American Academy in Berlin — Holtzbrinck Lecture

Cristina Rivera Garza examines how personal archives can challenge the erasure associated with gendered and state violence. Drawing on the family papers used in her account of her sister Liliana’s 1990 femicide, she considers how language, punctuation, repetition and playful forms preserve a person’s presence. The lecture connects these close readings with collective memory and the afterlives of femicide. Rivera Garza asks how documentary and writing practices can make victims materially present in public memory, engaging with Christina Sharpe’s concept of archives of breathlessness.