We are thrilled to announce a new publication, ‘Memorializing Eruption’ as a result of the research conducted by Sandra Rozental and Gabriela Zamorano’s Phase II funded IF project ‘Restoring territory and memory: displays of visual archives in Michoacán’. The project is based on current research on local visual archives in indigenous Purhépecha communities of Michoacán, this project proposes to organise and mount three photographic exhibitions in the region. The exhibitions, planned in close collaboration with local photographers and cultural promoters, build on contemporary initiatives that delve into visual archives and seek to actualize them through ingenious forms of public circulation:
‘But a volcano is not a military victory, nor a conquest, nor a war with friends and foes to be honored or shunned. It is an eruption, a geological emergence, a sudden and unexpected event that physically opens and breaks the earth’s surface, reminding us that we travel on an unwieldy, unknown, and capricious fireball. A volcano might then be imagined as an interstice, a liminal space that for a brief moment in earthly temporalities, brings together history and deep time. It’s an event, but it is also a place where the forces of what we call “nature” and of human historicity and territoriality collide. How, then, do humans memorialize the kinds of disruptions and transformations, even violence, caused by such a phenomena’
Read the full article here
Sandra Rozental is an anthropologist and Associate Professor in the Humanities and Social Sciences at the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana-Cuajimalpa, Mexico City. Her work focuses on the social worlds created by and around ancient material culture and landscapes in Mexico.
Gabriela Zamorano is researcher at Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social, CIESAS-CDMX. She wrote “Indigenous Media and Political Imaginaries in Contemporary Bolivia” (Nebraska, 2017). She studies indigeneity and visuality in Mexico and Bolivia.
