Para-sitios fotográficos y etnográficos de los sistemas religiosos de inspiración afro

Based on ethnographic and photographic work conducted between 2007 and 2018 in Colombia and Cuba, this article discusses the tensions between the photographic image and the production of archives as forms of memory of the country’s Afro-inspired religious systems. Fundamentally, the approach relates to diaspora religions from Cuba, and, in such manner, the article questions the relations and understandings of the image within religious scenarios in ethnographic research conducted throughout these years. At the same time, it reveals the shortfall and need to rethink notions such as being and representing, derived from the practices, spaces, and daily and collaborative experiences of the practitioners with the researcher. Thus, the article and the photographs presented here seek to grant a different space to that which these currently hold in the production of knowledge, that goes beyond considering them as ways to archive memory or as simple accessories to the written word. Finally, the above emerges as an attempt to conduct an-“other” anthropology of image —based on the photographic image—, in which it is understood that photography has a dynamic nature of multiplicity, which connects it to different dimensions including the economic, aesthetic, historical, political and sociocultural. This gives way to narratives of the world that are equally multiple, traversed by contradiction, and which do not intend to emulate or mirror reality.