A GUIDE FOR PRACTICING DISOBEDIENCE
Disobedience Archive is a video archive project in constant transformation, linking artistic practices and political action. At the Venice Biennale exhibition, it takes the form of The Zoentrope, a pre-cinematographic machine that gives life to a space that generates new perspectives.
Presented in different countries since 2005, Disobedience Archive mutates, renews cycles, adopts new forms. On the occasion of the Venice Biennale exhibition, it is incorporated into The Zoetrope, a pre-filmic machine with the ability to animate images, and presents two sections that include forty films: Activism in the Diaspora and Gender Disobedience. This is a project by Marco Scotini, created with Arnols Braho, Andris Brinkmanis and Lilia Di Bella.
The archive as a whole is understood as a field in dispute, with diverse voices sharing the same cadence. Disobedience Archive has a rhythm, an open score with tensions and resistances that invites reflection on the ways in which collective memories are organized. The way they operate, always in dispute, always unfinished.
Resignifying disobedience, in this context, may imply resisting the idea of the archive as a record that does not admit questioning. Disobedience is proposed as an active methodology to complexify our way of understanding the past and, also, the mechanisms through which we build the present.
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Disobedience Archive – Marco Scotini. Photo: Marco Zorzanello. Courtesy: La Biennale di Venezia
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Disobedience Archive – Marco Scotini. Photo: Marco Zorzanello. Courtesy: La Biennale di Venezia
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Disobedience Archive – Marco Scotini. Photo: Marco Zorzanello. Courtesy: La Biennale di Venezia
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Disobedience Archive – Marco Scotini. Photo: Marco Zorzanello. Courtesy: La Biennale di Venezia
Seba Calfuqueo's work, You will Never Be a Weye, delves into the ancestral Mapuche culture and the figure of the Machi Weyes, non-binary spiritual and gender identities that were banished during colonization. In his video performance he recovers this identity, where he pays homage to his ancestors and denounces the colonial violence that tried to erase them from history. Carlos Motta's Nefandus also investigates, as a "historian of forgotten narratives", the repression of indigenous sexuality during the colonial period.
In turn, María Galindo and the Mujeres Creando collective, with her work Revolución Puta (Whore Revolution), brings a radical cinematographic language, where she gives voice to sex workers in Bolivia. Disobedience becomes an act of creation, a different way of inhabiting the world.
Pedro Lembel's work is configured within post-dictatorial Chile. In the archive, his work highlights how queer identity and dissident bodies defy imposed norms, creating a parallel memory that subverts historical obedience. At the Disobedience Archive, the artist underscores the importance of resisting the invisibilization of marginalized lives, rescuing histories that would otherwise be forgotten.
In that way, Disobedience Archive proposes obedience not only as a rejection of power, but also as an active practice of rewriting and proposition.
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