Archive in the Water

When artists look to the archive for material, often the impulse begins self-referentially. If only the past could tell us something about ourselves—could draw connections, unsevered if sometimes hidden, to something removed only by temporal but not spiritual distance. If only the past could speak our language back to us.

It’s a fool’s errand. Archives, like the past they purport to capture, are unstable. Anything that might be made to speak through us, to speak only by reference to us, is itself indelibly tainted by the present order. The past recedes from us, changes its color, its texture with the years. Archives are always incomplete: even if they survive war or obsolescence, the missing persons and pieces that might have given them meaning often have not. The present attempts, impossibly, to fill the gaps.

The work of Colombian artist Oscar Muñoz—whose retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (MAMBO) in Bogotá, Colombia ended in October—approaches the archive differently. Rather than attempting to refashion the fragmented and incomplete past into a present whole, Muñoz leans into the ephemerality and unknowability of the past, and uses that very ephemerality as the basis of his work.

Born in central Colombia in 1951, Muñoz has been one of the country’s most widely known artists for decades. He has long been preoccupied with memory and complex social processes in his native country, including decades-long armed conflict, mass displacement, rapid urbanization, neocolonialism, and the ravages of racial capitalism—though his ways of approaching this material have changed significantly over the years. In Inquilinatos (tenements, 1971–1979), his first major series, Muñoz made charcoal drawings of the poor farmers who had taken up residence in the mansions of his native city Cali, abandoned by their wealthy owners during an urban building boom. The compositions are photographic (the drawings, it seems, were based on Muñoz’s own photographs), and they teeter on the edge of photorealism. But where other artists have realized the photorealist impulse as hyperrealism, Muñoz’s attention is as much on the “photo” as the “realism”—he uses charcoal to draw out the graininess and haziness of the image. An uncanniness emerges: ghosts populate the abandoned mansions, the bad conscience of the building boom haunts the remains. Though Muñoz soon began to work across mediums—photography, drawing, video, sculpture—he never abandoned this elegiac disposition or his uncanny approach to history.

The MAMBO exhibition, a major retrospective that spanned more than thirty years of creative production, drew its title from a term coined by Marcel Duchamp: the “infrathin.” According to the curatorial text, the neologism “refers to almost imperceptible transitions—the warmth left on a chair after someone gets up, or the fog on a mirror.” In Aliento (breath, 1995), one of the most arresting works on display, Muñoz almost literalizes the concept of the infrathin. Aliento invites viewers to exhale onto a series of mirrors, the fog of their breath revealing a small, anonymous obituary portrait which begins to fade as soon as it appears. The work is indicative of Muñoz’s oeuvre as a whole: it is as much about the attempt to recall a memory as it is about that attempt’s inevitable failure. The dead cannot come back, and if they do, they can only ever appear briefly, in an entirely new form.

The instability of water—its propensity to flow, to evaporate, to change from liquid to solid or vapor—provides ample ground for exploring the infrathin. This is precisely why Muñoz utilizes it in his work: exposing the photographic image to water in various states, Muñoz disrupts the solidity of the image and imbues it with something as evasive as memory. In the Narcisos series (Narcissus, 1994–ongoing), perhaps Muñoz’s most well-known work, the artist prints self-portraits onto a flat plane of water using a silkscreen and charcoal dust. The unstable liquid plane disturbs the forms set by the silkscreened photograph, distorting the image over time. Eventually, the image settles and dries onto paper at the bottom of the vessel. The resulting image speaks to the work of time: the face, so clear at the outset, becomes deformed and faded, bits of it have been lost forever. What remains is recognizable as Muñoz only because that detail is provided. There is an affinity with Gustav Metzger’s auto-destructive works, which were made from materials that devoured and erased themselves over time. But where Metzger’s works disappeared entirely, Muñoz allows the image to remain as a memory of itself.

