UDP Internacional

3 July 2023

“Every archive is a posthumous device. Its activation is perpetrated regardless of the life of its author. Archiving is a bit like dying, despite the fact that whoever is archived continues to live. This book, however, goes in the opposite direction. He approaches the idea that the file exceeds its funerary condition ”.

Thus begins the book Writing After Dying, a text by the prominent writer and academic at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS), Javier Guerrero, who, on Thursday, June 29, spoke with the student body regarding this publication.

This activity was carried out at the Nicanor Parra Library, within the framework of the Princeton-UDP Global Seminar that will take place until August of this year at the University. The meeting also included the participation of the academic from the Faculty of Communication and Letters, Cecilia García Huidobro and the writer Andrea Jeftanovic.

“This book is unclassifiable, it mixes different genres, it opens your mind in some way”, Huidobro commented during the dialogue. For her part, the author of Do not accept candy referred to her relationship with the archives and shared the work that she carried out around the archive of the playwright Isidora Aguirre.

“Archives are disputed territory,” the writer pointed out and indicated that, on many occasions, the process of their valorization is stressed by the wishes of the artist and the interests of the relatives who guard said assets. There, a new narrative is built and questions arise about how the archives are organized and which aspects pass into the public space and which do not.

For his part, the writer Javier Guerrero told how his interest in studying the archives arose and commented that his work does not seek to overcome the accidents that can occur at the eaves of the study of these materialities: “I do not try to correct the archive, but rather try to understand what is the staging that exists there”, he said.

In Writing After Dying, Guerrero analyzes the archives of Reinaldo Arenas, Delmira Agustini, Pedro Lemebel and Paz Errázuriz, among others. “Here the archive is not synonymous with canon, corpus or collective memory. Unlike this, in this book the archive is always a repository framed in space and time, by a consignment and belonging condition”, writes the researcher in the text.

During the development of the Princeton-UDP Global Seminar, different activities will be carried out, which will be framed within the theme “Art and politics in the transition to democracy in Chile”. It highlights a film cycle and various conversations with prominent Latin American intellectuals. Even during its development, the collective Las Tesis will carry out an activity together with the feminist writer Rita Segato.