SITE IN SPANISH
By Andrea Aramburú Villavisencio, Daniela Meneses Sala and Rachel Randall
On 30 November 2023 we organised a workshop at the University of Cambridge that was supported by the Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CRASSH). The result of the workshop — ‘Creative Interventions in the Archive: Working with Photographs of Wet Nurses in the Courret Archive (Lima, Peru)’ – is a print and digital zine entitled: ‘Wet Nurses in Nineteenth-Century Lima: An Alternative Archive’
The event constituted a second iteration of a workshop we held at the University of Bristol on 25 May 2023: ‘Creative Visual Methodologies: Affective Interventions in the Archive’. At both the Cambridge and Bristol workshops, our objective was to explore a series of photographs featuring wet nurses and infants that were taken in Lima in nineteenth century, which are now held at the Courret Archive in the Biblioteca Nacional del Perú (BNP). We were interested in considering both how creative depictions of affective and immaterial labour can raise awareness of exploitative employment practices that have been shaped by Latin America’s colonial legacy and how academics, artists and activists can strive to make their work on these forms of labour is as ethical as possible.
The zine features a series of reappropriations and critical reworkings, via collage techniques, of a set of photographs from the Courret Archive at the Biblioteca Nacional del Perú (BNP).
The archive, now fully digitised, is made up of the thousands of glass plates originally from Fotografía Central, a photography studio founded in Lima in 1863 by the French brothers Eugène and Achilles Courret. In nineteenth-century Peru, the Courret brothers were key figures involved in one of the crucial technologies of “mechanical reproduction” conceived to construct the bourgeois, modern image of the nation and its citizens: photography. Through the lens of Eugène Courret, we see the creole elite of a Lima in which independence was still nascent. Even if society’s marginal citizens were not the focus of Courret’s photographs, they still appear in many of his portraits, often as secondary characters. His representations, as such, contributed to the creation of stereotypes, often reinforcing differences of class and race.
This is the case of a series of images, scattered within the archive, where children appear held by their wet nurse or nanny, a role which at the time was popular amongst Lima’s elite families and which was commonly taken up by Afro-Peruvian women. In some of these photographs, these women appear covered with drapes or partially concealed; in others they look directly at the camera, as they hold their charge close to their chests; and in some, which are meant to feature newborns on their own, the wet nurses are almost entirely erased from the frame, though occasionally they leave behind a trace for the careful observer, like a hand or the glimpse of a head.
Our first encounter with these images provoked a series of questions related to how archives articulate remembrance, how they perpetuate (and yet invisibilise) the violent structural conditions sustaining the historical moments they memorialise. Society’s marginalised actors are anonymised, violently hidden and ignored, even if the archive retains their presence in plain sight. It was in this context that we came up with the idea of making an art workshop. Inspired by the works of scholars such as Saidiya Hartman, our aim was to recuperate, in a caring manner, the centrality of the wet nurse figure in the Courret Archive. By “caring”, we refer to a critical engagement encompassing the complexity of this task, the fact that we may often be required to sit with discomfort and the conscious recognition that each of the women who appear in the photographs were subjects with a life and a history of their own. We wanted to create a counter-archive that would bring attention to these women, their care work and the structures behind their oppression, both within and beyond the archive.
After presenting contextual information about the situation of wet nurses in Peru, about the Courret Archive, and about critical archive studies, we prompted participants to critically reflect on the photographs’ materialities, cutting them up, juxtaposing them, finding associations with quotations and other visual objects. Part of our objective was to produce a collective and thoughtful response to the archive, one that could consider the various forms by which material, active interventions could bring the often invisibilised labour of care work to the fore.
In their hands, participants held a selection of printed photographs of varied sizes taken from the BNP archive: some stamped with the BNP institutional watermark; others, bearing the markings of time on their surfaces. Additional materials were provided; for example, a picture of Hipólito Unanue, one of the nineteenth-century intellectuals with views on the subject of wet nursing, as well as images from the periodicals Semanario Crítico and Diario de Lima, which were both key sources, respectively, in sanctioning and disseminating the practice. Alongside these images, participants had a set of quotations spanning different critical views and fictional portrayals of wet nursing, as well as fragments from texts on archive studies, critical race theory and care work.
The pages that the workshop participants and facilitators created compose the zine. The thought-provoking interventions reflect individual and collective concerns as well as the participants’ varied disciplinary backgrounds in Modern Languages, Latin American Studies, English, Film Studies, Sociology, Visual Arts, Gender Studies, History, Social Anthropology,
Geography and Political Science. The pages are united by themes including care, agency, (in)visibility and social reproduction. Some interventions evoke the passing of time and implicitly or explicitly raise the question of how much has changed in terms of race, gender and class relations in Peru and who bears the burden of responsibility for undertaking reproductive labour, including by depicting clock faces, for example. Other pages play on the visible signs of wear and tear in the photographs, which are deployed as indictments both of violent archival practices and of the suffering that the role of wet nurse could have entailed for some of the women pictured. Several interventions thematise the wet nurses’ centrality by using flaps that can be lifted up to reveal their presence or by converting the traces of these women – including their hands and concealed bodies – into the focal point of their pages. Finally, one participant chose to cover several of the photographs with Peruvian flags constructed from red and white card, thereby foregrounding how the idealised, modern Peruvian nation has been sustained and reproduced by these women – particularly considering that many of the infants for whom they cared would later have become adult members of the country’s ruling class.
The process of intervening in these photographs over the course of the two workshops we have co-facilitated in Cambridge and in Bristol has reinforced for us the ethical issues that inevitably arise when working with photographs that invisibilise or objectify Afro-descendant women, which were likely taken without their explicit consent in the context of their labour relation. While neither the workshops nor the zine can resolve these ethical issues, we hope that the discomfort participants experienced when intervening in the photographs forced them to ask themselves how they continue to be implicated in the social discourses arising from these images. This questioning translated into our own practice and, during the second workshop that we held in Cambridge, we decided to address an issue that had bothered us from the beginning; that we were three white women co-organising these events. While we had raised this issue at the Bristol workshop, thanks to CRASSH funding, we were able to go beyond a reflection on our positionality, and invite Ana Lucía Mosquera Rosado, an Afro-Peruvian academic and activist, to join us online. At the workshop, Ana Lucía critically engaged with the photographs and talked about the situation of Afro-Peruvian women today. Her powerful text is incorporated into the final version of the zine.