Annabel Romero Hernandez 

Statement from the Initiative of Contextual Records

The Initiative of Contextual Records is a division of Opuntia Visual, developed by artist Annabel Romero Hernández as a parafictional structure for research, storytelling, and archival speculation. 

This project begins by asking what would have happened if a particular archive had existed and what new forms of knowledge it would have made visible. In this series, the ICR presents “Qué pasaría si todo el maíz fuera azul?”, an archive that examines two women: Trinidad Barranco and Elanor McC. Through this parafictional archive, the ICR aims to show how someone can respond to and elaborate on a found archive, how that process shifts their view, and what new meanings emerge when we imagine the records that could have existed, thereby expanding what maize represents both scientifically and culturally. 

The Trinidad / Eleanor Working Archive imagines a possible archive between two women connected through maize. Eleanor is rooted in the scientific world of chromosomes and maize diversity. The ICR has cataloged a set of private notes that shows Eleanor’s both artistic and scientific affection for maize; the notes seem to span from the 1940s to the 1960s. Then the ICR introduces Trinidad, a woman who found such notes during her 1982 visit to Chapingo Autonomous University, in her quest to understand why Mexico needs to import corn from the US. In a hidden corner of the library, she finds a set of notes (later categorized by the ICR) from Eleanor and decides to translate them and build upon the archive using her own methods. 

These women come from different countries, backgrounds, and ways of making knowledge, but the archive presented by the ICR proposes a connection among them. This genuine affection for maize serves as the opening for a parafictional possibility. What if the relationship was present in feeling, but never became tangible enough to leave a mark?