Archives, 2019 - 2023

Archives is a series of collages composed of scientific diagrams, old newspaper issues, schoolbooks, advertisements, propaganda posters, and more. Personal Archives confers a new meaning to these images, which were laser-cut and assembled in such a way that their original content is altered. The work is both a reflection on how images can serve as vehicles for ideology and on how archives articulate them in order to tell a specific story. Through these collages, Iván Argote shows that the archive—often presented as a collection of “objective” traces of the past—is in fact an ideological prism that shapes our relationship to history, and therefore to our identity.