(Un)documented lives: Notes for the cartography of a performance artist's archive

Abstract

In this study we analyze the catalog of the 2017 retrospective exhibition Mexican (In)Documentado by Guillermo Gómez-Peña in order to study different strategies for organizing an archive of his works. If we accept the formulation that performance can be conceived as an “art of the self” (Alcázar, 2014), we understand that it is the artist’s life that serves as the axis for organizing the corpus of documents that record his performances. This is the organizational approach that prevails in the curatorship of Mexican (In)Documentado. In the following article we ask ourselves what other modes of organization of an archive of his works we can establish if we analyze Gómez-Peña’s productions as cases of what Walter Mignolo (2013) calls “colonial semiosis”, that is, as processes of production of meaning mediated by colonial relations of power. We start from the hypothesis that this cartography of the archive allows us to trace new routes that link the artist’s performative autobiography with other lives lived in colonial or postcolonials situations.