(De)Generated Imaginaries: Xenofeminist Notes On The Inexistent Archive Of Felipe Rivas San Martín

Abstract

This work interrogates the notion of the archive beyond its conservative, passive, and instrumental function, considering the historical, material, and technological conditions that define what is perceptible, recordable, and imaginable. Based on Felipe Rivas San Martín’s Un Archivo Inexistente (The Inexistent Archive), a work co-created with Stable Diffusion, we propose understanding the archive as an active technology of sensitive and political production. The co-generated images, as fictions of a Latin American sexdissident past, absent from dominant records, allow us to consider nonexistence as the effect of historical operations of systematic erasure. In dialogue with Laboria Cuboniks, we conceive of the inexistent archive as a xenofeminist technology insofar as it is alienating, critical, situated, relational, and scalable; and coparticipates in the commitment to contest inherited regimes of visibility and thus open new possibilities for imagination.