The archive and the cafezinho: challenging (disembodied) histories by embodied archival experiences at Acervo Bajubá, an LGBT+ community archive in Brazil

ABSTRACT

This article examines the challenges faced by Acervo Bajubá, an LGBT+ community archive located in São Paulo, Brazil. Departing from the observation of a disconnect between the recognition of the archive’s importance in terms of the content it holds and its consideration as a community epistemological project, the article argues for a paradigm shift in understanding archives. Contrariwise, the article proposes viewing Acervo Bajubá as an epistemological project that challenges conventional notions of community, history, and memory. It calls for a re-evaluation of the archive’s material conditions, bringing them to the forefront, and operating a recognition of its role as a legitimate knowledge producer – and not only as a repository for disciplinary projects and commitments. The article suggests that by expanding the concept of the archive-as-object and embracing archive-as-community-practice, alternative relationships with the past can be forged. Finally, through the analysis of two art-pieces produced in the context of an inventory process, the article argues for a concept and practice of archive that challenges disembodied notions of history, memory, and community, emphasising community practice and recognising the lives and bodies embedded within archival devices. It concludes by highlighting the importance of grounding the archive in the present time, and fostering creative tactics for envisioning alternative historical imaginaries and political repertoires.

Cet article examine les défis auxquels se confronte Acervo Bajubá, une archive communautaire LGBT+ située à São Paulo, au Brésil. Avec comme point de départ l'observation d'une fracture entre la reconnaissance de l'importance de l'archive sur le plan du contenu qu'elle héberge et sa considération comme un projet épistémologique communautaire, cet article présente des arguments en faveur d'un changement de paradigme autour de la compréhension des archives. Cet article propose qu'Acervo Bajubá soit au contraire vue comme un projet épistémologique qui met en question les notions conventionnelles de communauté, d'histoire et de mémoire. Il appelle à une réévaluation des conditions matérielles de l'archive, pour les mettre en avant, et recommande qu'il soit procédé à une reconnaissance de son rôle comme producteur légitime de connaissances – et pas seulement comme dépôt de projets et d'engagements. L'article suggère qu'en élargissant le concept de l'archive en tant qu'objet et en adoptant le concept d'archive comme pratique communautaire, il est possible d'établir des relations alternatives avec le passé. Enfin, à travers l'analyse de deux œuvres d'art produites dans le contexte d'un processus d'inventaire, l'article préconise un concept et une pratique de l'archive qui met en question les notions désincarnées d'histoire, de mémoire et de communauté, en mettant en relief la pratique communautaire et en reconnaissant les vies et les corps ancrés dans les dispositifs archivistiques. Il conclut en soulignant à quel point il est important d'ancrer l'archive dans le présent, et d'encourager des tactiques créatives pour concevoir des imaginaires historiques et des répertoires politiques alternatifs.

Este artículo examina los retos enfrentados por el Acervo Bajubá, un archivo de la comunidad LGBT+ con sede en São Paulo, Brasil. Tras constatar la desconexión entre el reconocimiento de la importancia de este archivo en términos del contenido que alberga y su consideración como proyecto epistemológico comunitario, el presente artículo aboga por un cambio de paradigma en la comprensión de archivos. Así, contraponiéndose a esta desconexión, este trabajo propone que el Acervo Bajubá sea considerado como un proyecto epistemológico que impugna las nociones convencionales de comunidad, historia y memoria. Al mismo tiempo, hace un llamado a reevaluar las condiciones materiales del archivo, colocándolas en un primer plano, y a materializar el reconocimiento de su papel como productor legítimo de conocimiento y no sólo como depósito de proyectos y compromisos disciplinarios. Ampliando el concepto de archivo-como-objeto y adoptando el de archivo-como-práctica-comunitaria, el artículo sugiere que pueden establecerse relaciones alternativas con el pasado. Por último, mediante el análisis de dos obras de arte producidas en el contexto de un proceso de inventario, el artículo intercede por un concepto y una práctica en torno al archivo que cuestione las nociones incorpóreas de historia, memoria y comunidad, haciendo hincapié en la práctica comunitaria e identificando las vidas y los cuerpos contenidos en los dispositivos archivísticos. Finalmente, se destaca la importancia de fundamentar el archivo en el tiempo presente y de fomentar prácticas creativas para idear imaginarios históricos y repertorios políticos alternativos.

