¿Cómo se interpreta el archivo de un muerto?
2’, 2020, Uruguay / España
In January 2020 I traveled to the island of Mallorca and worked on the images of Antonio Muntaner, a paternal great-uncle born in 1910, an amateur photographer and filmmaker. In the archive I found more than 700 images in different formats, highlighting a series of glass plate photographs, which are included in this essay. In an attempt to affectively distance myself from the archive, I investigated and found that Antonio’s obsessive action of taking images was resented by the context – political and economic, specifically the Spanish Civil War.
To the repression and violence of the war was added a deep economic crisis that did not allow the photographic industry to evolve. Antonio stopped taking photos for a period of ten years, and when he returned to practice, the cameras and -the world- had been transformed. This audiovisual essay, construction of archival images that dialogue with each other and with music, tries to reflect on what the bodies in the images tell us, what links and events exist and existed, how the gaze is constructed, how, in short, the archive of a dead person can be interpreted.
