Quem vê cara não vê ancestralidade: arquivos fotográficos e memórias insurgentes de Belo Horizonte

Abstract

Belo Horizonte, a planned city in the late nineteenth century, built on the ideology of modernity-colonialist, allied technical images to urbanism to create a visual normativity, produce invisibilities and naturalize the oppressive point of view present in a representative part of the official images found in its historical archives. In the clash undertaken with the public archives in the search for historical images of Belo Horizonte that tell known stories, but not filed in the institutions’ vaults, this thesis exercises and discusses the transit between knowledge and archives. Through the research with eight archives and two museums of public destination and the interlocution and collaboration of Isabel Casimira, Júlia Ferreira, Mana Coelho and Valéria Borges – research companions who generously shared their personal and community collections, their looks and knowledge – I elaborate the paths in the archives entitled Ambushes, Detours, Movements and Transposed images to discuss the hegemonic ways of seeing, the cosmovisions and the insurgent memories and imaginations. On, with, against and through photography, we collectively proposed a small collection of dissonant narratives and ways of life that intersect and enable us to imagine potential cities that transvisualize photography, the archive, the city and history.