Archives and Ruins

by Daniel Pereira

 

Photographic images, in their permanent given function of eternalizing moments, be they edited or unedited clippings, are also for this reason for resurrecting the dead, as Roland Barthes put it. According to the philosopher, we can look at the image and say "I am seeing death". In this logic, the photographic archives would be a junction of the dead eternalized there in those static images recorded forever. 

 

The photographs are clippings of what once was, of what has been immortalized through the fixation of images. Thus, are archival photographs of ruins or remnants of what once existed also ruins or remnants of something that has fallen into disuse? An ethnography of the photographic archives within a public collection. Thinking from the idea of ruin as being. Would photographic images, printed and located in a collection, be ruins of our memories, for "keeping" these landscapes or objects the way they once were?

 

We will re-signify our memories when we come across information, data, and knowledge about the monuments that have their remains there. These "remains" or leftovers are data that determine a small aesthetic notion of the ruin, while they also include notions of its uses, social and natural (now by nature).

 

So they (the archives) are also objects of education, photography has a determining role in the modern forms of fundamental records in the public documental logic of the State, occupying drawers and shelves in the public archives. Precisely, in the course of this research, we had the opportunity to experience the Public Archive of the city of Olinda, which here would be the place where we found fragments of an imagetic documentation that made us know more of these ruins that are alive in this place, which continues in the mission of fulfilling precisely its role of preservation and circulation of memory.

 

This space and its emergence and maintenance as the space we know today is directly linked and strengthened by the title of World Heritage granted to Olinda by Unesco 40 years ago, in 1982. And these notes and findings can also give us paths about the relations of these ruins with the social life of the city, here starting from the visuality of the photographic images, their polysemy, and what is political in these clippings that tell us about expansion, territory, and society. 

 

These archival images also carry the burden of referencing us if we seek to understand something about memories, individual and collective, of this edge of the continent with the sea. The images as material sources and references for seeking to understand more about the collective and individual imaginary as well.

 

However, the polysemy of the images can put us in a very peculiar situation (very welcome here) to help interpret the symbols of these remains, of what was left... until now. These points of geographical location of the residues and remnants help us to build a cartography of the ruins and the memories of certain materialities.

 

Several types of image clippings with different functions helped and provided an opportunity for this research, such as, for example, images of the ruins and constructions of the waterfront in the context of Olinda's modernization and the phenomenon of the advancing sea (present in the Public Archive's collection), which are added to the photographs produced about today's landscapes of this same waterfront and the record of an impressive collection of pieces found in this same beachfront territory, by researcher Ted Grainer.

 

Culture gives meaning to aesthetic meanings and the photographic archives are, without a doubt, an orientation and option for this intention.