How Do You Remember What You Don’t Remember? Re-membering in Karen Miranda Rivadeneira’s Historias Bravas

In this presentation I examine the nexus between memory, forgetting, embodiment and the photographic event. The photograph in Miranda-Rivadeneira becomes a locus of enunciation for a self in search of a past given a history of migration and liminality. To create Historias Bravas, the Ecuadorian-American photographer Miranda-Rivadeneira recreates with the help of family members scenes from her childhood in Ecuador, photographing these performances and thus effectively turning the photograph into an extension of self-making by way of embodied memory-making. With the aid of Gloria Anzaldúa’s notion of re-membering from the stage of conocimiento Putting Coyolxauhqui Together, I read Miranda-Rivadeneira’s photographic practice in this series as both as (1) establishing a sense of selfhood by way of photographic practice and (2) problematizing the veridical status of memory. In her practice, the past becomes a futural project written with light in which embodiment, imagination, desire, and nostalgia converge in an attempt to put a self together.