Elsewhere, Muñoz works with more finality. In the video Cíclope (cyclops, 2011), he places black-and-white photographs—largely portraits of unidentified people from unnamed sources—into a pool of swirling water. The water instantly dissolves the pigments from the paper, and the process is repeated until the previously clear water runs black with ink, and the portraits are completely erased. The video formed a part of an otherwise conceptually uncompelling room thematizing the ways in which the mass adoption of smartphones and the advent of social media threaten to erode our capacity for memory altogether. The works in this gallery were marred by an excessively literal treatment of the subject (burned pages of Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, for example). To be certain, the technological and social processes that Muñoz highlights have dealt perhaps irreparable blows to our capacity for memory and our conception of time, but Muñoz’s focus is too narrow. Everything has lost its texture and become smooth, become data, yes, but not as a result of discrete pieces of hardware or software.

Rather, this is a consequence of capitalism itself, in which all things are reduced to equivalencies. The smartphone represents an amplification of this process, not its origin. Postmodernism, as Jameson argued, was not just a particular style, but more “a periodizing concept” that referred to certain formal and aesthetic features stemming from the “emergence of a new type of social life and a new economic order”—namely, consumer society or the society of the spectacle (my preferred terms from Jameson’s list).1 Life became increasingly mediated through images over the course of the twentieth century, and has ultimately become an image of itself: what was once lived directly is now experienced secondhand, as if through a screen. There are clear correlates with photographic ways of seeing, in which “having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it,” as Sontag put it.2 But the camera, like the smartphone, emerged within a social context that had already begun this process of abstraction—specifically, the transmutation of life itself into abstract labor, and incommensurable difference made identical through economic rationality. The dirty black water expelled during the process documented in Cíclope is commodity society itself: so many qualitative differences dissolved into an ever-circling mass—more or less, but never something else.

In contrast, in Muñoz’s non-liquid works he seems interested in restoring some semblance of identity to what has been lost to time. But even on more solid ground, identity is neither individual nor stable. Rather, Muñoz uses anonymous figures found across various archives to provide some texture to the past, all while preserving the sense of loss and incompleteness that history inevitably entails. In 4x3 (2013–2017), for instance, Muñoz assembles a collection of 4x3 passport photographs taken in Cali. There are no people to see here, however. They have been excised from the frame, the photographs cropped to conform precisely to officially prescribed dimensions. All that remains are the photographs’ edges, each containing traces of the sitter and the room: a bit of color from the backdrop, a lock of hair, the edge of a tie.

In Archivo por contacto (archive by contact, 2007), Muñoz plumbed the enormous archive of “Instantáneas Panamericanas,” a collection of photographs made in Colombia between the 1940s and late 1970s by “fotocienros,” people who stood in crowded areas, took photos of passersby, and then sold them vouchers to redeem prints at a later date. Muñoz picked through the photographs, focusing on the Ortiz Bridge in Cali, assembling selections in a quasi-scrapbook format. Doubles appear: An image of a wealthy couple mid-stride, dressed in semi-formalwear, first facing to the left, then the right. In another, a man crouches for a posed shot with his infant son; in the adjacent photograph, someone, perhaps the same man, poses in almost the same manner, now in different clothes. One gets the sense that Muñoz is making a taxonomy, an attempt to identify types in order to construct a composite social image. And indeed, the images, like those in 4x3, do make suggestions about the class and gender politics of the time and place, but both fail to tell us anything about the individuals depicted (either directly or, in the case of 4x3, apophatically).

The photographs in Archivo por contacto do not catalogue an event; they constitute it. There is thus a dual aspect to their documentary nature, or their claim to truth: On the one hand, street photography attests that, following Barthes, “that has been.”3 However, the truth of “that” is that it was barely there, a fleeting moment—again, the infrathin—in the infinitude of time that is given meaning only within the economy of images created by the production and circulation of so many similar images. The street photograph derives its meaning not from its specificity but from its generality, from the ways in which it remains subsumed under a kind of imagined whole even as it has been singled out. The focus on the anonymous individual in the archival images does nothing to constitute their identity, instead it anonymizes them further—symbols belong to everyone and to no one. These people, lost to the flow of time even as they give it texture, heighten the melancholy sting of the exhibition—they were anonymous then, and here too: representation is not resurrection.

