Mirando Juntos: Activating the Archive

Aperture and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico (MAC) invite photographers, educators, community members, activists, and archivists to “Mirando Juntos: Activating the Archive,” a workshop considering the impact of the archive. Who decides what an archive contains? How can it speak to the past, present, and future? How does the context in which we see photographs change what they mean? Teaching artists Alice Proujansky and Christopher Gregory-Rivera will lead participants in this free workshop to decode and encode images from their own community, municipal, and personal archives. With a focus on the use of archives for photography, Aperture’s “Counter Histories” issue will contextualize the past, present, and future of the archived image and Gregory-Rivera’s exhibition on view at MAC will also provide a point of departure.

On Tuesday, July 15, at 7:00 pm ET, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico will host an artist talk between Proujansky and Gregory-Rivera, who will discuss their photobooks Hard Times are Fighting Times (2023) and El Gobierno Te Odia (2023), and how each artist activates the archive.

“Mirando Juntos: Activating the Archive” will be taught in Spanish and free to attend. Capacity is limited.

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Alice Proujansky is a photographer and quilter looking at family labor: birth, work, motherhood, and identity. Her photobook Hard Times are Fighting Times (2023) uses archival and documentary images to look at the legacy of radical activism in her family. It was shortlisted for a 2024 Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award and the Rencontres d’Arles Author’s Book Award and was selected for exhibition through Baxter St’s Mid-Career Artists Initiative. She is currently working on a photobook about culturally responsive birth work and a photography and quilting project about psychological formation and motherhood. Alice has taught photography since 2002, most currently with Aperture, who also published her book Go Photo! An Activity Book for Kids in 2016.

Christopher Gregory-Rivera is a Puerto Rican artist living between Madrid, Spain, and San Juan, Puerto Rico. His work is particularly interested in rescuing, deconstructing, and reconfiguring historic narratives through documentary, still lifes, and archival research to promote a better understanding of the present as well as imagined futures. His latest project, Las Carpetas, reimagines political memory in Puerto Rico by rescuing, photographing, and appropriating archives from a secret police division dedicated to political persecution in a US territory. His photobook El Gobierno Te Odia (The government hates you) won the First Photobook award at PhotoEspaña in 2024 and was shortlisted for both the Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards and Rencontres d’Arles in 2023. His work has been shown at institutions around the world, including at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, San Juan; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; the Abrons Arts Center, Smack Mellon, New York; and the Maine Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland.

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Image: Christopher Gregory-Rivera, from El Gobierno Te Odia, 2023 Courtesy Archivo General de Puerto Rico/Instituto de Cultura