Paper Short Abstract:

A research practice that focuses on continuing collaborations with research participants beyond the fieldwork experience not only responds to ethical and decolonial concerns, but also proves fruitful for the construction of knowledge for both researchers and participants.

Paper Abstract:

This paper examines how the conceptualisation of a visual archive emerged from the practice of co-construction of knowledge. In 2021, I invited a Peruvian research participant to a dissemination and restitution event in Switzerland, where she made effective use of what I conceive of as a visual archive. As an introduction to a silkscreen print workshop, she was invited to provide for European academics, she displayed digital photographs of wheat-pasted posters on walls, lampposts and garbage bins in the streets of Lima. Referring to these public interventions as acts of resistance, she commented on the images by chronicling the political events that have motivated the creation and pasting of the posters. Through her presentation, it became clear that what the research participant exhibited was a vessel for collective memory, which she effectively used to narrate a shared history of protest.

The construction of a visual archive was part of Limeñian female cultural worker’s collective efforts to record and document their political activism of posting graphics, stencils, and prints in public space. Thinking of these records and private collections of images as a visual archive allows for their recognition “as potential resources and repositories for unofficial histories” (Lee 2020:180).

The paper outlines how this argument grew out of following discussions that reflected the experience and nurtured our respective reflections on theory and practice. Creating research dissemination and communication events with research participants proved fruitful for both researcher and participants.