Archive to Get Myself Back
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Archive to Get Myself Back is a performative novel that condenses an artistic investigation I began in 2020 and which found its editorial form in July 2025, with the publication of the book by La Balsa Editora. I think of this project as a living, affective, and experimental archive: a territory where writing, photography, and performance intertwine to question how we narrate, preserve, and reconfigure memory from the body.
From its inception, Archive to Get Myself Back was not intended to be a traditional book. It was, first and foremost, an intimate, almost secret gesture, a practice of survival. It began when I started drawing a self-portrait based on my eight-year-old passport photo, while writing about some events related to my mother’s death. At that time, I did not imagine a work intended for the public: I wrote and produced images to sustain myself, to recover something I did not quite know how to name.
In 2024, I decided to take the step towards publication. I arrived at La Balsa Editora with a mock-up of the book and with the explicit desire that the editorial process also be part of the work. Together with Federico Paladino, the publisher, we worked for eight months on a deeply artisanal and collaborative process of editing, printing, and materialisation. We met weekly to review the images, adjust the writing, test the ink in risography, choose papers, print each sheet, and manually seal each cover before binding.
Being part of the material construction of the book—its body, its texture, its visual rhythm—reinforced its hybrid and performative nature. The use of risography and print art processes was not only a technical or aesthetic decision, but a conceptual extension of the project: each copy is, in itself, a variation, a trace, a singular body.
Archive to Get Myself Back sets languages in motion in search of that which cannot be said. It is a book that does not merely narrate an experience, but activates it. An archive that does not seek to fix the past, but to reopen it, to put it under tension, to make it sensitive in the present.
PERFORMANCE PRESENTATIONS
The book presentations are, in turn, performance presentations. Each one takes on the specific characteristics of the space where it takes place and is configured as an activation of the archive. Readings, actions, bodies and voices intertwine so that the novel is assembled and disassembled over and over again. In each presentation, Archive to Get Myself Back multiplies: it ceases to be just a book and becomes a shared experience, an event where memory becomes collective and where the work continues to be written in other bodies.
ARCHIVE TO GET MYSELF BACK ON TRACK AT THE PERGAMINO BOOK FAIR / PRESENTATION #1
When is a performative novel born? How is a book born?
– No idea, man! –
– By writing down the images that keep you awake at night –
– by making a pelvis out of crealine –
– by looking for yourself behind the camera –
– by performing medical, somatic, family, and skin archives –
– by running in the square until you cross paths with a moving van –
– by activating memories, gestures, visions, fluids –
– by chatting, sharing, and working with others –
On that afternoon, the performative presentation of the book developed a construction and unfolding of the body-archive, located in my place of origin, through a performance and a collective reading. It was an event where the novel became body, time, and shared presence.
For 60 minutes, the book ceased to be an object and became a field of forces: images, texts and memories in circulation, in tension with the institutional space of the museum and with the presence of the audience.
Following this presentation, I will use the same copy of the book for all future presentations.
PLACE AND DATE
Fe.Li.Pe. Pergamino Book Fair. Museum of Fine Arts, Pergamino. 24 August 2025
DURATION
60 minutes
CONCEPTUAL DRIFT
The experience did not end with that first gesture. The presentation was extended as a pedagogical practice in a seminar on Practices between gesture and impression in the Engraving and Printed Art II course taught by Emilio Pettoruti.
There, the meeting took the form of a space for exchange and reflection where I shared my work process, focusing on the ways in which writing, performance, and archive construction are articulated as artistic research.
Based on work materials, records, graphic pieces and editorial resources, a collective dialogue opened up around the poetic, political and methodological dimensions of the project. The archive was set in motion again: not as a reservoir of the past, but as an active tool for thinking about the relationships between body, memory, image and contemporary practice.
PHOTOGRAPHIC RECORD
Ayelén Luzuriaga
ARCHIVE TO GET MYSELF BACK IN FELIFA / PRESENTATION #2
Opening like one opens a wound
or a desire
Performing around the book
inside the book
next to the book
Performance is at the heart of everything I do.
This presentation of Archive to Get Myself Back took place within the framework of FELIFA – Festival of Photography and Graphic Arts Books, at the Espacio Bouchard of the Domingo Faustino Sarmiento Cultural Centre (CCK) in Buenos Aires. It happened on a Sunday, Mother’s Day, a date that charged this activation of the archive with symbolic and emotional layers.
I arrived at the venue with all the project materials: the book, prints on different types of paper (sandpaper, mirror paper, tissue paper, tracing paper), pieces of stone and cement, cyanotypes, fabrics, and video performance recordings. I also brought microphones and the time needed to carry out a performance in which the book was not only a support, but also the core and driving force.
A personal project is always collective. Archive to Get Myself Back is inhabited by presences, accompaniments and participations; it is the result of a desire sustained over time: to write across fiction, performance, photography and autobiography.
The performance presentation featured Federico Paladino and Valeria Sestua, with whom we deployed and symbolised the materials as a way of accounting for the artistic process and the system of relationships and affections that shape it. We performed around the book, inside the book and next to the book, but also expanding towards other voices: artists and writers who explore the maternal bond —Claudia Masin, Rosario Bléfari and Sharon Olds—, summoned as textual and affective presences within the archive.
