The shapes of memory

From family album to Wikimedia projects and from WikiCommons to a public gallery. The journey of Archivo Inundación (Flood Archive) to the photographic exhibition ‘The insistence of memory’.

More than a thousand digitised photographs, four hours of audiovisual recordings on VHS video tapes and sixteen hours of interviews on audio cassettes make up the raw material recovered by the Flood Archive to date. This free culture project, which has evolved into a community archive, has been driven since 2023 by WikiActivistas del Litoral with the aim of collecting and sharing – through Wikimedia Commons and its own website – visual testimonies and family, personal and institutional documentary records of the 2003 flood in the city of Santa Fe, Argentina.

All that initial work of calling for contributions, searching and selecting, digitising (including software archaeology) and cataloguing seems to be an effective strategy against the obsolescence of some physical media records. But this is not enough. Although Wikimedia projects have proven to be accessible repositories and open sources for preservation, a big question emerges: how can we get the community itself to disseminate and circulate this collaborative memory that is under construction?

Look mum! The photo you took is on Wikipedia

Adriana Falchini is a university professor and researcher of social memory in Argentina. She was one of the many people affected by the flood, along with her family, and is one of the main contributors of all kinds of documentary records to the Flood Archive. Since 2003, she has been a committed activist for memory and justice. She has given testimony, built networks of activism and denunciation, and played a key role in two important projects: Narrating the Flood and Memories and Oblivions of the People of the West (now available on WikiCommons). These two publications, dated 2005, bring together more than 80 intimate and personal testimonies, recorded as soon as the floodwaters receded. These raw accounts form a chorus about a time suspended in uncertainty, with the consequences of a socio-environmental catastrophe still unfolding. Two decades on, with new generations who did not suffer the flood but did experience its consequences, Falchini often insists on the need to continue creating social frameworks for memory that allow reflection to be (re)activated. This is expressed in ‘What are we going to do?‘, a piece written on the eve of another anniversary:

We know that remembering the flood will never be easy because it is a past that refuses to fade away. Painful and traumatic memories are difficult to talk about and listen to. That is why we need a framework, a way of organising specific memories that allows us to build inclusive and collective meanings.

The Flood Archive can be a key that unlocks and activates a place of memory. At WikiActivistas del Litoral, we keep asking ourselves questions about what other shapes this community archive could take or enable. Is it enough for the repository to be free, open, and accessible? Are the possibilities offered by Creative Commons licences enough to promote the creation and re-creation of meanings? We believe it is necessary to promote other narratives that bring these recent memories together and facilitate the collective production of new meanings.

How to activate a community archive?

At the end of 2024, the project was selected in Cultura Comunitaria y Territorios Creativos call for proposals by the Municipality of Santa Fe. The grant included a financial contribution that allowed for the annual renewal of the website. Also, it was the starting point for a strategic partnership with a GLAM institution: the Municipal Photo Gallery. In early 2025, the project began working with the Photo Gallery Coordination Team to organise a photography exhibition that would allow for the wider circulation of some of the visual records that form part of the community archive. The proposal included the idea of reviving the materiality of the printed format, emulating family photo albums.

The task schedule included extensive curator work, which resulted in the selection of 50 images (from more than 250 available on WikiCommons), the layout of a fanzine for the exhibition space (in dialogue with the blog), and the planning of a set of activities to help visitors process the experience. The result was ‘The insistence of memory’, an exhibition organised by WikiActivistas del Litoral, with the support of the Office of Culture of the Municipality of Santa Fe and Wikimedia Argentina Chapter.

If the Flood Archive began as a path from physical to digital media, ‘The insistence of memory’ involved partially reversing that process. The photographs that originally went from the family album to Wikimedia projects now made the transition from the digitality of WikiCommons to a printed medium in an exhibition hall.

As for the reproductions, there was careful work on the printed formats (small, medium and large), the use of photographic paper and the exhibition of the devices with which they were taken. The intention was to highlight the different temporalities of the archives: from the time the shutter was pressed to the moment of film development – despite the flood – their incorporation into the family or personal archive and their subsequent release through free culture; but also the technical transformations of experience and perception, with analogue and digital cameras also forming part of the installation. These processes were practically unknown to the teenagers and young people who would later visit the Photo Gallery, and who would only know about the flood from the stories of their relatives.

Setting-up ‘The insistence of memory’

Is the distance of twenty years enough to organise a collective narrative? Where does such an intimate photo fit into such an open archive?

These were some of the questions people encountered when they entered the room. Visitors were greeted with these questions, an introductory text, a fanzine, and a list of activities. On the walls were eleven medium-sized photos by Juanjo Berón, then a lifeguard. Twenty-five images in various sizes, captured by Juana Núñez, at that time a domestic worker. Thirteen 20 x 30 cm photographs taken by Darío Montenegro, a doctor and then deputy director of the city’s main public health institution.

Each group of images depicts a different aspect of the flood:

Juanjo Berón’s collection tells the story of the collective organisation of the Santa Fe regional branch of the Lifeguard Union. The reel includes improvised ports with inflatable boats tied to trees; canoes and pirogues navigating the streets; vaccination campaigns; the reception and distribution of donations at the union headquarters; people and farm animals on rooftops; and finally, the aftermath: mud, rubbish and decay. The full story can be read in the chronicle ‘Can images have a smell?‘ (in Spanish).

On a shelf was an exhibition of a digital camera similar to the Kodak DC280 with which Darío Montenegro captured, ten photos at a time, the key moments of the flood. There were no film rolls here, only memory cards with very limited capacity, which meant choosing carefully what to shoot and constantly backing up. His photos show scenes of the exodus before the total overflow, with lines of people being displaced by the river; the first improvised evacuation centres in churches and schools; health campaigns carried out in the affected neighbourhoods; and the aftermath of the flood, with a report on the destruction of public health facilities in the western part of the city. The full story can be read in the chronicle ‘How much space is there in memory? 2003 in ten photos at a time’ (in Spanish).

On another wall, Juana Núñez’s photographs composed a narrative universe in themselves. Printed in different sizes, they sought to evoke their belonging to a family album, that of the Núñez family. As Titi Nicola points out in an article, in Juana’s images ‘there is no spectacularisation of suffering, but rather a visual narrative of disrupted living. The aim is not beauty, but truth. In each image there is a gesture: to uphold the story from the perspective of those who lived it’. Each shot is a facet of the Núñez family’s daily life during the emergency: their own flooded home, canoe trips to bring food to their neighbours, the reception of clothing donations arriving from other cities, the queues of victims just a few blocks away from the water, in the dry part of the city. The full story can be read in the chronicle ‘Juana Núñez’s camera lucida‘ (in Spanish).

Some highlights from ‘The insistence of memory’ 

• The exhibition opened on 11 April in Santa Fe and ran for five weeks, with free admission.
• During those 35 days, a series of activities were held for teenagers and young students: the opening day, a panel discussion (as a way to activate the exhibition), and four guided tours with educational institutions.
• As there were no tickets, there are no final totals for attendance at the exhibition, but during the mentioned activities, an estimated 200 people participated.

Between 21 and 23 November, the exhibition travelled to the city of Rosario, in the south of the province of Santa Fe, to form part of the first edition of Encuentro, a regional photography festival. This was a second opportunity for the Flood Archive to become known beyond the city of Santa Fe.

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