A Reserve of Light Photography Ethnography and Lucid Memory in Contemporary Chile By Cristobal Bonelli

https://www.academia.edu/168629313/A_Reserve_of_Light_Photography_Ethnography_and_Lucid_Memory_in_Contemporary_Chile?email_work_card=title This article takes shape as a shared inquiry between an ethnographer and a photographer, in continuity with the photographic archive of Luis Poirot. Through sustained encounters with hisimages and archival practices, the text does not position itself outside the archive that motivatesit, but unfoldsfrom within it. At its centeris what Poirot callslucid memory.It is not a theoretical category, but a fragile and demanding practice of persistence. Through it, photographic materials and the relations that sustain them illuminate a dark zone of history, not by restoring order or chronology, but by allowing presences to persist, return, or even resist appearance within an anarchic temporal register. Photography, ethnography, and writing are approached here as practices that remain internally related, extending one anotherthrough shared exposure and material persistence. The archive does not appear as a sequence of past momentsto be contextualized orinterpreted, but as a stratigraphy of presences, where different historical textures remain active, sedimented, and unevenly available. Situated within Chile’s unfinished political history, this relational archive foregrounds lucid memory as a sustained and demanding coexistence of presences that resist chronological ordering and erasure. ...