Archivo Puta

Artist talk: Archivo Puta by María Riot

Location: Etage | Times: 12:00-15:00 (including break) | Tickets: Donation (suggested sliding scale €0-20) – online registration required

This infinite project in constant construction aims to unite activism and the political recognition of rights for the collective as well as appeal to the sensitivity that only art can give. She will present her work and talk about the project in more depth.

The project is self-taught and independent, carried out with money earned through sex work that is invested for the films, scans, prints, etc. She believes it is important to give visibility and support to projects like these as a response to classism and elitism in art and to give opportunities to subjects who are not usually part of museums, galleries or first-person narratives in art. Archivo Puta seeks to be exhibited in exhibitions and in the future to become a book of photographs and being part of a short documentary.

“Archivo Puta” is a multidisciplinary project that seeks to create archives of the present as well as recover memory, make visible the beauty and resistance of the collective. Through the photographic project, it aims to create an archive of the present since, due to stigma, many people who engage in sex work decide to hide. Although there are artistic projects about sex work, there are very few made by the sex workers themselves or without a voyeuristic gaze, with ethics and political context. Thus, it seeks to challenge the existing perspective from society towards those who engage in sex work but also the perspective from photography and art in general.

By bringing to the forefront the agency of those portrayed and making visible that the photographers themselves also share the same work activity and stigma, something that does not usually happen in the world of photography, where art, due to its lack of accessibility and resources, is not usually made massively by sex workers and our visual stories and narratives are told by others. The project arises from the need for the world to know the silenced stories of people who are stigmatized, criminalized, and persecuted solely for using sexuality as their work tool. Through the photos, captured in multiple analog formats, the sex workers are portrayed as they wish to be seen. In addition to the photo sessions with sex workers, the project includes photographs of their own world related to sex work and sexuality in their life in general: photographs on porn sets, activism, clients, hotel hallways, herself, kink, desires, fetishes, friendship and lust.

María Riot (September 12, 1991) Born in the Province of Buenos Aires, Argentina and currently based in Buenos Aires, Argentina and Barcelona, Spain. She is a sex worker, sex workers’ rights activist, intimacy coordinator and artist. She is a member of AMMAR, the Sex Workers Union of Argentina. She writes in the media and books and gives talks on sex work, such as the lecture “Bad women: control mechanisms” at the Museum TEA Tenerife in January 2024 in the framework of Fotonoviembre at the International Biennial of Photography. She is a curator of the selection and screening of films about sex work “Whores on Screen: Portraits of sex work in first person” and is currently working as an actress and scriptwriter in a documentary film about sex work with the Argentinean film director Agustina Comedi. She is the author of the photography project “Archivo Puta”, exhibited for the first time at MACBA, Barcelona last December 2023 in the frame of the “108 days” exhibition, by Lydia Ourahmane.