Jose Alberto Vidal de Almeida, Festa do Avante! (Avante! Festival), Portugal 1979 original colour photograph

Jose Alberto Vidal de Almeida, Ana de Almeida, Dormitories of the ČVUT 1979 original black and white photograph

Jose Alberto Vidal de Almeida, First of May Parade II, Lisbon 1978 original colour photograph

Jose Alberto Vidal de Almeida, First of May Parade, Prague 1978 original colour photograph

Jose Alberto Vidal de Almeida/Ana de Almeida, Image Pair I (View on Prague from Strahov 1979 & Outskirts of Lisbon 1978) original black and white photographs, montage

Ana de Almeida

The Collective Archive                                           II

III.

METHODOLOGIES

If the first impression in the material substrate of the archive is already responsible for the desire towards the archive, the second moment that deals with the visual content of the photos, bridges a multiplicity of contexts between parallel timelines.

At a first glance, when focusing on the visual content represented in photos, we seem to be confronted with a limited number of contexts, in the specific case of my father’s archive I could easily enumerate three main represented sites: a majority of photos taken in Prague between 1978 and perhaps 1983 (taken mostly either at the technical university – ČVUT – campus, photos taken at the sites related with the students’ academic and political life or at official celebrations promoted by the communist government like the Spartakiad[5] or the celebrations of the 1^st of May and a small group of photos of the non collective personal life); the photos taken on intermediary periods in Portugal that covered mostly political rallies, official celebrations of the 1^st of May and events organized by the Portuguese Communist Party; and a set of photos taken during a InterRail trip in 1982. However, the contexts portrayed through the photographic substrate are not limited to themselves, through the activation of the archive they instead open to other contexts or, I would rather say, to an intercontextual system, as what the archive contains is not a multiplicity of contexts but rather the relations between them. The contexts portrayed in the pictures are nothing more than the trigger for a more complex and relational system of representation of time and space, like a cogwheel mechanism that presuppose the idea of activation.

The question that can be posed is the one of which contents are archived directly in the exterior substrate and which ones are being produced by the archive itself?

Yet because there is no clear and easy route by which to confront the self who observes, most professional observers develop defenses, namely, “methods”, that “reduce anxiety and enable us to function efficiently (Devereux as cited in Behar 6)

Any exercise of observation and posterior analysis requires a methodology. In this case a set of tools meant for us to be able to some extent to filter the contextual multiplicity of the archive.

Considering that there is a kind of mapping intention, one that accompanies a need of positioning myself towards the archive, and being that a first method, the one of diving into the archive through its surface, the material and external substrate, is already set in motion, the chosen methodology should be one that contemplates both the possibility of a multilayered universe and the notion of deepness. The appropriation of archaeological tools in general and of Harris Matrix in particular is linked to this very same idea of mapping and of recording the multiplicity of contexts that are acted upon as well as act upon the archive.

Archaeology not only contains the notion of the Arkhē as it a quest towards it. As a path towards a beginning that lays always under the next layer, it consists in the persuit of this very beginning through the raking up of marks, impressions and artifacts belonging to the material exhistence of the archive. As well as transversal artifacts, the archaeological method also contemplates the finding of impressions transversal to different layers of the archive.

The Harris matrix allows the recording of contexts in a stratigraphically excavated sequence. This kind of schematic analysis allows the recording of  a notion time through the establishment of a sequencial order of contexts, as well as the recording of the existence or non-existence of  physical connection points between different contexts.

An important notion brought by the use of this analytical method is Harris law of superposition which states that in a series of layers and interfacial features, as originally created, the upper units of stratification are younger and the lower are older, for each must have been deposited on, or created by the removal of, a pre-existing mass of archaeological stratification.(Harris13) This tool allows the conception of a possible time sequence for the establishment of the different positions that we will find while mapping the archive, as well as for the identification of temporal relations between different contexts.

Fig.1 – The archaeological stratification of the material substrate of the archive

The figure on the right side represents an appropriation of the visual language of an archeological excavation scheme. An excavation cannot start at any other place than at the surface. After the thinner and most superficial layer of the materiality of the exterior substrate of the archive, we reach the second most superficial layer, the one of the events, persons and objects portrayed in the photos – the layer of what we can see or the layer of what we are looking at, in the moment of the image production. This second layer makes partially part of the material substrate of the archive, but the contexts visually represented in the photos (personal and historical) open the door to broader narratives that surpass them. The stratum of the contents represented in the photos contains roughly an account of two different contexts (2 and 3): a broader pre-revolutionary period in Czechoslovakia (most of the photos are taken in Prague and around the Czech territory but there are also some pictures taken, for personal reasons, in Bratislava and in the Tatra mountains), intercalated by short but intensive periods spent in a post-revolutionary Portugal.

The majority of the photos are taken in Czechoslovakia, as the visits to Portugal haven’t had a higher rate than once per year. The period of studies in Czechoslovakia accompanied the broader period of the Normalization until its end. The Normalization process can be shortened to the period between 1969 and 1971, when only considering the two years of restoration of the power of the orthodox wing of the Czech Communist Party (KSČ), which followed the invasion of Prague by the troops of the Warsaw Pact in August 1968, putting an end to the previous political liberalization period of the Prague Spring. The period between 1971 and 1987 is still considered part of the Normalization period in a broader sense, being that after the erasing of the policies and laws of the short term liberalization period, the years that followed were those when the political persecution and imprisoning of active political dissidents was accompanied by less coercive but more regular and generalized repression methods that, among other, included the control over the access to education, housing, mobility and career. The Normalitization period wounded deeply the Czechoslovakian experience with socialism, revealing at the same time the limitations of national sovereignty inside the Eastern bloc.  

Lasting almost two decades, the Normalization period faded before a conjuncture of internal and external pressure, just shortly before the Velvet revolution.

Therefore the period of studies started in Teplice and Poděbrady and completed in Prague, could be described as taking place in the context of a normalized normality, when the coercive functioning of the Czechoslovakian society was already consistently and permanently established.

But in the archaeological and conceptual scheme of the stratification of the moment of image production, there is a layer that comes underneath (as it was deposited before) the layer of where are we looking at. This other layer, the layer of where are we looking from is harder to reach as grasping it does not dependent anymore on the direct reading of the exterior substrate of the archive. As for any archaeological excavation, a deeper layer cannot be reached without digging through the more superficial ones, in the same way the access to where are we looking from it can only be established through a theoretical mirror  placed in the previous layer in order to reveal the space behind the camera at the moment of image production.

The Harris matrix allows us to start from the end. The linear reading from top to bottom coexist with the inverse linearity of the moment of deposition (from the bottom to the top).

Fig.2 – Harris matrix for the archaeological stratification of the material substrate of the archive

It is the schematization of the consignation of the archive in its external substrate, because of the proximity with the process through which the archive is being unveiled.

A stratigraphic analysis is an approximation to Derrida’s description of a multiplicity of skins across which the archive is inscribed, nevertheless this schematization should not be seen as establishing a definite delimitation of strata, as drawing contours only serves the purpose of facilitating considerations upon the different moments of deposit of the archive, being that these same moments, only schematically deposited horizontally one above the other seem to have elements of very powerful corrosive properties, that immediately open channels on the skin of the previous layers, quickly infiltrating and undermining the previous strata. It is one of Derrida’s conceptions of a Freudian and transversal impression or incision, hence we can say that the different moments are incisive.

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[5] The Spartakiad (in Czech Spartakiada) was a massive gymnastic event, organized by the government every five years since 1955, celebrating the liberation of Czechoslovakia by the Red Army