Son[i]a #455

Archivo Honduras Cuir is a community-based, affective, radically political project that emerged in Honduras as an urgent response to the systematic erasure, structural violence, and precarity of queer and trans lives. It is not a repository, but a living web: a collective archive in the form of a critical, educational, and creative platform. Built on friendship, care, and solidarity, it is activated by Abigail Reyes, Dany Barrientos Ramírez and a constellation of peers, gathering photographs, newspaper clippings, magazines, and stories historically excluded from official narratives. It safeguards and revives memories of sexual and gender dissidence: not only to preserve them, but to produce situated knowledge from the Global South, and to experiment with queer and decolonial methodologies. From emotions to domestic albums, with undeveloped rolls of film, chosen mothers, embodied experiences, and knowledge passed down by word of mouth, from generation to generation, the Archivo Hounduras Cuir is also an archive that exceeds its boundaries.

In this podcast, we delve into the embodied history of the the Archivo Honduras Cuir, through the voices of two of its guiding lights: photographer and intuitive archivist Abigail Reyes, and photographer and cultural manager Dany Barrientos Ramírez. With them, we explore the map of the violence, displacement, resistance, and late-night parties of the trans and queer experience: an archive that began as an urgent gesture of reparation in the face of erasure and death. When friends are murdered and not a single image remains, documenting becomes a way of sustaining life over oblivion. We talk about intimate and domestic photography as a practice of resistance, about hacking newspaper archives to piece together the lives and miracles of the community’s ancestors, and about the political power of collecting images in a country that seems to avoid preservation by design. We also speak about images that are missing, and about the archive as a tool for future reparation and community healing. And we imagine the archive as swarm of fireflies: a fragile, shining, collective way of emphasising memory.