Creative Interventions in the Archive: Working with Photographs of Wet Nurses in the Courret Archive (Lima, Peru)
Workshop at the University of Cambridge on 30 November 2023.
This workshop is being run for participants at the University of Cambridge. The first part of the workshop will be dedicated to reflecting on creative visual methodologies, such as collage and zine-making, and to discuss the potential of creating alternative archives. It will also introduce participants to a series of nineteenth-century photographs of wet nurses and infants taken in Lima, Peru, which are now held by the Courret photographic archive. Many of the photographs feature Afro-descendant wet nurses or nannies, and our discussion of the issues they raise will be framed by a talk from Ana Lucía Mosquera Rosado, an Afro-Peruvian activist and academic.
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.
This workshop is being facilitated by Daniela Meneses-Sala (PhD Researcher, University of Cambridge), Dr Andrea Aramburú Villavisencio (Research Associate, University of Bristol) and Dr Rachel Randall (Reader in Latin American Studies, QMUL and Project PI).
The workshop is supported by funding from the Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge.
You can register for the workshop via the eventbrite page.
Invisible Commutes: Visual Representations of Domestic Workers’ Challenging Commutes in Latin America
Workshop held for members of the Afro-Colombian Union of Domestic Workers (UTRASD) in Medellín, Colombia, on 27 July 2023.
This workshop was run for a group of domestic worker participants in Medellín, Colombia. It had a dual objective: (1) to find out what the participants themselves think about popular representations of paid domestic work in recent Latin American films, including of depictions of domestic workers’ commutes to work; and (2) to enable the participants’ own views and experiences to feed into the creation of a short documentary that the workshop facilitators are currently developing, which will focus on the challenging journeys that domestic workers often need to undertake to reach their workplaces in Latin America. Once the short documentary is complete, it will be made publicly available online.
The workshop was designed and facilitated by the Invisible Commutes Team – Dr Valentina Montoya Robledo, Daniel Gómez Restrepo and Andrés González Robledo – together with Dr Rachel Randall (Project PI). It was also supported by Migration Mobilities Bristol Strategic Research Investment Fund (SRIF) seedcorn funding.
Creative Visual Methodologies: Affective Interventions in Archival Materials
Workshop for PGRs and ECRs that we are holding as part of the project on 25 May 2023 at the University of Bristol.
The first part of the workshop was dedicated to reflecting on arts-based visual methodologies, such as zine-making, and the potential of creating alternative archives. It also introduced 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 provided participants with the materials they needed to make one page each of a collaborative zine by intervening creatively in reproductions of the photographs of wet nurses and babies.
After the workshop, we put the pages that participants created together and published the collaborative zine dedicated to the photographs. You can see it and print it for free on the ZINE section of our website.
We are also planning to incorporate images of the zine and recordings from the workshop into a video essay that we are developing.
The workshop was facilitated by:
- Rachel Randall (Senior Lecturer in Latin American Cultural Studies and Project PI, University of Bristol)
- Andrea Aramburú Villavisencio (Research Associate, University of Bristol)
- María Santelices (Research Administrator, University of Bristol)
- Daniela Meneses-Sala (PhD Researcher, University of Cambridge)
- Micaela Meneses Haustein (Graphic Designer and MA Student, University of the Arts London)