The presentation concluded with a space for dialogue and collective reading, proposing the book as an expanded, activatable and relational territory, open to shared experience. In this closing, I shared the main themes of the artistic research, the archival work and the process of editing and printing in risography.
PLACE AND DATE
FELIFA. Photography and Graphic Arts Book Festival. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento Cultural Centre (CCK) . Buenos Aires City. 19 October 2025
DURATION
50 minutes
CONCEPTUAL DRIFT
The presentation was expanded in the exhibition Unfolded Books, held in Room 512 (5th floor) of the Cultural Centre. There, I constructed an installation using discarded sheets from the book’s printing, prints of the project material on tissue paper and tracing paper, and tests carried out on the master of the risograph machine.
Within the installation, I arranged three copies of the book, understood as multiple bodies within the archive: books that no longer function as objects of reading, but as material fragments of an ongoing process. The exhibition functioned as a new layer of the project, where the book was once again dismantled and reconfigured, insisting on its condition as a living archive in permanent transformation.
PHOTOGRAPHIC RECORD
Leandro Albani
DEVOTION. PERFORMANCE IN THE MALASAÑA NEIGHBOURHOOD OF MADRID / PRESENTATION #3
giving voice to the unspoken,
from the intimate to the public,
sustained
This presentation of Archive to Get Myself Back took the form of a walking performance art, an emotional procession through Madrid’s Malasaña neighbourhood. It took place at dusk on a rainy Saturday and was titled Devotion: a sustained action involving shared walking, reading aloud and mutual care in public space.
Together with Maritza Vélez Sampedro and Ana Beltrán Porcar, we walked up and down the neighbourhood streets arm in arm. As we walked, we read excerpts from the book, wrote with chalk on the cobblestones, sang a lullaby, and shared the secret with those who joined the tour. Our voices merged with the sound of the rain, which tried to erase the ephemeral writing, and with the glow of the city lights.
We changed places, but not our bond: we remained linked arm in arm throughout the journey. The people who crossed our path began to accompany us, walking behind us, covered with umbrellas. The archive became transit, drift, chorality; an intimate gesture sustained in common.
When we arrived at Galería CasaSur, we mingled with the audience and read a fragment of the book in unison. Then, the copy circulated from hand to hand: the book was handed out to the audience so that other voices could activate the reading. The performative novel moved again, multiplying in other bodies.
Next, Romina Casile joined us, and we opened a dialogue about Archive to Get Myself Back. It was a luminous and present conversation—a dance of hands, ideas, and words—where we reflected on the notion of the performative novel, the intersections between autobiography and fiction, expanded writing, the relationships between body and image, the characters that inhabit the book, and what it means to show the monster.
PLACE AND DATE
Translations about a body of humus. Solo exhibition by Roma Vaquero Diaz. CasaSur Gallery, Madrid. 15 November 2025
DURATION
120 minutes
CONCEPTUAL DRIFT
In this performance presentation, the archive moved from the exhibition space to the urban space. Archive to Get Myself Back became a journey, a procession, and devotion: a sustained gesture between bodies that read, walk, and care. Writing became ephemeral and vulnerable, exposed to the elements and erasure, insisting on its political and poetic power.
The presentation deepened the passage from the intimate to the public, bringing the voice into play as a tool of transmission and support. The book ceased to be a central object and became a relational device, where memory, body and word were collectively activated, in dialogue with the city and its inhabitants.
PHOTOGRAPHIC RECORD
Lucila Bodelón
LIVING ARCHIVE
Archive to Get Myself Back is constructed as a practice of insistence. An archive that does not organise or close, but rather returns again and again to that which insists on being said, shown, put into relation. Each presentation, each performance and each drift seeks to open up a field of resonances where memory, body and writing are reconfigured in real time.
The performative presentations function as a system of layers: superimpositions, displacements, other readings. The book appears and disappears as a central object, becoming body, journey, installation, shared voice. A relational device that enables encounters.
Far from the idea of the archive as a reservoir of the past, Archive to Get Myself Back proposes an active temporality: an archive that is activated in the present and transformed with each context, each space, and each community that traverses it. The performative novel is written and unwritten in action, in gesture, in collective reading, in the open air of public space, or in the intimacy of dialogue.
This project understands recovery not as a return to a stable origin, but as a continuous movement: to recover is to put back into play, to look again, to touch again. To recover is to expose oneself to the risk of erasure and, even so, to insist.
The archive remains open. As long as there are bodies willing to read, walk, hold, listen and speak, Archive to Get Myself Back will continue to unfold as a living, affective and collective practice.
ARCHIVE TO GET MYSELF BACK
Roma Vaquero Diaz
Published by La Balsa Editora
Epilogues by Natalia Romero, Romina Casile, and Valeria Sestua.
156 pages / 6.3 x 8.7 inches / 2025
Edition of 250 copies
ISBN 978-631-00-9182-2