archivo de imagen anónima narrada y centro de estudios de la gestión privada del olvido, la memoria y la fotografía

< back   The AIAN is, mainly, a micro-history of the private management of the photographic image that uses the scene of the narration and its registry as support. It is  an author file which uses as departure point the construction of a data base with audio-visual registries of the moment at which different people, requested of by the project, illustrate their private photographic images -coming from their familiar albums- with an oral narration. Around this main file other data bases or sub-files are built. Sub-files are constructed to cross these registries, deepening in the relations between image, word, memory, forgetfulness, construction of the reality and relation between the great cultural stories and the narrative and construction of the intimate memory.    According to several  authors it is not possible to talk  just about photography since the photographic practice includes all a series of human performances before and after "click" of the camera. There is one second photographic practice, that that goes since it is decided if a photography is conserved or not, and that happens through all a series of behaviors essential to understand the complex verb "to photograph". To the light of these ideas “to photograph” becomes a complex act that includes all these practices: to reveal or not to reveal the image, to organize it next to others, to teach it, to narrate it, to trim it, to manipulate it and the practice that interest more here, the scene in which an individual uses the photography as a mean, when meet people and talk on the photography or through the photography.     First stage of the AIAN, sgce (section Spanish Civil War), produced by the Museum Patio Herrariano of Valladolid (Spain), has been a project of travel and registry by the Spanish State looking for  places and people to create narrative scenes with photographies of the time of the Civil War  as means. The conversations have been registered in video and later edited. These conversations have been oriented to the relation of the proprietor with the photography and that performance could framed within that second photographic practice to which we talked about.     Habitually the interview or the contact with witnesses of great tragedies is oriented to the affirmation of well-known stories or  to the search of a literal and no-nexemplary explanation of the tragedy or the injustice. The works, that resort to the interview and the compilation of time photographies to carry out these constructions of which already wise, are many and known. In the center of the problem it is the way in which the interviewer approaches the interviewed person, who automatically  plays the victim of or witness rol of that tragedy. With it the narration and its interpretation of the rol it is tied inevitably to everything what already one knew, to everything what throughout the years it has been built around the so called tragedy.    In the case of the network, Internet, the experiences are similar. The Websites dedicated to the memory usually have the same characteristics  and create problems such. It is enough to visit some of the main sites dedicated to holocausto or black people history. A visit to the Spielberg Shoah site will be enough to understand what we mean.   Project AIAN approaches that situation creating a script different for that scene from the witness or the victim, since  the objective is to know the photographic practice that surrounds to the conflict, to the trauma or the memory:  the interviewed person is a manager of his images and not a witness or victim of anything. With it it is tried to arrive at an exemplary construction of everything that surrounds to tragedy. Fundamental information filters to understand certain behaviors and historic processes, that information that the great stories of victims and perpetrator, of rescuers and rescued, good and bad usually destroy.   It doesn’t mean that AIAN is a project of just private or standard micro-history, or that the aim of the project is to recollect little private stories and testimonies: AIAN tries to analyze that tragedies, their memory and oblidion using the study of the private management of images as support and media, as a mean to undestarnd what History make as forget. AIAN is partly based in the idea that beyond any tragedy there is a human representation of reality and analyzing that representations is a right way to assume ones own past and memories.

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