Archivo de la Memoria Trans (AMT), in the words of its members, is a space for the protection, construction, and vindication of trans memory. Since the late 1990s, activists Claudia Pía Baudracco and María Belén Correa had dreamed of gathering their friends and fellow survivors—of violence and murder by police, imprisonment, and the AIDS pandemic—to share memories and images of one another.
In 2012, months after the death of Claudia Pía and the approval of Argentina's Gender Identity Law (which removed barriers to legal gender recognition and provided healthcare to trans youth and adults), Belén founded AMT on social media while living in exile in Germany. Together with photographer Cecilia Estalles, Belén developed the project, collecting and scanning the personal archives of Argentine trans women and sharing their lives and histories online and through print publications.
Since then, AMT has digitized and preserved more than 15,000 artifacts, including films, personal letters, police files, and newspaper articles, creating the largest trans archive in Latin America. However, photography—and its capacity for intimacy, joy, and bearing witness—is at the core of AMT's creative research, as foregrounded in this slideshow, Nuestros códigos (Our codes), 2023. As Estalles states, "I think all our work has something to do with presenting a new way of seeing the world via the trans gaze, a loving gaze. Like when someone who cares for you takes your photo."
Available via libreriaberkana.com
and leslielohman.org
Photo via as.nyu.edu
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