Archival Visitations

5:00 pm - 6:30 pm | Panel

With speakers Camila Salcedo, Jorge Ayala-Isaza, and Kevin Coleman.

Moderated by Patricio Dávila.

Are archives the detritus of historical processes? Are they evidence of official narratives or, contrarily, their liabilities? Who chooses which material traces linger in time, where they are preserved, and with whom they are shared? Camila Salcedo’s interdisciplinary practice, in particular her work with the Textile Museum and the Gardiner Museum’s collections, approaches material objects, sometimes fragmented and incomplete, as starting points for speculative futures. In his ongoing work with UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register, Jorge Ayala-Isaza seeks to entangle canonic history and proposes creative approximations to repositories of history. Kevin Coleman’s investment in a photographic representation of victims of the 1928 Massacre of Banana Workers in Colombia ponders on the corporate techniques of erasure, and possible revindications of overlooked histories.

With the moderation of Patricio Dávila, the participants will speculate on how, by working with fragments of material history and moving along the interstices of historical voids, alternative readings of the past can be drafted, and less predictable forecasts of the future can be speculated upon.

The conversation will run for approximately 60 minutes, followed by 30 minutes for Q&A.

This event is free and open to the public. Please register in advance.

About the speakers

Camila Salcedo is a Venezuelan-born interdisciplinary artist currently based in Toronto working primarily in textiles, arts education and curation. Their most recent curatorial endeavour is a current project called Mending the Museum alongside art historian and writer Karina Román, through which they are commissioning ten artists to respond digitally to the idea of “fragments” from the Textile Museum and Gardiner Museum’s archives. Other recent curatorial projects include listening and making: a (Zoom) call and response (2022) at the Textile Museum of Canada, Subtle Technology’s Curatorial Mentorship (2022), Vtape Curatorial Incubator: V16 “Living in Hope” (2020), Memorial: Work by Artists of the Venezuelan Diaspora (2020) at Xpace Cultural Centre and The Khyber Centre for the Arts. They also curated a number of exhibitions and programming in Halifax at the Anna Leonowens Gallery and Eyelevel Artist-Run Centre between 2016-2018.

Jorge Ayala-Isaza is a media artist and scholar. His creative practice explores archival and historical research to create documentary films, photography, installations and Mixed Reality projects that explore memory, identity, and resistance issues.

Jorge is currently a Media and Design Ph.D. student at Toronto Metropolitan University, researching new approaches to data narratives. He holds a Master’s degree in Documentary Media and a Bachelor’s in New Media from Ryerson University (Canada). He has also studied at the Hochschule der Medien in Stuttgart (Germany) and interned at the Cinematheque of Cuba (Havana). He’s based in Toronto (Canada) and works as a freelance interactive media programmer and producer. 

Kevin Coleman (Ph.D. History, Indiana University, 2012) is Associate Professor of History at the University of Toronto, where he conducts research and teaches on capitalism, visual culture, and the politics of Christianity in modern Latin America. He is the author of A Camera in the Garden of Eden (2016), a study of the spectacle and practice of citizenship in the banana plantations of Honduras. He is co-editor of the books Capitalism and the Camera (Verso: 2021), which brings leading theorists of photography together in disagreement over the status of the photograph in our era, and Coups d’état in Cold War Latin America (Cambridge University Press: forthcoming), as well as special issues of the Radical History Review and Photography and Culture. He is lead investigator on the SSHRC-funded Visualizing the Americas project and director of the documentary film The Photos We Don’t Get to See (2023). He has penned three peer-reviewed manuscripts on the life and historical memory of the slain archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Romero. His research has been funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Fulbright-Hays Program. 

About the moderator

Patricio Dávila is a designer, artist, researcher and educator. He is Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Arts in the School of the Arts, Media, Performance and Design, at York University. He is also core member of the Vision: Science to Applications (VISTA) project at York University. Patricio is also co-director of Public Visualization Lab (PVL). PVL is a networked lab (York U, OCADU, Ryerson U) and focusses on how visualization can operate as a critical design and media practice. A priority for the lab is to understand the ways that the representation of data is political as well as analytical, designerly and creative. A basic premise that guides PVL’s projects is that visualization is an assemblage that arranges people, things and processes and as such demands a commitment to ethics, accountability and meaningful participation.

Patricio’s research and practice focuses on the politics and aesthetics of participation in the visualization of spatial issues with a specific focus on urban experiences, mobile technologies and large-scale interactive public installations. His research focuses on developing a theoretical framework for examining data visualization as assemblages of subjectivation and power. In his creative practice he has created mobile applications, locative media projects, essay videos, new media installations, and participatory community projects including: Shadows!, Powers of Kin, Chthuluscene, Tent City Projections, The Line, and In The Air Tonight. His research and practice also includes curatorial projects such as Multiplex Essay Film Festival and the Diagrams of Power exhibition, research events and book published by Onomatopee Projects (NL).

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of our funders, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Department of Canadian Heritage.

LAMAS has been generously supported by the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Migration and Integration Program (CERC Migration) and the WhereWeStand Project at Toronto Metropolitan University; the George Brown School of Media and Performing Arts; The Creative School at Toronto Metropolitan University; the Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University; Hemispheric Encounters; Sensorium: Centre for Digital Arts and Technology, School of the Arts, Media, Performance, and Design at York University; Performance Studies (Canada); OCAD University; Onsite Gallery; the University of Toronto Centre for Culture and Technology; the Latin American Studies Program at the University of Toronto; the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean (CERLAC) at York University; and Lokaal.