Affective interventions in archival materials: recuperating photographs of wet-nurses in the Courret Archive

• Ana Lucía Mosquera (Afro Peruvian activist and academic)

Summary

How can creative depictions of affective and immaterial labour raise awareness of exploitative employment practices that have been shaped by Latin America’s colonial legacy? How can academics and artists ensure that their work on these forms of labour is as ethical as possible? In this workshop, we want to explore these and other questions in relation to a series of photographs featuring wet nurses and infants that were taken in Lima in nineteenth century.

The first part of the workshop will be dedicated to reflecting on arts-based visual methodologies, such as zine-making, and the potential of creating alternative archives. It will also introduce participants to photographs of wet nurses and babies taken in Lima, Peru, in the late nineteenth century, which we are exploring as part of our project. These photographs are housed at the Courret photographic archive in Peru’s National Library. The second part of the workshop will provide participants with the materials they need to make one page each of a collaborative zine by intervening creatively in reproductions of the photographs of wet nurses and babies.  During the workshop, we will also have a reflective pause where we will hear from Ana Lucía Mosquera, Afro Peruvian activist and academic.

After the workshop, we will put the pages that participants create together and publish the collaborative zine online.

Closing date for registration: 20 November 2023

If you have specific accessibility needs for this event please get in touch. We will do our best to accommodate any requests.

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