Anarchivos to tell another art history and cultural policies in Aguascalientes

Abstract

This essay presents a critical reflection on the possibilities of the art archive as a tool for articulating past practices with contemporary proposals, specifically in the context of collective and political art in Mexico. It establishes a dialogue between artistic groups that generated archives in Mexico City in the 1970s—such as El Taco de la Perra Brava, Taller de Arte e Ideología (TAI), as well as artists like Mónica Mayer, with her Pinto mi raya archive, and Armando Cristeto—and collectives active in Aguascalientes since 2012, such as La Agencia (Argel Camacho, Bere Cortés, Rolando López, and Tánex López), Diversx (Alicia Cruz and Kevin Cruz), the Aguascalientes Fanzine Archive (Argel Camacho), Archivo H (Bere Cortés), and the Escuela Libre. Using the concepts of "anarchives" and "reactivation of the archive," the article analyzes how these groups update forms of political resistance and documentation in contexts marked by job insecurity, gender dissidence, and institutional exclusion. The text also examines cultural intervention strategies, the construction of collective memories, and tensions with the Aguascalientes Cultural Institute. The methodology used is based on the visual archive generated by the Visual Arts Bachelor's Program Assembly at the University of the Arts, a direct antecedent of the Free School, as a kind of remembrance and chronicle of the teaching struggle that began in 2023. In addition, it includes interviews and dialogues with participating actors, conducted within the framework of the Aguascalientes Artistic Archives and Anarchives project. It is not a text that describes the general situation of artists or cultural institutions, but rather focuses on specific practices that share a political dimension, work with archival devices, and a desire to break away from the normative forms of the institutional cultural field.