Other Futures for Our Pasts in Feminist Art Interventions in the Archive in UNSETTLE UNSETTLE Feminist Approaches to the Architectural Archives

It was an incredible honour to participate in the graduate symposium “UNSETTLE Feminist Approaches to the Architectural Archives,” organized by Eliza Pertigkiozoglou, Beatriz Takahashi, and Erica Vinson at the Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture at McGill University, October 2-3, 2024.

Anne Hultzsch from the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture, ETH Zurich, delivered the keynote, which was followed by a discussion with Annmarie Adams. The other panellists included Ipek Mehmetoğlu, Cait McKinney, Alex Ketchum, Tania Gutiérrez-Monroy, Jamila Ghaddar, and myself.

In my presentation entitled Other Futures for Our Pasts: Feminist Art Interventions in the Archive, I discussed a series of feminist art interventions that challenge traditional understandings of the archive as an institution where documents, material culture and media no longer in use are safeguarded and organized. Starting with 1970s feminist embodied interventions in the built environment of Mexico City and the domestic space of my mother’s intergenerational family kitchen to recent Latin American feminist curatorial strategies and media art projects, I theorize the potential of re-mediation, re-activation and re-enactment as feminist methodologies to re-signify the archive as a living practice. I highlight how these three methodologies promote intergenerational and collaborative encounters among humans and non-humans across bodies, media and technologies to revisit the past and how, in doing so, they turn historical memory into political memory, suggesting other futures for our pasts.