Entrevista a Ludmila da Silva Catela. Poner el cuerpo en el archivo: memoria, derechos humanos y descolonización

Abstract

As part of an international seminar on archives, memory, and human rights, organized by the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Pontifical Javeriana University (Bogotá), Professor Ludmila da Silva Catela was interviewed. The interview took place the day after Professor da Silva Catela gave a public lecture to Colombian researchers and archivists, in which she presented the results of more than two decades of work with archives related to repression in Argentina and Brazil.

Professor Ludmila da Silva Catela is a social anthropologist and a graduate of the National University of Rosario (Argentina). She earned her master's degree from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and her doctorate from the National Museum of Anthropology in Brazil. She was director of the Provincial Archive of Memory of Córdoba (Argentina) from 2006 to 2015, a position from which she led the recovery, digitization, and public opening of documentary collections from the Argentine repressive system, including the so-called Registry of Extremists (Provincial Archive of Memory of Córdoba)—more than 150,000 photographic negatives from the provincial police—archives of books banned during the dictatorship, and documentation from police stations, the prison system, public hospitals, and businesses. She has taught in the Master's Program in History and Memory at the National University of La Plata since its founding and is a researcher at CONICET (National Scientific and Technical Research Council). Her publications include works on memory, political repression, identity, and archives in the Southern Cone.

Her reflections are part of a trajectory that combines ethnographic research, the management of public policies on memory, and human rights activism. This combination—which she calls "putting one's body on the line"—is one of the central themes of this interview. Professor da Silva Catela doesn't speak about archives from the outside, but from within concrete experiences of document recovery, institutional negotiation, and community restitution.

The following text comprises edited excerpts in which Professor da Silva Catela presents reflections on the archive as a political subject, the ethical and methodological challenges of working with repressive documents, the tension between national and provincial archives, scale as a condition for memory work, and the need to decolonize dominant notions of archives. Throughout the dialogue, questions also emerge about the relationship between the State's duty to maintain archives and citizens' right to them, about the use of DNA as a tool for identity and struggle, and about the place in Latin American memory of victims who were also political actors.