Documenting the feminist struggle from within: an experience of visual memory and free culture

The right to decide also permeated, in the early days of 2018, in the city of Santa Fe, Argentina, the way culture was created. It was a concrete invitation to document our history firsthand, as it unfolded, and with the freedom to choose how to tell it.

Inhabiting feminisms and the spaces chosen for contesting meaning enabled the possibility of narrating the history of the women’s and dissidence movement from within. Having tools at our disposal—words, images, form—was yet another reason to build the present that was being lived.

In this context, and given the narrative power attributed to visual activism, choosing to speak about and through images was key. The click of a camera, which portrays, selects, and frames a fragment of reality, allowed others to be told what was being experienced in circles of trust filled with meaning, struggle, and hope. Spaces from which attempts were made to tear down that which oppressed.

To want, to believe, to create

The initial challenge was having the courage to speak out. The subjective perspective, now impossible to separate from political meanings, became a legitimate tool. The feminist activists and militant photographers who documented the movement knew how to say what they wanted, and they did it on their own. The work consisted of rescuing, from that fluid moment in the news, images capable of documenting the struggle that was being sought: that of non-hegemonic bodies, that of coastal faces, that of love and hugs, that of hands walking together.

Paula Kindsvater expressed this clearly when sharing her practice: deconstructing, revising, and resignifying were verbs that guided the production and freeing of images of the feminist and dissident struggle. In this process, a unique way of narrating through images was consolidated, a visual discourse that needed to circulate, be reappropriated, and gain space in the communication landscape.

Collective organization was also key. Many activists, screens in hand, looked at the same thing from different perspectives. This pluralistic approach reinforced the idea that appropriating and resignifying digital spaces was a concrete commitment to digital sisterhood and shared learning.

From Wikimedia Argentina, Constanza Verón offered a strategic perspective: the history of women has been burdened by a structural deficit in terms of access to information. Visual narratives replicated stereotypes from written history, rendering invisible or distorting the experiences of women and dissidents. This realization reinforced the need to produce and free images from other perspectives.

The right to decide

Creating also meant deciding what would happen to that material. Knowing how to express it when sharing it was part of the empowerment. Within this framework, free culture emerged as a political conviction: free access to information and collaborative knowledge building.

Creative Commons licenses served as a clear tool for defining conditions for the use, distribution, and transformation of creative works, without relinquishing authorship. Freeing content was not a naive gesture, but rather a strategic decision about how culture should circulate.

As Kindsvater pointed out, free images caused tensions, but it also paved the way for more inclusive and diverse representations. Documenting and freeing production, whether from amateur or professional practices, was a conscious way of building culture and asserting one’s own discourse.

An open, free, and available to everyone history

To speak of an open history meant thinking about unrestricted access. To speak of free histories implied works conceived from the outset as plural, appropriable, and in constant evolution. And to speak about histories available to everyone meant making available fragments of memory that, when combined, narrated a collective universe, without denying the value of work or its material conditions.

Donating or freeing images did not mean losing rights, but rather choosing how to circulate them. It was a political decision: to guarantee the right to access history and culture on equal terms.

Repositories like Wikimedia Commons consolidated this approach. Everything that ended up on Wikipedia had previously been freed by individuals and institutions. In this ecosystem, local initiatives, such as the collaborative feminist coverage of El Litoral, demonstrated the value of building open, diverse, and localized archives.

Thinking about the freedom of the image from a documentary perspective also meant moving away from hegemonic aesthetic demands. Narrating from within, prioritizing the message over the form, and embracing their role as producers of memory were all part of the collective learning process.

Donating images to open archives has allowed history to be preserved for future generations. Fighting the good fight, capturing key moments, and being able to decide on that cultural construct is a way of being free. And as Rebecca Solnit says, “the ability to tell your own story, whether in words or images, is already a victory or a rebellion.”

➲ View Collaborative Coverage – mesa niunamenos – Santa Fe – Argentina on Wikimedia Commons

➲ View Collaborative Coverage – Paraná Entre-Ríos – Argentina on Wikimedia Commons