Emotional archive and photobiographical corpus. The construction of the visual memory of a school comunity

Abstract

This article reviews a selection of visual documents from a school archive of an educational establishment in the city of Talca (Chile) in order to analyze the construction of an emotional archive around the photographic images that are preserved, which acquire multiple meanings when impregnated with emotions associated with the moment in which they are observed, through the identification and breakdown of the visual moment, of the value that the individual prints through observation and what this makes him tell as a story. The emotionality that emerges from the observation of these images allows the members of the school community (students, teachers, parents) to recognize themselves and resignify their educational and local history together. The portraits of the infrastructure, of the spaces that it houses and its consecutive transformations intersect with the subjects' life relations about their course within the establishment. This shows his attachment to those episodes recorded in the images that manage to highlight his memories and appreciations around the school; in this way, a material, emotional and photobiographical archive of the school space was configured.