The personal archives of artists as counter-stories

Abstract

Over the last decades, there has been a growing interest in the so-called personal collections in areas and uses that go beyond the specificity of the archival field. This paper proposes a review on their particularities and potentialities for knowledge generation in social and human studies. In particular, it discusses the memorial nature of archives and the possibility that they offer for generating counter-narratives. First, a brief review of the debates and conceptualizations surrounding the issue. Secondly, two types of personal collections are reviewed: a private one and another in process of being formed as a result of oral sources with audiovisual record and documents transfer for their digitization. The reflections are inscribed in the framework of a Transdisciplinary Cultural History and recover contributions from the subfields of Oral and Recent History.