Step by Step, from Word of Mouth Archival Driftage/the Archive Adrift in Freisy González Portales and Diana Rangel Lampe’s Migrant Memories

Abstract

One of the most notable changes in visual culture around contemporary mass migrations is perceived in the gestation of a self-representational and transmedial memory. The reinterpretation of the national and personal archive, the incorporation of oral testimonies, and other forms of communication that move from orality to dialogue, are part of the discursive strategies through which the Venezuelan photographers Freisy González Portales and Diana Rangel Lampe investigate from their own migration experience and that of other Venezuelan migrants. In this essay I address these elements as evidence of the permeability between the personal and the collective, and in particular in connection with the practice of drift. I argue that it is an aesthetic strategy that subverts the protocols of the visual regime in search of another oblique, displaced and transitional language, to make sense of the still incommensurable migratory experience. A drift that opens or expands the sensory limits of the photographic archive as a sonorous chronotope of migrant memory towards a possible listening to the collective wound that step by step, from word of mouth, is mobilized transnationally.