AIC's 52nd Annual Meeting

The Trans Memory Archive (AMT for its acronym in Spanish) is a collaborative and independent project founded in 2012 by trans activist María Belén Correa as a result of her friendship with Claudia Pía Baudracco. During her lifetime, Claudia Pía has devoted herself to keeping photos and letters of herself and her friends with the intention of keeping a record of her life and the life of the transvestite/trans collective. For many years, the trans collective was marked by persecution and state abandonment, the denial of their identity in educational and health institutions and the continuous association with delinquency. Months before the approval of the Gender Law in Argentina, Claudia passed away and left as a legacy to María Belén the collection of photographs she had treasured. These photographs, survivors of exile, dictatorship and police repression, are the triggers of the Trans Memory Archive.

In its beginnings, the AMT was a virtual space organized through a private group within the Facebook platform. For more than two years, more than 1,400 members of the Argentine trans community shared their photographs, testimonies and memories from different regions of the world. In 2014, Cecilia Estalles, visual artist and current general coordinator, joined the project. Together with María Belén, they began to search for and collect the photographic and written material of the survivors with the intention of digitizing it and disseminating the project.

In September 2021, thanks to the International Trans Fund support, the team was able to rent a space specifically for its archiving tasks. At that time, I was called to train the conservation area to renew the storage systems for photographs.

The tasks within the AMT are carried out by a team made up of trans survivors over 50 years of age. With them we initiated a collaborative work of mutual and continuous learning. As a result, we generate models of paper envelopes for photographs, sewed by sewing machine, without adhesives. We also designed folded models of folders and boxes to contain the units and photo albums. We designed work strategies that would allow us to repeat our processes and to teach new members the tasks we had been performing.

The purpose of this work is to share an experience where the protagonists are the ones in charge of preserving the photographs and documents that recover their memory. They have gradually learned conservation and archival tasks. This allowed them to improve their procedures and expand their work in relation to the management of written, photographic and audiovisual material.

We believe that it is relevant for the field of conservation to incorporate voices that for years have been silenced and to highlight their work and collective struggle. One of the main strengths of the Archive is the commitment of its members and the conviction that the preservation of memory allows us to build a future with greater equality, dialogue and collective construction.