Archive in the Works plays on the double sense of 'archive' as a site under construction and as a field continuously reshaped by the artworks that activate it. Through critical and aesthetic interventions that foreground the archive's negotiated character, archival art destabilises conventional ways of organising, preserving and representing memory. In the Latin American context, these interventions engage collections shaped by histories of colonial extraction, displacement and uneven regimes of inscription, where violence and silence remain structurally embedded.

This eighth publication in the Cluster's con·stel·la·tions series has its roots in the first Activation Lab, an experimental research and creation platform for Latin American artists working with archival materials, held in Berlin between June and October 2024. The Lab emerged from the Cluster's research project Rewriting the Archive, led by poet and researcher Ana Rocío Jouli (Research Area 2: Travelling Matters), and was conceived in cooperation with the first festival edition by Barrio | Bairro Berlin (a platform for Latin American Literature and Culture), where the activations premiered at the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut. The volumebrings together texts and images by a diverse range of artists and researchers who participated in the 2024 edition of the Activation Lab.

     

Ana Rocío Jouli, Juan Ignacio Chávez, André Felipe, Paloma Zamorano Ferrari, Camilo Echeverri and Ludmila Fuks. Archivo en obras / Archive in the Works. con·stel·la·tions 08. Hamburg: Textem Verlag, 2026. dx.doi.org/10.17169/refubium-50997 (Open Access)