Alejandro M. Flores Aguilar
We built upon the idea of carrying out a conversation to explore the connections between visual and collaborative methods, activism and politics of resistance in the aftermath of the Counterinsurgency and Cold-War in Guatemala—as well as the rest of Latin America and Spain. The kind of work promoted by the WwL Collective is unique, and it has allowed me to know better the viewpoint of colleagues that grasp the complexity of visual anthropology in contemporary ethnographic work. It has been priceless to have the opportunity to discuss your own work, to share questions and insecurities in an open space of friendship as well as epistemic and aesthetic curiosity. The end result, I think, is the promotion of collective visual and theoretical practices that can contribute in a positive fashion to the subdiscipline.
Alejandro holds a Diplom soziologe (sociology) degree from the Freie Universität Berlin and a PhD in sociocultural anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin. He is a postdoctoral fellow in the CSMCH-IASH, at the University of Edinburg.
His current project—Raised Gaze in Ixil Time: Towards a Minor History of War—revolves around the production of an ethnographic film-essay, and a hypertextual, multimedia memorial repertoire composed of video portraits—life stories of Maya-Ixil former guerrillas. This project has been supported by the Wenner-Gren’s Fejos Postdoc in Ethnographic Film.
His research interests include transdisciplinary, decolonial, collaborative research methods, sensorial and visual anthropology of memory, social imaginaries, Cold War, counterinsurgency infrastructures, and indigenous—ontological— subversions.
Photo by Daniel Perera, 2016. From Writing with Light Magazine, Issue no.1.