KEYWORDS:

• Archive
• memory
• queer
• LGBT
• Brazil
• communitarian archives

Acknowledgements

I thank Bruno O., Florence Belladonna Travesti, Lufer Sattui, and Marcos Tolentino, knowledge producers and memory workers of Acervo Bajubá. I am very grateful for the generosity of Natan (on Instagram @cancerianatan), also a memory worker of Acervo Bajubá, for sharing their artwork for this article. I would like to acknowledge and thank the insights, questions, and critiques I received during a keynote at the panel ‘Queer Echoes’, in the Gender Matters Symposium (The New School for Social Research, 2023), organised by Dr. Chiara Bottici and João Eduardo Freitas. In that event, Dr. Zeb Tortorici (NYU) provided insightful recommendations for the present text. Beyond this panel, I am also in debt to Dr. Maeghan Miller-Likhethe and her seminar ‘Global Archives’ at the Global Studies Department, UC Santa Barbara (Fall, 2022), where the first version of this text was produced. Finally, I would like to thank Dr. Debanuj DasGupta (UCSB) for the initial reflections on the notion of ‘archive’ and Dr. Elizabeth Marchant (UCLA), responsible of the ‘Independent Studies’ I took, for the readings and the final writing of this piece during the Spring of 2023.Funding

Notes

1 Indeed, Eichhorn (2014) has critically challenged this either–or model, showing how some feminist archives and archivists in the US have an in-between position regarding activism and academia. With that I mean that one dimension does not necessarily deny the other. About the troubles of a positionality in between activism, arts, and academia, I am also inspired by Curiel’s memories in Sacchi et al. (2021, 335).

2 The expression ‘scale-up’ is inspired by Kathi Weeks (2021), here used as a desire for going beyond the localised nuisance and inserting the questions I draw here in a broader political economy of knowledge production.

3 Of uncertain origins, pajuba or bajuba is a linguistic style ‘built on lexical borrowings of various kinds, but particularly from the Yoruba language. First articulated by travestis, today it has not only been popularised to other LGBTIQ groups in Brazil, but some of its words have also entered the mainstream vocabulary as well’ (Araújo 2022, 292). Still according to Araújo, it is important to consider the circulation of Pajubá in Candomblé religion and its roots in Yoruba-Nago languages of West Africa, with its original uses meanings ‘secret’ or ‘mystery’, but also constituted by a series of shifting meanings by queer speakers, turning into ‘news’ or ‘gossip’ (Araújo 2022, 292).

4 Although I recognise ‘LGBT+’ as a Western and contested category that limits the diversity and historicity of the embodied experiences, subjectivities, practices, and identities of sex-gender dissidences, including the own linguistic notion of Bajubá, I choose to use this term to respect the political choice of Acervo Bajubá. The use of this terminology is justified by Bajubá due to conditions of communication and access, as proposed by a partner organisation, the political collective #VoteLGBT. Collecting public data and producing reports since 2016, #VoteLGBT chooses that term based on the following argument: ‘Every time we change or increase the acronym, we distance ourselves a little more from the non-activist population, which is a very important part of our audience. #VoteLGBT understands that the transformation of society towards the full participation of people requires the contribution of many people, and as an institution, it has chosen to solidify the acronym “LGBT+” because, on the one hand, it appeals to something better known (“LGBT”) and, on the other hand, it shows that there are more people to consider (“+”)’. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5b310b91af2096e89a5bc1f5/t/62839ef52f76f546de002ce0/1652793081067/220517_vote_relatorio_2022.pdf.

5 ‘The magistrate who is really in Derrida’s text, exercises a power he doesn’t always actually have, that has already always been inaugurated somewhere else’ (Steedman 2002, 44).

6 On the coexistence of different archival paradigms, and competing approaches, such as evidence and memory, see Cook (2013).

7 ^‘The meaning of archive, its only meaning, comes to it from the Greek arkheion: initially a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded  …  To be guarded thus, in the jurisdiction of this stating the law, they needed at once a guardian and a localization. Even in their guardianship or their hermeneutic tradition, the archives could neither do without substrate nor without residence. It is thus, in this domiciliation, in this house arrest, that archives take place’ (Derrida & Prenowitz, 1995, 9–10).

8 In that regard, thinking of the transgender archive, Lewis (2014) ponders about the risks of considering queer history as transparent and referential, advising us of the inherent foreclosures in the intelligibility process by which the subjects of the archive are frequently rendered: the deauthorisation of their lifeworlds through a translation based in the primacy of the historian and their episteme. In such a frame of epistemic violence, Lewis envisions a possibility of a deep sense of accountability, in which instead of considering the archive itself as a challenge, we must provincialise History and wonder if ‘the archive will submit to our engagements in the first place’ (Lewis 2014, 28).

9 For example, Gonzalez (2020) observes how the ‘economic miracle’ that happened during the 1960s impacted the geographic regions of Brazil and racial groups in different ways, putting macro historical narratives into doubt.

