Extracting and reassembling: archives under suspect in the work of Agustina Wetzel, Maia Navas and Pablo Weber

Abstract

This paper proposes an approach to the works of three emerging filmmakers from Argentina: Agustina Wetzel, Maia Navas and Pablo Martín Weber. Their productions are characterized by an essayistic narrative based on the remontage of the audiovisual archive. Their pieces stand out for their circulation, as they travel through different expositive spaces such as museums, art galleries and film festivals, among others. They occupy an insular place within the contemporary artistic field without being anchored to a fixed space, navigating between different exhibition formats. These audiovisual works propose a reflection on the images produced by the digital devices that record our current world, such as Google Earth, YouTube, drone footage, military images or the recording of space probe cameras. Each artist extracts these materials from the internet and assembles his or her own archive and then reassembles it an innovative way. Wetzel criticizes the security model of our society. Weber drifts through the infinite archives of the internet proposing a meditation on the ontology of these images. Navas dives into the past and edits the documents that testify to the repression of the native peoples of the Chaco in order to contrast them with the present images of this territory.