Trans-Archival Practices and Photographic Archives in Argentina:Travesti Memory, Community, and Access at the Trans Memory Archive and the Claudia Pía Baudracco Library

Abstract

This article examines Archivo de la Memoria Trans and Biblioteca Claudia Pía Baudracco as community-based archival experiences that reshape the way photographic archives are understood in Argentina. Drawing on a qualitative and situated approach, it analyzes the transition from intimate and dispersed memories to a public infrastructure of preservation, description, access, cultural circulation and historical repair. The article argues that these experiences constitute trans-archival practices, understood as material, political and affective interventions that challenge dominant representations of the archive based on institutional centrality, external technical authority and the separation between preservation and community life. In these spaces, the protagonists of the archived histories participate in the selection, organization, identification, description and circulation of documents, photographs, letters, objects and testimonies, producing a situated archival authority. The article addresses the emergence of Archivo de la Memoria Trans from a closed Facebook group created in 2012 as a space of reunion, care and collective reconstruction. It then examines the archive’s expansion into the public sphere through exhibitions, books, audiovisual productions, judicial interventions and institutional recognitions. Finally, it focuses on the work of Biblioteca Claudia Pía Baudracco and the Claudia Pía Baudracco fonds in order to show how archival practice becomes intertwined with documentation, preservation, economic support, community labour and the ethical protection of sensitive materials. Overall, the article argues that the travesti archive formulates a situated critique of the modern archival regime through a logic of memory, community, care and repair.