Embroider the archive, intervene the desert: #InakayalVuelve by Sebastián Hacher

Abstract

Visual anthropology has already pointed out the paradox of the photographs of the Conquest of the Desert, where the material violence of the historical event is sublimated and silenced by its apparently neutral images. This situation of the archive implies the construction of a visuality on the document, a way of seeing that is also a way of reading the image that we can find in the way in which nineteenth-century intellectuals such as Martí or Sarmiento thought of the photographic device. This reveals a more complex situation of the image and the archive: a visual unconscious or scopic regime.

This paper aims to analyze the archival intervention of #Inakayalvuelve, a project carried out by Sebastián Hacher that has different multidisciplinary and intersectional dimensions: the chronicles that the writer and journalist published between 2017 and 2018 in the Revista Anfibia, the audiovisual fragments made by Mariana Corral and, finally, a social activism that seeks to intervene the photographs of the Mapuche prisoners that were in the Museum of Natural Sciences of La Plata.

Keywords:
Photography; La Plata Museum; An-archivism; Conquest of the Desert; Sebastián Hacher; Embroidery