflect on how preconceptions about these cultures were forged from outside perspectives that were foreign to the way of thinking of the groups “portrayed”. It is worth emphasizing how much looking at the archive can reveal – in this case, through the absences – about the selection criteria for what is to be preserved and, therefore, become the matrix of official historical narratives that conceal that they are only one of the possible versions of the question of art and its system.

When pondering structures and superstructures, Néstor Garcia Canclini questions whether art histories in Latin America are modes of production or representation. Canclini says that he does not doubt “[…] that art can contribute – along with other avenues of study – to a society’s knowledge, but in order to situate the value of artistic information, one must first establish how art is inserted into the context, to what extent it suffers its conditioning, and to what extent it is capable of acting on it again and producing effective knowledge”.⁵

Caboco Wapichana and Tipuici Manoki revealed just a few documents from the archives that are extremely important for thinking about the meanings of absences based on their questioning of them as “symptoms”.

Aritana’s statement, reclaimed by the artists, is deeply uncomfortable and leads us to ponder why: why doesn’t it say anything to him? And, even more acutely, how can we rethink this question?

Based on this motto and with the transformative power of presences that experience absences, Caboco and Manoki, in addition to the work produced, ponder their process through a program at the 35th Bienal called “Conversas sobre ausências” [Conversations about absences]. In the public presentation held by the Bienal, Manoki recalls that many artists talk about/to Indigenous people and few Indigenous people talk about their own culture. According to the artist, her presence only happened at the Bienal because “we called ourselves”. Tipuici recalls that it was Caboco who invited her to take part in the research and exchanges at the Wanda Svevo Historical Archive. It’s worth noting that Almires Martins Guarani and Boe Liberio also took part in the panel on October 28, 2023.

The pair’s objectively presented arguments allow us to think about the function of the archive, its very need as an instrument, source, and narrative power and, what I believe to be the crux of this issue, how to analyze it conceptually to allow absences to be repaired and, even more so, how to do it so that “all this” starts to “say” something – that is representative – for the construction of the identity of the different social groups represented there. Associated with this issue, the very idea of representation, the construction of self-image and, ultimately, art as an institutionalized system, should be enhanced through different forms of preservation, since we are talking about archives.

I believe that all the criticisms and their pertinence, made explicit in the absences highlighted by Caboco and Tipuici, offer the possibility of paths to be seriously considered and implemented. In this sense, Caboco’s gesture of donating a feather with cotton thread to the Bienal Archives, transforming it into a document, indicates the plausibility of reviewing the possibilities of the archive. Fausto Colombo, in his Arquivos imperfeitos [Imperfect Archives] asks, “Why do we build memory systems? Why do we continue to believe in them?”.⁶ It seems to me that Caboco’s initiative points us towards what documents are, their expanded nature and, even more so, what art and artist archives can do, to eventually re-signify themselves in a new and powerful notion of a “living archive”.

¹ Susan Sheets-Pyenson, Cathedrals of Science the Development of Colonial Natural History Museums During the Late Nineteenth-century. Kingston: Mcgrill-Queen’s University Press, 1988.
² Sobre o conceito de ‘verdade’ ver: André Lalande. Vocabulário técnico e crítico da filosofia, trad. Fátima Sá Correia et al. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 1993, pp. 1202-1023.
³ Ver Maurice Halbwachs, A memória coletiva, trad. Beatriz Sidou, 2ª ed. São Paulo:Centauro, 2013.
⁴ Aqui, falamos de processos colecionistas dos arquivos históricos entendendo a expansão mesma do conceito de “arquivo”. No entanto, deixamos claro que a arquivologia entende que arquivos correntes, intermediários e permanentes não praticam o “colecionismo”, mas a acumulação de documentos. Sobre esse assunto ver: Ana Maria de Almeida Carmargo e Heloísa Liberelli Belotto, colaboração Aparecida Sales Linares Botani et al. São Paulo: Associação dos Arquivistas Brasileiros – Núcleo Regional de São Paulo: Secretaria de Estado da Cultura, 1996.
⁵ Nestor García Canclini, A socialização da arte: Teoria e prática na América Latina, trad. e Maria Helena Ribeiro da Cunha e Maria Cecília Queiroz Pinto. São Paulo:Cultrix, 1984.
⁶ Fausto Colombo, Os arquivos imperfeitos: Memória social e cultura eletrônica. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1991. 

About the author

Marilúcia Bottallo has a Ph.D. in Information Sciences and a master’s degree in arts, both from ECA (USP), as well as a Bachelor’s degree in History from FFLCH (USP). She is the Technical Director of the Instituto de Arte Contemporânea. She is also the coordinator of the Postgraduate Program in Museology, Collecting, and Curating at the Centro Universitário Belas Artes de São Paulo.

This text is part of a series dedicated to the Arquivo Histórico Wanda Svevo, which turns 70 in 2025. All the images in this series are illustrated by photos kept in the Bienal Archive. Take the opportunity to visit the Archive’s website and its database, which is always open to the public and will soon be translated to English. The initiative is supported by Promac.