Albums with Clippings from Works of her Authorship: Articles and Novels

We are accustomed today to the mixing of images and texts, or to associating them with each other in a manner that is non-linear nor homogeneous in “memes,” GIFs, or with the use of Photoshop or other applications that permit photo montage or the modification of an image (this virtual exhibit itself is, in fact, a demonstration of that). In the nineteenth century and with other mediums and tools, this was already a common activity.

In the second gallery of this exhibition, we confront another sense and meaning of the album, which we will classify as an “album of clippings,” popularized especially in Anglo-Saxon culture as the scrapbook. Albums of clippings, similar to what we would make today with an application or software, gather a series of images and texts from printed culture by ordering them arbitrarily on the blank pages of a personal book (though in some cases they can be collaborative). It became a frequent activity around the 1850s, when photography became more accessible. This type of album is, therefore, a medium composed of other mediums: magazines, books, drawings, photographs. The central activity of composition consists in removing a textual or visual piece from one context in order to place it and reassign meaning to it in a new one.

Soledad Acosta de Samper's albums of clippings offer additional meaning: they are collage compositions created with foreign materials applied to her own printed material, especially newspaper articles and novels that had appeared previously in a serialized fashion in the Bogotá press. There are numerous albums included here that reveal that, for the author, the activity of clipping, gluing, and assembling collages was parallel to writing; an activity of creation that connected her to the manual, artistic, and artisanal sphere and at the same time could serve as a pastime.

It would be impossible in the brevity which this format demands to detail the origin of the images or to offer a reading of each one of the collages, but following the study of Carolina Alzate in her facsimile edition of the novel Una holandesa en América (A Dutch Woman in America), we can say that they involve images from local and, above all, foreign sources, those which a woman could have accessed through contacts or travels, or that circulated in Colombian cultural life. In whatever case, various lines of general interpretation can be suggested about these albums of clippings. Firstly, the position of Soledad Acosta as a meticulous writer who constantly revises and returns to her own (prolific) work is emphasized. The authority of women over their work is shown here in alternative ways, given that it is permitted in the album’s pages to question what has been printed, associate it to images of heterogeneous origin, and order it according to one’s own criteria (independent of the editorial bias with which it was published in the first place). Moreover, the albums of clippings show the vast artistic knowledge and sensibility of the writer, who is well aware of literary and aesthetic currents and of the publications available to adorn her work and put it in dialogue with the visual and written culture of her time. Through these pages, we see complexity not only in the act of writing, but also in Soledad’s own subjectivity as a professional, woman, reader, and consumer of the wealth of printed materials of the nineteenth century. Lastly, in a context such as nineteenth-century Latin America, with constant and profound social changes, the album situates and connects one’s own work in a secure space, conserving it for posterity’s sake, in case no one else does. Faithful to her time, Soledad Acosta adopts the logic of the “museum” or the “gallery” over the materiality of her own writing.

The albums included in this gallery are: