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Mario Rufer: The altered archive: dreams, ghosts, murmurs

This lecture start from some practices of research: indigenous archives buried in Argentinean dunes in the 19th century and later exhumed by the military; archives and letters buried near Mexican community museums at the time of the Revolution; buried archives of "cédulas reales" given to indigenous peoples before being "swallowed" by the “narco” in the last decade. Stories of ghosts haunting those archives, whispers of loss: loss of leaders, of resources, of land. But there are dreams about a different history: a history of continuous possession of the lands, dreams of a leader who waters the lands already dried up by the work of extractive companies, dreams of restitution of resources. What is encrypted in this history of buried treasures? What ideas of history, restitutive memory and community do they bring into play? How do these dreams speak of a possessed history, of connective memories and an altered language of time?