10 Thinking of these intersections between materiality and political goals, the visual artist Bruno O. understands Acervo Bajubá’s activities as políticas do chão produced by tecnologias do chão. Chão means ‘floor’ or ‘ground’ in Brazilian Portuguese, hence this conceptual articulation means something close to politics of the ground, produced by technologies of the ground, in a sense of different social technologies that are produced/articulated departing from the floor we step on. Hence, ‘floor’ is understood in relation to the social and political actors that step on it, their political desires, economic possibilities, and the dialogues that are then produced with the available and created technologies. In that context, there is no separation between the local reality that is lived and the discussions that are motivated through the methods that are locally conceived and performed. The source of this concept is based in the personal and community memories of a lived practice not reduced or reducible to the act of writing or any written record.

11 What I write here is also a result of the many negotiations that result from these different spaces, grammars, and repertoires in relation to my positionality, a ‘global South’, as a queer scholar of colour.

12 The use of Clare Hemmings to think about archives is based in Eichhorn (2014).

13 For a summary of this critique, see Fraccaroli (2022).

14 In particular, I am inspired by the comments of Bliss (2015, 87–8) on the politics implied in seeing Black feminism beyond a simple interdisciplinary framework or party programme, and how racialised and gendered dimensions have prevented from seeing it as a theory.

15 Remom Matheus Bortolozzi holds a PhD in Collective Health (University of São Paulo). He is a Psychology professor at Pontíficia Universidade Católica (PUC/PR) and was one of the founding members of Acervo Bajubá. Remom frequently teaches courses on the histories and memories of LGBT+ communities in Brazil and his current research project is focused on the solidarity mechanisms that the LGBT+ communities developed to face the HIV/AIDS epidemics.

16 Testimony present in the virtual exhibition ‘Clippings, Patches, Snippets and Reports: Browsing Through LGBT+ Memories’. https://artsandculture.google.com/u/1/story/iQURZdWsiQ2_-g (accessed 15 May 2023).

17 Acervo Bajubá and Casa 1 (2021) ‘Laboratório de Memórias’ | Video Series (YouTube Videos). https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2dRUoriDfmtrgqTg-i0pZ9uaydzfD5Y3 (accessed 15 May 2023).

18 According to the Dictionary of Archives Terminology, post-custodial is defined as an adjective related to ‘situations where records creators continue to maintain archival records with archivists providing management oversight even as they may also hold custody of other records. The literature on post-custodial thinking understands it as possibilities of shared governance and ownership (Zavala et al. 2017) and recognises that collecting and preserving records is not enough’. Agostinho (2019, 151) signals the importance of post-custodial thinking in democratising access and care, shifting from the dependence on archival repository to the prioritisation of the ‘context of records creation’ over ‘records content’: ‘In this way, the entire community becomes the larger provenance of the records, and all layers of society are seen as equal participants in the making and interpretation of records’.

19 This section contains some of the central elements of Fraccaroli (2023).

20 Although for an English-speaking audience a translation to drag queen could certainly help the comprehension, transformista is an emic category with common and different historical roots in Latin America, and transnational dialogues beyond it. In the Brazilian context, the superstar Rogeria and the show Les Girls, which circulated in South America, are probably the main reference. With articulations since the 1950s, transformistas’ performances would rely on the embodiment of a glamorous femininity based on Hollywood divas, but also French musicals. For an interesting attempt at historical periodisation of Brazilian trans performances on stage, see Jayo and Meneses (2018).

21 Observatório G (2020) ‘Drag queen paulista critica falta de ativismo em Parada LGBT virtual de SP’. 19 June. https://observatoriog.bol.uol.com.br/noticias/drag-queen-paulista-critica-falta-de-ativismo-em-parada-lgbt-virtual-de-sp.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Chancellor’s Fellowship (2022/2023 academic year, University of California, Santa Barbara); and was the recipient of The Charlotte Stough Memorial Prize 2023 (Department of Feminist Studies, University of Santa Barbara).

Notes on contributors

Yuri Fraccaroli

Yuri Fraccaroli (they/them) is a PhD student in Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA and an active member of Acervo Bajubá. Their academic work is informed by the epistemologies and methods of Acervo Bajubá. This article is the result of an intense involvement with Acervo Bajubá (2020–2022). The main argument of this piece, against disembodied notions of archive, is inspired by all cleaning activities, the boxes we packed and carried in our address change in 2021, the countless rides I took with Bruno O., and all other invisible (and, for some, minor) labour that shapes Acervo Bajubá. Postal address: Department of Feminist Studies, 4631 South Hall, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-7110. Email: [email protected]