Affective montages: photobooks, domestic archives, and reconfigurations of Argentina’s recent past

Abstract

This paper analyzes two Argentine photobooks, La imagen perdida (2021) by Diego Fernández and Memorias de militancia (2019) by Juan Manuel Fiuza, centered on the trajectories of Roberto Laporta and Liliana Rita Violini, two individuals who were detained and forcibly disappeared during Argentina’s last civic-military dictatorship. Building on the analysis of these two cases, the article proposes the notion of affective montage to address the editorial operations through which these works intervene in and reorganize heterogeneous archival materials —family photographs, institutional documents, union archives, testimonies, and contemporary records— traversed by absence and the marks of disappearance. Both projects articulate dispersed archives and configure new relations between personal and collective memories. From an approach that puts perspectives linked to the “archive turn,” affect theory, and photobook studies into dialogue, the article analyzes the relations between images, texts, documents, and editorial materialities, attending both to montage decisions and to the forms of reading and engagement these devices propose. We argue that affective montage constitutes a strategy for reorganizing the archive based on relations of proximity and friction between heterogeneous regimes, which responds not only to a narrative or thematic logic but also to new conditions of intelligibility and affectivity produced by the contact between materials. This operation allows domestic and institutional registers, the everyday and the political, to be brought into relation, situating individual trajectories within a broader social and collective horizon