The notion of the archive as a strategy for expanded mediation art practices in Chile

Abstract

This article reports the findings of the first stage of the research project Artistic practices of mediation with communities: challenges to expand the social role of the arts in Chile, whose objective is to investigate the artistic practices of mediation to reveal their contributions in the field of art and its sociopolitical manifestation in Chile and to propose these experiences in an expanded manner. The methodology is the case study of fourteen artistic projects (five cases in this article), in which the archive was used as a contemporary art strategy for working with communities. We observe types of archives linked to affective practices, audiovisual stories, territorial processes and editorial narratives that give way to the archive as a methodological artistic strategy that contributes to the reflexivity and the recomposition of the living memory of the communities. Based on these characteristics, an expanded archive is proposed to develop artistic practices of expanded mediation (PAMEX). This gives way to the identification of the results of this stage of the research linked to the identification of ways of recovering and building archives in a versatile, dynamic way, which is recovered and reconstructed, placing the artists as mediators of artistic practices with communities.