Body as Archive: A Zine About Bodies, Memory, and Gestures That Resist

More than a publication, Body as Archive is an interactive risograph-printed zine that invites readers to slow down, listen, and engage with memory through the body. Created by María Amelia Viteri, Cristina Yépez Arroyo, and María Emilia Analuisa, the zine explores the idea that archives are not only found in institutions and documents—they live in our gestures, scars, sensations, objects, and everyday acts of care.

Blending archival research, embodied inquiry, sensory ethnography, and reflective exercises, the zine moves between personal and collective histories. Inspired in part by years of research on Ecuadorian consul José Ignacio Burbano Rosales, whose actions helped save hundreds of lives during the Holocaust, it asks readers to reconsider what counts as an archive and whose stories deserve to be remembered.

Designed to be touched, annotated, carried, and revisited, the publication includes prompts for body mapping, sensory reflection, memory work, and personal archiving. It is an invitation to unarchive—to notice the traces we carry, honor inherited histories, and imagine new ways of remembering, healing, and belonging.