About The Telenovela Archives

The Telenovela Archives: The Early Years – an Exercise onVisual Archaeology

Juan Andrés Bello

This project collects, organizes, and presents, for the first time to the public, a comprehensive visual account of the creative forces that shaped the production of serialized fiction during the early years of television in Latin America.

My work involved both curatorial and production activities, and the first outcome is this web-based exhibition. The project has the structure of an open archive, it is an evolving collection of visual records–knowledge and memories–that illustrate the huge impact that television, and more specifically serialized fiction, had in the political, social, and cultural history of Latin America during the 1950s and 1960s. It is also a storytelling exercise: I will present the authors, the work that they created, and the circumstances surrounding its production and dissemination, in a way that will allow the audience to identify cause-effect connections, and to understand the ‘telenovela’ phenomenon (the Latin American version of the North American and British soap-operas), in its political context.

Telling this story is an archeological enterprise. The precarity of the recording technology, and the lack of archival preservation policies, make it difficult today to gain access to content produced in Latin America during the 1950s and 1960s. As cultural products, those early stories belong to the category of ephemeral or lost art. The intention of this project is to retrieve and present the physical evidence of its existence: kinescopes, newsreels, still photos, news-clippings, promotional materials (ads, posters, postcards, etc.), and derivative works (i.e. comic books).