Archivo Fantasma — Spectral Fictions is a meta-research project that proposes a fictitious, immaterial cinematic archive as a methodological and conceptual tool to examine the spectral nature of all archives. It proposes fiction as a critical and emancipatory strategy for engaging with institutional silences, historical erasures, and the ideological construction of History.
The project draws from Latin American traditions of meta-fiction, speculative literature, and epistemic disobedience, emphasizing how archives are shaped by regimes of truth that legitimize certain narratives while excluding others. It mobilizes Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation”, a history “written with and against the archive”, to explore fiction as a reparative method, animating virtual presences and silenced subjects often violated by archival taxonomies.
In a global context marked by war, dehumanizing ideologies, and growing demands to decolonize archives, this project responds to the urgency of imagining alternative forms of memory-making. As institutions confront reparations, returns, and refusals, Archivo Fantasma proposes fiction as a tool to reinvent shared space and contribute to transitional justice. It centers diasporic subjectivities, intersectional frameworks for audiovisual sovereignty, archival literacy, and situated practices. It explores strategies for intergenerational and cross-cultural transmission, reclaiming the role of imagination in constructing collective memory.
Archivo Fantasma, deliberately untranslated to retain its linguistic and cultural specificity, emerges from Laura Huertas Millán's two-decade artistic practice involving film, installation, writing, and pedagogy. It will materialize through two feature films, a solo exhibition, and a constellation of pedagogical projects, film programming, and writing.