This is also true in Muñoz’s liquid works. People are recalled as images, already an abstraction, only to be lost again. Their reappearance is not a matter of individuation: in Aliento, for instance, the image no longer references the person, but only the process by which they were lost. In Muñoz’s intense focus on innovative printing processes, a materialist art emerges. In 1967, John Berger ascribed the waning importance of painted portraiture in part to the camera but, more so, to our growing understanding of the ways in which the individual is socially mediated: “We can no longer accept that the identity of a man can be adequately established by preserving and fixing what he looks like from a single viewpoint in one place,” he writes. “To concentrate upon ‘likeness’ is to isolate falsely. It is to assume that the outermost surface contains the man or object: whereas we are highly conscious of the fact that nothing can contain itself.”4 This is true of the individual, and it is equally true of the image as well: neither is a self-contained unity, rather, they are the intersection of myriad, ever-shifting lines of development. The missing persons in 4x3 or the anonymous figures in Archivo por contacto become visible—i.e., noticeable, retrieved from the junk pile of history—only to the extent that they are made to stand in for the social whole, which itself only becomes visible in their guise. Muñoz’s work attempts to move beyond mere appearance and to expose and make legible this dialectic.

While most of the individual works on display contain some element of loss or incompleteness at their core, each speaks apophatically to Colombian history itself. Never explicitly mentioned (out of political or aesthetic concerns, I’m not sure), but always lurking in the background, is Colombia’s decades-long, complex armed conflict, which has involved right-wing Colombian governments (current president Gustavo Petro is the first left-wing president in the country’s history) and paramilitary forces (at some points with support from the US and other anti-communist governments), left-wing guerrillas (at some points with support from some left-wing governments and global anti-systemic movements) and narco-traffickers.

Beginning in the early 1960s (though its origins stretch back to imperial exploitation by the US via the United Fruit Company) and continuing at varying degrees of intensity until today, the conflict has claimed the lives of over 450,000 people and displaced and wounded significantly more. In The Rest is History (2025), which covered an entire wall of the largest room in the exhibition space, Muñoz presents a vast array of silkscreen prints of images lifted from Colombian history and popular culture (I don’t know whether the images would be immediately recognizable to a Colombian, but as a US American, I was adrift). The prints are created with carbon powder, and each is blurry, almost charred, rumpled, and covered, it seems, with soot and ash. The effect is similar to Muñoz’s Inquilinatos—the images teeter uncannily between photograph and drawing in a twilight haze. The images are difficult to make out: what may be an otherwise mundane or innocuous image of a crowd is transformed into a monument to violence by virtue of the unmistakable suggestion of fire. History is one great holocaust—the work sees within the archive of popular culture the violence which it obscures, the violence at its origin, the violence which it sustains. The intent is not to give the archive life but to make it confess.

A few days after returning from Bogotá to New York, I read an article about a recent search for human remains in Colombia’s San Antonio estuary. The remains, locals believe, belong to people murdered during the country’s internal conflict, their corpses dumped into the water by their killers. The search is part of a broader effort by the government’s Search Unit for Persons Reported Missing to account for the over 120,000 people disappeared during the conflict. The water is murky and dark, and the estuary tides are strong and difficult to navigate. There’s an archive in the water; no bodies were found.

1 Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in The Cultural Turn. Selected Writings on the Postmodern 1983–1998 (Verso, 1998), 3.

2 Susan Sontag, On Photography (Rosetta Books, 2005), 18.

3 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (Vintage Books, 2000), 115.

4 John Berger, “No More Portraits,” in Landscapes: John Berger on Art (Verso, 2016), 170.

Jake Romm is a New York based writer and the associate editor of Protean Magazine. He can be reached on Twitter at @jake_romm.

Installation images: Juan Yaruro. Courtesy of the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá – MAMBO.