Family archives: memories as a means of knowledge

Until a few years ago, all or almost all families preserved photographs in large albums dedicated to protecting family memories. Women often took on the responsibility of protecting these records, caring for them, and sharing them. “This is what your grandmother looked like,” “this was your great-grandfather,” “this is how we lived.”

These encapsulated memories have become the last vestiges of an analog reality that is gradually becoming more diffuse. Physical photographs are now treasures of collective memory, and as such we have identified them in the work we do at Wikimedistas de Bolivia. We began two years ago by contacting the family of Bolivian designer Daisy Wende, and we expanded our scope with the Papeles y bytes libres program, through which we share images from the career of film and television director Marcos Loayza.

We are making slow progress managing new family archives. This work mainly consisted of mapping cultural actors whom we personally invited to donate archives from their personal records. Metaphorically and literally, we knocked on many doors. Thanks to these efforts, we contacted the family of musician and artist Alfredo Dominguez and found a lost image in Wikidata. We contacted the family of singer-songwriter Jesús Durán, to whom we owe some of the most emblematic cuecas in the national songbook, as well as the family of composer Alberto Villalpando, partner of writer and poet Blanca Wiethüchter.

This is undoubtedly the longest route to obtaining images that help put a face to both the articles and the cultural sphere in Bolivia in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.. However, it is also a route that has allowed us to develop a strategy that does not depend solely on cultural institutions and also gives us a glimpse into the personal lives of these people who have written, lived, and demonstrated their love for the country through their art.

With the principle “down with silence, up with gossip,” we treasure these donated images as socio-historical documents that condense a moment in the lives of Bolivian artists. In this sense, we have understood that photographs, as singular acts of witnessing, balance the emotional capacity of memory and the death of a decisive moment on paper and pixel.

As Susan Sontag said, photographs convey the truth of innocence, of the vulnerability of life that can be glimpsed in the link between photography and death. In this way, these donated documents also signify the rebirth of a moment or a person in memory and in the collective knowledge of their work.