Editorial Residency
In 2025, the Research Center at the Bogota Museum of Modern Art focused its efforts on activating the museum’s photographic archive through contemporary research approaches. As part of this initiative, the Editorial Residency was launched—a space designed to foster the development of editorial projects that critically engage with archival materials in a museum context.
Led by Susana Vargas-Mejía, the residency responds to the growing need to promote and support editorial practices that explore archival studies from interdisciplinary, critical, and experimental perspectives. Conceived as a creative laboratory, the Editorial Residency offered an opportunity to analyze MAMBO’s photographic archive while also exploring the possibilities of editorial production as a research method.
The residency also aimed to circulate key findings from the first phase of Unarchiving the MAMBO, a project focused on the cataloging, documentation, and digitization of the museum’s photographic archive.
The first edition of the residency was carried out by Ediciones Réplica, an independent editorial and curatorial project focused on Latin American photography archives. Their emerging trajectory in designing and conducting research on visual archives related to art in Colombia and the region made them a strong fit for this collaboration.
Publication launch, May 16, 2025, at the Bogotá Museum of Modern Art. Photo by Gregorio Díaz.
The project
Multiple Gazes: The Photographic Archive of the Bogotá Museum of Modern Art
Between November 2024 and May 2025, Ediciones Réplica conducted an in-depth editorial investigation of MAMBO’s photographic and publication archives. Their research explored the working methods and collaborative networks developed by artists, curators, cultural managers, and editors during the museum’s first three decades. The reviewed materials included documentation of two-dimensional artworks, exhibitions, non-objectual works, artist books, and public space interventions. The research was enriched through consultation of the museum’s vertical files, library, and historical publications to further contextualize the photographic records.
The project culminated in the publication of Mirada múltiple: el archivo fotográfico del Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá [Multiple Gazes: The Photographic Archive of the Bogotá Museum of Modern Art], launched in May 2025. The book brings together a curated selection of photographs that highlight under-explored aspects of the local art scene, with particular focus on public space, conceptual uses of photography, and embodied actions. It invites new readings of the archive, functions as a tool for future research, and creates meaningful links between MAMBO’s photographic collection and other institutional and independent archives.
Publication launch, May 16, 2025, at the Bogotá Museum of Modern Art. Photo by Gregorio Díaz.
Open Encounter: Launch Day
The launch of Multiple Gazes was conceived as an open encounter—a participatory event that invited visitors to engage directly with the archive through the act of assembling their own copy of the publication. This approach turned the launch into a collective and performative experience of editorial production.
Materials for the book were distributed across various stations throughout the museum. Visitors followed a guided path, collecting different components and assembling them step-by-step. This design encouraged a tactile and personal relationship with the archive while transforming the publication into a shared, co-created artifact.
The book’s format includes a metal binding screw, allowing it to be opened and closed easily. This structure not only facilitates consultation and reuse, but also reinforces the publication’s flexible, open-ended character—one that invites additions and future reinterpretations.
One of the publication’s central features is an alphabetical index of all the artists represented in the museum’s photographic archive. This resource allows anyone—whether visiting the museum or accessing it externally—to understand the contents of the archive and explore a representative selection of the images it holds, broadening public access to this valuable collection.
Publication launch, May 16, 2025, at the Bogotá Museum of Modern Art. Photo by Gregorio Díaz.
About the Residents
Fotografía de Gregorio Díaz
EdicionesRéplica is a research and editorial/curatorial production collective composed of Arturo Salazar and José Ruiz, focused on Latin American photography archives and publications. Their first project, titled Un supuesto fotográfico: The Family of Man en Bogotá, examined the truncated itinerary of one of the 20th century’s most important photography exhibitions in Colombia.
To date, the following photobooks have been published under the EdicionesRéplica imprint: Vamos todos a las urnas, Guía para los afligidos y desobedientes, Regresamos con novedad, ColombiaColor, Notas de un fotógrafo, Ficciones de tierra caliente, Sneak peek, Óscar Monsalve: unidad mínima, and Sergio, la cámara y yo. The latter two were accompanied by exhibitions of the same name at the Espacio El Dorado gallery in Bogotá.
Their most recent project, titled Impreso en Colombia: fotografía masiva en el siglo XX, examines the development of publications structured around photographic material in Colombia. This research draws upon an archive of photobooks, poetry collections, albums, postcards, and newspapers compiled over the past five years.
Acknowledgment
This project was developed by Arturo Salazar and José Ruiz, in collaboration with Susana Vargas-Mejía, Juanita Bayona, and Federico Reyes Mesa, with support from the New Frontiers in Research Fund of the Government of Canada [NFRF-2022-00245].