{"id":297592,"date":"2024-03-05T19:44:40","date_gmt":"2024-03-06T00:44:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/en\/?p=297592"},"modified":"2024-03-05T19:44:40","modified_gmt":"2024-03-06T00:44:40","slug":"an-archive-is-not-only-custody","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/en\/cuba\/science-cuba\/cuban-environment\/an-archive-is-not-only-custody\/","title":{"rendered":"An archive is not (only) custody"},"content":{"rendered":"

These photographs are notes in a process that does not end. The beginning was Ana and Mabel\u2019s hands on the yellowed pages of the <\/span>Verde Olivo<\/span><\/i> magazine with interviews with soldiers returning to Cuba after long years in Angola.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAs much information as possible must be given to locate an image. Because maybe the name is not there, but the place or date appears: \u2018he was in the Kifandongo battle,\u2019 or \u2018it was in November 1975.\u2019\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

I was in the Archive of <\/span>Verde Olivo<\/span><\/i> magazine, the official organ of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, filming part of its photographic collection for the documentary <\/span>D\u00edas de diciembre<\/span><\/i>, about our memory around the war in Africa, about the imprint of an era. Ana and Mabel told me about the structures of the archive that stored these images; but the gesture of their hands was different from order and logic. A gesture of affection. For both of them, in the faces of the soldiers, in the sadness of the relatives before the funeral urns, they were also there, young and dressed in olive green. Their memory was inseparable from the \u201crepresentation of an era in the image.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n