"Archivo Político Vivo" (Living Political Archive) is a hand-printed and hand-bound artist’s book created during my artist residency at Signal-Return Press in Detroit, Michigan. It compiles titles of historical documents detailing US interventions in Latin America from 1823 to 2001, and a collection of carefully curated poems, lyrics, and commentary, all written with a pictographic typeface. Each of these pictographs — created first as linoleum prints and later as polymer plates — were given a letter value in order to create text that translated to poetic imagery. The pictographic text corresponds to poems, lyrics, and commentary written by Latin American authors around the same years these government documents were issued. Many of these authors, such as Pablo Neruda, Mario Benedetti, and León Gieco, created their work while in exile from their countries of origin.

​

These songs, poems, and phrases are now part of Latin American culture, folklore, and oral tradition. In their songs, poems, and commentary, these community heroes and creators of culture tell us about the pain of leaving family and friends behind, about that which can not be taken from us, like the sun, the wind, the colors, the warmth, the rain, and the pain of our motherland — which turns out to be Latin America as a whole, rather than each individual country. “Archivo Político Vivo” is a tale about the resilience of our people, and our capacity to create art even from our saddest experiences. This poetic imagery can be decoded with the help of a key page found at the end of the book. 

 

I chose the movable type used in this compilation according to the year each movable type was created, and corresponding to the book’s timeline. They go from Caslon, the oldest type used in “Archivo Político Vivo”, to Stymie, the newest type used in “Archivo Político Vivo”. I researched the type available at Signal-Return, and I figured out a timeline and matched it to the timeline of the book. I learned about many different types created throughout history and how they came back to life in different decades. Now most of the type is available in digital form and mixed up with fonts that have never been available as lead or wood type. 

 

Latin American culture persisted and flourished despite everything, heavy with memory, creating the identities that we now carry wherever we may be. Identity cannot exist without knowledge and recognition of the past, of the personal and historic aspects of the countries we come from and their movements through history, including the historic moments in which there are struggles for power, those in which the voices of minorities are extinguished. 

History and memory are two different paths. If history is written by the victors, memory is what happened to the rest of us, what we live as people and populace. It is also what culture and art send forth as a result.