Essays – serie

Collection, colonialism, translation, and the ephemera that shapes the stories we tell about ourselves.Featuring new original works by: Yásnaya Elena Aguilar, Cristina Rivera Garza, Joseph Zárate, Juan Cárdenas, Velia Vidal, Lina Meruane, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, Dolores Reyes, Carlos Fonseca, Djamila RibeiroThe Central and South American collection at the British Museum collections contains approximately 62,000 objects, spanning 10,000 years of human history. The vast majority cannot be displayed, and those objects are the subject of Untold Microcosms , a collection of ten stories from ten Latin American writers, and inspired by the narratives about our past that we create through museums, in spite of their gaps and disarticulations.

Explorers, Dreamers and Thieves is an adventure through memory and archives.This book is an exercise in invention that emerges from the complex history of encounter between Europe and the Americas. Following the success of Untold Microcosms – which saw ten Latin American authors write stories inspired by objects from their countries held by the British Museum – the curatorial team at the Museum and at Hay Festival have joined forces again, this time with a slightly different proposal.Six writers – Selva Almada ,Rita Indiana ,Josefa Sánchez ,Philippe Sands ,Juan Gabriel Vásquez andGabriela Weiner – were invited to examine a series of ethnographic documents: a profusion of diaries, letters, drawings, thoughts and transactions, all referring to the acquisition of works for the collection. Using this material as a starting point, they were asked to imagine narratives about the people involved in bringing those pieces to the museum. The journey through these texts is not unlike the one that, in years past, was undertaken by the explorers, dreamers and thieves who serve as an inspiration for this book.Translated by Anne McLean, Robin Myers, Carolina Orloff, Fionn Petch & Frances Riddle.

From Mexico to Patagonia, the struggle for women's rights in Latin America comes alive in the voices of the artists and activists making the change.La Lucha gathers the voices of 30 artists, scholars, and activists, from 17 countries, actively engaged in the fight for women’s rights in Latin America. From the patriarchy to femicide, to the inflections of identity embedded in colour, class, and indigenous cultures, their struggle embodies the contested definitions and priorities of feminism. Their solidarity, and tirelessness, has yielded striking, game-changing results in areas as disparate, and as fundamental to women’s lives, as reproductive health, environmentalism, anti-colonialism, and  human rights. With contributors that include Isabel Allende, Selva Almada, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, Valeria Luiselli, Lina Meruane, Claudia Piñeiro, and Cristina Rivera Garza, this unprecedented collection is sure to challenge, provoke, and inspire.

In Sevilla, Spain, the General Archive of the Indies has, for 240 years, been a repository for centuries of materials and documents gathering a record of the daily life of empire. Now ten writers from Spain and Latin America have a chance to respond to this 80-million-page trove.With contributions from:Carlos Fonseca (Costa Rica)Carlos Granés (Colombia)Cristina Bendek (Colombia)Juan Bonilla (Spain)Karina Pacheco (Peru)Liliana Colanzi (Bolivia)Edmundo Paz Soldán (Bolivia)Martín Caparrós (Argentina)Mayra Santos-Febres (Puerto Rico)Yásnaya Elena Aguilar (Mexico)