A third exercise proposed creating a sequential narrative with all the images: they had to form a timeline on the floor with a beginning and an end, but the shape was free. The sequence could be lineal, fragmented, chronological, dispersed, reasoned or none of these. Again, the team used their previous knowledge and experience of working with visual multimedia materials, in some cases, or their previous historical knowledge, in others.  Different roles and modes of participation developed.


The narrative that emerged through the consensus of the team was a fictional recreation or construction – but based on reality – where one could find street children, a guerrilla hero, teachers demanding their rights as well as researchers. Other elements, especially those of a  more abstract nature, were allowed to play other roles: a photo cut in thin stripes and woven became the way media distort facts; another photograph cut by hand in many pieces, a crisis. As a result of the contributions of many voices, there developed a story of self-organization, of cycles filled with crises and the expansion and retreat of social protests.  A spiral tale that returns to the beginning at a different plane of the history of self-organization in general and of this story in particular.

The available materials were completely used up in the narrative. There was a moment, however, when one of the participants separated all the photographs in which members of the team could be seen during the first workshop. This was not noticed by the group practically until the end of the exercise.  They then said:
 

We take this as a clue to analyze how the team of researchers (that is how they define themselves) are involved in the narrative. It is pertinent to ask about the effect of taking their own photographed bodies out of the plane of production and if there were difficulties to integrate these images again. As researcher-participants in these workshops, this sequence “lit up” for us and we understand then that the link researcher-object is attractive for us to continue our inquiries.  In this sense, our artistic practices may seem to facilitate these journeys: they integrate multiple planes of thought and link spaces, forms and bodies.

Remember, commemorate, testify.  Resist.
The purpose of the two workshops was to reflect on some of the characteristics of self-organization as a socio-historical process. However, working from the materiality of the images and other media that participants shared allowed an exercise of collective memory that also became, in a way, a commemoration and an act of testifying.
 

Alena Alexandrova (2014) critically examines Henri Lefebvre´s “The Missing Pieces”, a list containing poems, buildings, symphonies, works of art that are no longer in the world (and for which only remains the record that they once existed).  She describes it as an anarchic list without territorial or temporal context, but revealing what is not in it – the “saturated absences”. The work our group undertook during the first workshop can be described also as a list, where paths and narratives emerge allowing elements to be recovered and revealing those missing pieces still to be found. The empty space between images becomes a metaphor for those other invisible stories. 

During the second workshop, those spaces became saturated with images echoing the first one. Images of the group working during the first session (taken out of the video as still frames and printed on paper) were included and allowed increased connections between several of these: when we see those images we find ourselves in them; we think about ourselves and rethink our history and our present.

The construction of collective memory doesn’t amble down an easy path. As Walker (2017) claims in her work on the events of 11 September 2001 in the USA, personal memories are built over a collective memory already established of the events and in contrast with a great display in literature, the arts and theory produced in response to that which occurred. Although it’s not possible to create a total memory without falling into an eternal present where the horizon of culture is to just revive the past (Alexandrova, 2014), the exercise of memory must constitute a collective, conscious and reiterated action to stop history making it disappear. For Young (1999), the process of commemoration must remain incomplete to guarantee the life of memory: commemoration becomes a process and not an answer, a place where there is time for commemorative, contemplative reflection and learning. Similarly, these commemorative processes lay in direct dialogue with the possibility of building/re-building memory and, in case of traumatic events, re-signifying historical memory found in official or popular discourses.  A process of conscience-raising – of conscientious action - is necessary, however, to turn those new learning events into a materiality that can be apprehended and then shared. It is in this sharing and communicating to others that memory and commemoration may play a role to enact change. These acts where a person becomes a witness, where they testify, defy regimes of representation and create multiple spatial imaginaries (Cambre, 2014) where that given or accepted-as-truth until that very moment, can be questioned. This “embodied seeing” (embodied gaze) - becoming aware of something and acting upon it - transforms the onlooker into a witness. The witness becomes proof themselves of the evidence: what is outside becomes part of them – one becomes a witness by carrying the weight of the testimony - that is by bearing witness (Cambre, 2015).

The methodology used during the two sessions encouraged the opening of physical and temporal spaces for the contemplation of what was exhibited, written, and spoken (that is, embodied). Memory took place in the encounter between the participant, the canvas and the mind/heart/conscience of the observers, and by multiplying those interactions in unanticipated and unexpected ways. During the workshops there was room for commemoration and remembrance and participants also became witnesses and embodied their seeing to give new meaning to the images that they worked with. The space of creation became then a space for resisting the way things are or the truth as it is framed. It was in the interaction that participants constructed alternative narratives and were able to articulate emerging discursive (and distinct) possibilities.  These artistic processes are in themselves counter-hegemonic and subversive because they question the notion of a single discourse, way of seeing, historical narrative or memory.
 
