The archive as a concept holds an inherently dark and mysterious quality—these collections often sit in quiet obscurity, overlooked and untouched, until an artist or researcher stumbles upon them. The moment of discovery is akin to opening a crypt, releasing its hidden contents into the light. A cascade of stories, objects, and connections emerges, revealing truths that had long been forgotten or concealed. There is a thrilling and dangerous aspect to this process, as the act of unearthing an archive and recontextualizing its contents can lead to entirely new forms of knowledge—insights that often transcend the original purpose for which the archive was created.

When artists delve into an archive, they don't just present its contents; they transform, rearrange, and reimagine, crafting a narrative that captivates the audience in unexpected ways. This creative intervention has the power to challenge established norms about the use and sanctity of archival material, pushing boundaries and sparking questions about ownership, authenticity, and interpretation. In these moments, formalized regulations and protocols for handling archives often come to the fore, highlighting the tension between preservation and artistic freedom.

An archive is not just a static collection of the past but a living, untapped treasure waiting for the artist’s touch to give it new life. This potential for reinvention makes working with archives so exciting and perilous at times. Through the artist’s vision, archives become vessels of new knowledge and imagination, capable of reshaping how we understand history, memory, and meaning. This interplay embodies the tension between the infinite accumulation of data and the constraints imposed by its curated boundaries.

Archives, Archival Fever draws its name and inspiration from Jacques Derrida’s examination of our collective obsession with archives and the complexities surrounding them. This theme and other concepts by post-structuralists like Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault, and Barthes have detonated a departure point for a series of projects that engage deeply with archival practices, exploring how archives function as repositories of history and as intentional constructs with their narratives and implications. The practice of intervening archives thus intends to describe a new world, a new order where decontextualization, iteration, and the re-interpretations of documents create new understandings of layered meanings, originally unintended.

One of my most significant projects is Entrar Adentro, Salir Afuera, Salir Adentro, which enquired into the extensive CIRMA archive. I conducted an in-depth study of the anthropological theories of ladinization in Guatemala, as developed by the Chicago School of Anthropology. This project deeply engaged with archival material and explored how such archives reflect and shape socio-cultural understandings. The work was widely recognized, and I was invited to participate internationally in various exhibitions highlighting the intersection of historical documentation and critical analysis.