Another archive is possible. I am working with my family archives while constructing a new archive and learning how the archive is a crossing—a space in-between the past and future where the unknown resides. The way our communities carry our archives forward is emphasized in their activation more so than in the act of preservation. In the activation is where the archive is truly kept alive, often with intuitive practices of care. Contrary to museum and institutional systems of archiving, in our communities we can think differently around the deterioration, temporality, and ephemerality of the archive and lean into emotional understanding, intergenerational repair work, and a reimagining of the future.

A portrait of Galleta holding her rabbit. 120mm Kodak Portra film, Guadalajara, Mexico. 2021

Portrait of myself holding up a photograph of my aunt Georgina and uncle Francisco over an adobe and cement brick wall built by my family in my grandmother’s home. 120mm Kodak Portra film, Guadalajara, Mexico. 2021

A scanned photograph of my aunt Antonia projected at night onto an adobe wall in my grandmother’s patio. 120mm Kodak Portra film, Guadalajara, Mexico. 2021

Arlene Mejorado is a first-generation, transborder artist from Los Angeles working with analog and digital photography, video, and installations. In her practice she experiments with documentary forms, depicting truths that aren’t visibly represented or legible but are experienced viscerally. Through visual media, everyday materials, and repurposed documents, Mejorado engages in repair work, countering erasure and mending fragments in personal, collective, diasporic, and migrant experiences and stories. Specific subjects she explores are quotidian spectacles, performance, and pleasure, the construction of legacy in working class communities of color, culturally subversive spaces, and collective gestures of catharsis and resistance. 

Mejorado has been awarded the Magnum Foundation fellowship, the DocX fellowship at Duke University, the NALAC artist grant, and the Lucie Foundation Independent Book Award. Her practice has included projects with the Human Rights Documentation Initiative, The Latin American Benson Collection, and El Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen in El Salvador.

Website: amejorado.com