Some methodological considerations
In closing we identify three aspects that we consider key if this methodology were to be recreated somewhere else. The first one relates to context and research; the second one, to the way in which voice and action needs to be distributed equally amongst participants; the third and final one is about the way in which audiovisual records may support an analytical perspective afterwards.

When facing work of this nature, the team, whether teachers or researchers, must keep in mind the local historical context and the type of representations about these stories/histories that are regularly reproduced in the media and institutions, as well as the existence of alternative narratives.

The challenge is to disentangle those narratives through connecting and juxtaposing images in a process of collective creation.  Given that no image is better than any other one, each may open an interaction with participants that can not be foreseen.  This fact allows for a “leveling” process that puts the images and the team in parity with each other: participants are positioned in parity in regards to their perspective on any image, creating an even field of exchange as a starting point. Each opinion counts. No one´s response is better than anyone else's and questions can be posed equally in regards to any piece.

However, in order to be able to identify how these processes take place, and be able to trace the exchange that emerges amongst participants, the images and other media, we need a record. Making an audiovisual record provided a document through which participants could revisit their work together. Coordinators were also able to look at what happened in order to later analyze key points.

During our second workshop, a third person – that is, someone who was not a coordinator or participant – was in charge of recording with two hand-held cameras. There was also a zenithal camera to record the making of the collective collage.  These elements were essential at the time of analyzing gestures, narratives and discussions taking place during the day.

Final reflections
At the beginning of our writing, we posed an implicit question about the relationship between bodies, images and words, and we hypothesized that this encounter goes further than others that use lines of reasoning as the only type of exchange.

Even though there have been recent experiences of work with images in Argentina [5], the methodology used during these workshops could represent a novelty in two ways: on the one hand, working with a set of multiple images and interviewees at the same time, and on the other, obtaining a set of information that arises from the process of collective construction that we consider interesting to analyze. The sequence of distinct voices and discourses, their relation and mutual affectation, finish by creating a collective narrative that is more than the sum of its parts.  At the same time, encouraging the interviewees to “play” with the images and to link them spatially allows more active and deeper channels of association, as well as engaging the group with the material perceived as a totality.

In this multiple process the researchers also create, observe, observe themselves and interact among themselves and with the materials. They thus become witnesses-actors in their own production, allowing the heuristic to emerge from the material itself because it generates (at the same time as the work) a live and involved space of analysis.

The actions that make up this process of creation-research can be analyzed, as well, from the point of view of the performance, given that those present have the possibility of making a conscious record of their own actions in a space that can be perceived as a mis-en-scène.  The methodology we used allows bodies, actions, spaces and speaking to disentangle meanings that could be exhausted or end up as a dead-end street if we only had engaged with reasoning.  It is from playing-action with the images that other discourses can be embodied and promote new ways of researching.

It is in this sense that we define research as a process of learning with the explicit intention of remarking that exchange, or more precisely collective action, not only predisposes but also forces inter-disciplinary teams to put on the table the most basic ways in which they approach their disciplines.  Learning is, in this sense, renouncing the power that a specific knowledge of each field may provide.  Our place in a micro-world that exercises a mandate on the use of the word collapses when faced with the perspective of a healthier horizon: deepening our disciplines means opening them up to a field of relations from which to re-define them (Cosachov & Scolnik, 2008).

Breaking down frontiers between disciplines is for us, as a team, a challenge to the way we see our own practice. In this sense, the canvas, the glued papers, the room, the time each action takes, the intervals contained in words and gestures, they all make up a complex map in which the form-time and form-space open up and connect in all directions. There is no order or border with enough permanence to frame discourses, nor central or predominant perspective when faced with a multiplicity of gazes and voices that meet, and where both are given equal value and the possibility of being heard.

Equally, bodies as frames or borders are transformed like discourses into witnesses of other bodies and words that preceded them – these witnesses are able to think and act over the motivations that gave way to acts of resistance during the recent past. These bodies, together as a collective organism in motion, took the challenge to think about self-organization through recent history and about themselves as body-resistant to the actions of the State in cases of human rights violations and the politics of oppression.  During the workshops, the production of a group working in parity lit up the recovery of memory as a collective, active, creative process, in constant growth.

In this sense we recognize Art – and its processes – as a subversive tool, which in essence defies the given order and makes evident that which is not allowed or is outside the norm.