Poetics of Archive as Urban Practices: Three Research Gestures in the Archive of the Photo-Documentation Laboratory Sylvio de Vasconcellos

Abstract

This article presents three research gestures (enlarging, dismantling and diverting) undertaken at the photographic archive of the Sylvio de Vasconcellos Photo-Documentation Laboratory, in order to highlight aspects that have established a field of debate regarding city, technique and everyday life. This was engaged upon with sources from the Photo-Documentation Service in the School of Architecture at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, chiefly from the years 1954 to 1964. The research gestures, as poetics, experimented with ways of “making the archive speak”. They also provoked sounds when they brought into discussion the ordinary life captured through photography, and the implications of this technical mediation in the practice of the city and in constructing representations and discourses. By penetrating the devices of the patrimonial archive and focusing on the historical plot surrounding the vernacular, these gestures have glimpsed critical updates of what was discarded, and are also urban practices to the extent that they establish other ways with which to see the city (or un-see it, in the terms of Manoel de Barros and Rita Velloso).