Archivo Constelaciones

Context

Since the late 1990s, artists and collectives in Argentina have occupied public space: posters, stencils, murals, marches, encampments. These actions carry feminist, sex-dissident and environmental struggles, the defence of human rights, and the fight against precarious cultural work. Many take place in provincial cities, far from Buenos Aires.

Their traces are fragile. Photos sleep on overloaded phones, online albums disappear, walls get painted over. Social networks add their own rules: some images are censored, others are handed over to algorithms. Entrusting one’s memory to these platforms also means giving them the power to erase it.

Constelaciones was born in 2022 between the street and the university: artists, activists and researchers from La Plata, then from Rosario (GEEP group, Universidad Nacional de Rosario) and Paraná, following an initiative launched by Marjolaine David Briand and Guillermo Vargas Quisoboni. The network now has teams in Argentina and France. The archive opened in Tomé, Chile, through a member of a collective who left La Plata to settle there. It holds 233 documents, from 2002 to 2025, in open access.

Stakes

Keeping traces without freezing them. Archiving street practices without cutting them off from the people who carried them out.
Classifying with those who are classified. The archive’s categories emerge from collaborative work with the collectives, not from an outside gaze.
Opening up without exposing. Guaranteeing free access while protecting people made vulnerable by the criminalisation of protest.
Circulating rather than storing. Inventing forms so that documents keep producing meaning, from the street to the platform and from the platform back to the street.

Approach

Constelaciones starts from a question: how do you design a digital tool that preserves the memory of the creative processes tied to the struggles of artists and collectives in Argentina, while allowing doctoral students and researchers working on these subjects to make use of it? It comes with another: how do you design this tool alongside ongoing doctoral research, which is also a militant commitment and cannot carry everything on its own?

Designing together. Between 2022 and 2024, workshops in La Plata (Benteveo space) and online brought together activists, artists, photographers and researchers. They defined the archive’s needs, structure and categories. Two principles emerged. The first is to unify without imposing: a common framework, without verticality, that applies to archives yet to come. The second is to decentre: the archive follows the affinities and circulations specific to activisms, and gives up any claim to exhaustiveness. Entries link to one another to form constellations of practices, collectives and institutions. Four classification axes were invented collectively (general information, ways of doing, weaves and processes, narratives). They hold together each group’s own language and shared criteria for searching.

Taking care of people. Open access is a political stance, set against privatised or hard-to-reach archives. It also carries a risk: a public archive can be used to identify activists. Participants therefore decided not to publish faces or tattoos, and to favour collective identification or anonymity. The images are placed under a feminist peer-production licence, with no marketing and no data exploitation. The platform is built as free software with Sutty, a Latin American cooperative that champions a sustainable web, to escape the commodification of images and the monopoly of the big platforms.

Thinking of the archive as an archivo vital. The project takes up the notion of the vital archive that Nelly Richard applies to the Chilean uprising: a repertoire of actions, images, scenes and stories in which what happened is inscribed. The street is one example, with its ephemeral, simultaneous signs. The question is what survives of that vitality in the passage from the street to the cloud. The archive has long been used to control, identify and produce narratives favourable to power. The manifesto counters it with an “archival imagination”: deprofessionalising and collectivising the archive in order to regain an archival power. The main challenge is to archive actions that, by their nature, are partly unarchivable, which echoes Diana Taylor’s distinction between the archive, made of durable supports, and the repertoire, made of gestures and bodies. These design choices follow from it: the “narratives” section links testimonies to each document, open access is paired with a deposit open to the collectives, and the interface improves through use. The aim is a back-and-forth between the street and the platform, with a possible future made of videos, oral memories, maps and timelines.

Working with respect for everyone. Everyone involved should be paid, and archivists need time to gather and classify the images. Fundraising is therefore part of the project. The digital component, co-produced by Guillermo Vargas Quisoboni, relied on two grants, each with its own series of workshops: the first (Institut français d’Argentine, Institut des Amériques) for the design of the archive, the second (MSH Bordeaux) for the mapping.

Achievements

Online platform with 233 archived documents, filterable by ten criteria.
Three types of documents: interventions, events, graphic materials.
Four classification axes, drawn from the workshops.
Three paths: explore, wander, contribute, with an editing panel for authorised contributors.
“Narratives” section linking testimonies and texts to each document.
Project mapping currently being delivered.
Publications: Entre la calle y la nube (2022) and Taxonomías para el archivo (2023).

Timeline

2022: birth of the project, workshop De la calle a la nube (La Plata) and first issue of the publication of the same name; Hors Cadre exhibition at the GED, Campus Condorcet.
2022-2024: design workshops in La Plata and online, first grant. 2023: roundtable at the Sorbonne Nouvelle, publication of the taxonomies.
2025: conference at Bordeaux Montaigne.