Title: Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentina
Description: "Archivo de la Memoria Trans" is a project that seeks to protect, build and vindicate the memory of the Argentine transvestite, transgender and transsexual community through photos, videos and newspaper clippings. The collection continues to grow thanks to donations of material made by survivors, their families and friends "The Argentine Trans Memory Archive is a family reunion. It arises from our need to hug ourselves again, to see ourselves once more. It arises from our need to reunite after 30 years with the "compañeras" (female friends) that we believed were dead, with those that we had grown apart from due to differences or exile, and with the memories of those that are no longer here. Our past is marked by exclusion and violence. Six decades of police, military, and social repression of our trans community left many of us dead, disappeared, detained or exiled in various parts of the world. Our photographs, stories, diaries, magazines, and objects shed light on our decades of resistance, and on why there are fewer than 100 of us alive today that survived past 55 years old. The project began with Claudia Pía Baudracco and María Belén Correa, two activists that were instrumental in creating Argentina's first trans organization (ATA) and in passing the country's first trans rights bill (the Gender Identity Law). Pía and María Belén had always imagined having a space to reunite surviving "compañeras" and their memories. After Pía died in 2012, María Belén started the Archive from a box of Pía's old photos. In 2014, with the help of photographer Cecilia Estalles, they began collecting and digitally preserving Pía's photographs and others from the community. Six years later, the Archive houses a collection of more than 10,000 documents, with material dating back to the early 20th century and up until the late 1990s. Currently, the members of the Archive are: María Belén Correa, Cecilia Estalles, Carmen Ibarra, Magalí Muñiz, Carolina Figueredo, and Cecilia Saurí. In the Archive, we assemble memories to recreate the portraits of friends that are no longer here. In our fight for the real version of their stories, we discover details that we had forgotten, but that other "compañeras" had saved and that therefore remain in the orbit of our stars. Together, we look inwards with nostalgia, happiness, and pain to bring each "compañera" back to life: the smell of the perfume that characterized her; the tone of voice that was just her own; her mannerisms; her body; her most tragic and comedic anecdotes about jail cells and police officers; the mother who baptized her with the nickname that could never appear on an ID card; the fury of her outfit for Carnaval; her new family in Paris, Rome, and Villa Madero; the days before her death and the nights she spent by the highways, avenues, and forests, or in private apartments. Our reality has always been struggle and resistance. And an intense shine on our lips. These are essential traces of our past that would be lost without our intimate and subjective acts of remembering. Individual memories that through this process become collective." -Publisher webpage.
Subjects: Catalogs, Portrait photography, Transgender people, Portraits, Pictorial works, Archivo de la Memoria Trans (Group),
Places: Argentina