counter-archives

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.

In this podcast, Palestinian filmmaker, artist, and teacher Razan AlSalah reflects on the role of artistic imagination in the context of ongoing catastrophe and on cinema as a site of gathering, resistance, and rehearsed return. We talk about archives as both evidence and border, the camera as a mediating and potentially violent device, and the ways images are mobilized for population control and self-fulfilling colonial narratives. We also discuss solidarity, censorship and the need to redirect attention toward images produced by resistance movements themselves, not simply as documents of suffering but as tools for reclaiming historical and political agency.