Embroidering the archive, intervening the desert: #InakayalVuelve by Sebastián Hacher

Abstract

Visual anthropology has already pointed out the paradox of the photographs of the Conquest of the Desert, where the material violence of the historical event is sublimated and silenced by its seemingly neutral images. This archival situation implies the construction of a visuality around the document, a way of seeing that is also a way of reading the image that we can find in the way 19th-century intellectuals such as Martí and Sarmiento conceived the photographic device. This reveals a more complex situation of the image and the archive: a visual unconscious or scopic regime. This work aims to analyze the archival intervention of #Inakayalvuelve, a project carried out by Sebastián Hacher that has different multidisciplinary and intersectional dimensions: the chronicles that the writer and journalist published between 2017 and 2018 in the Anfibia Magazine, the audiovisual fragments created by Mariana Corral, and, finally, a social activism that seeks to intervene in the photographs of Mapuche prisoners held in the Museum of Natural Sciences of La Plata.