“To speculate safely about a livable future, we might do well to look for a crack in a rock and step back.”
Ursula K. Le Guin

VISUAL TREATMENT

“A Possible Archive” is an experimental documentary essay that explores filmic, scientific, and affective archives to interrogate the value of what is preserved, what is discarded, and what persists as bodily and political memory.

The film is sustained through editing that generates crossings of spaces, histories, and materialities, which find a shared narrative and are bound together through an essayistic voice. This voice is centered on my personal memory and on the poetic–political associations established among the elements.

The structure proposed by the film resembles an archaeological method: it begins with what is most macro—museums and archival institutions—and moves inward through those archives, arriving at their microscopy and at a narrative that is not concerned with remains, but with memory.

ARCHIVAL SPACES

The film traces a parallel between archives in petrology and film archives to find their correspondences in the preservation and classification criteria. Archival spaces are presented as cemeteries. Their interiors are intensified through the use of cold lighting and wide shots of these large, highly organized spaces. Shelves, corridors, lighting, and shadows are all part of the clinical atmospheres of the archives.

INSIDE THE ARCHIVES, THE FISSURE

The film explores how archival institutions begin to fissure to move us into the archive interiors. Here, discarded VHS materials appear, along with the rock that opens, exposing its microscopic interior.

There is a decision to retain those shots in which actions are repeated, or the shots in which Aldo asks questions or gives directions to the women in the discarded VHS footage, where Fátima, Paqui, and Vicky appear. An off-screen space begins to emerge, representing that context and suggesting a pre-existing, discarded image.

Historical documents linked to Uruguay’s military dictatorship are also presented through the deterioration of the filmic material support. For example, fungus on the celluloid, glitches inherent to VHS, and poor-quality digitization. In the same way, I am interested in exploring the fragmentation of documents of terror: the cutting, the isolated words, the microscopy of the documents, the condition of the ink, and the paper. Visual elements such as magnifying glasses help to focus, fragment, and deform those discourses within the documents of terror in which gender-dissident bodies are pathologized.

STAGING

The sequence of the lamps is a staging inspired by the installative and unfolds throughout the course of the film. It relates to an act of conjuring and evocation, in contrast to the ideal of rational science that orders and “illuminates” certain kinds of knowledge. This sequence is constructed within a large scenic space foregrounding the idea of staging, and it will be shot on 16mm, as this format reveals an image that is more aleatory and less controlled.

SOUND TREATMENT

Sound is a key narrative device: hums, mechanical sounds, glitches, tactile noises of celluloid or of a stone being cut. The whispered voices of the archivists, the petrology researcher, and Fátima’s voice intertwine with the sounds of the archives as if they were geological layers of a single time.

There are situations in which contact microphones are used to transmit the tactile sound of the materials, especially in the first part of the film. In these situations, the microphone device placed on a rock or on a strip of celluloid will be visible on screen, as yet another means of surrounding these archives.