Ana Rocío Jouli

Ana Rocío Jouli received a PhD in Literature from the National University of La Plata (UNLP) in 2020. Her current research focuses on the intersection between poetry and archive in Latin America. As a postdoctoral researcher at the Cluster of Excellence ‘Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective’ (Freie Universität Berlin), she founded the Activation Lab, an experimental platform for research-based artistic practice focused on archival activation in Latin America. As part of this project, she edited the collective volumes Archive in the Works (con•stel•la•tions series, Textem Verlag, 2026) and Handbook for Dismantling Memory (Trashumantes Verlag, 2025).

She has undertaken research stays at the New York University, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Københavns Universitet, McGill University, and IDEA Institute for Advanced Studies.

Alongside her academic research, she holds a master’s degree in Creative Writing from the National University of Tres de Febrero, and has published the poetry collections Los pacientes, Tarde, and Constelaciones. Her poetic work has been included in numerous anthologies and publications, most recently Voces periféricas (Equidistancias, 2026) and Lyrik_03 (box of rain press, 2025).

How can documentary poetry enact autoreduction as a poetic procedure? How do these writing practices respond to contemporary forms of political violence, erasure, and institutional collapse in Latin America?

Documentary poetry draws on the archive by gathering and assembling fragments capable of rendering a historical reality visible, in a bid to intervene in cultural memory. In documentary poetry, the lyrical ‘I’ withdraws as a structuring principle of the poem, allowing the multiple voices embedded in the documents to emerge. This self-limitation is not a lack of agency but a deliberate ethical and formal stance.

At the same time, poetic reduction operates on the archive itself: by extracting, reframing, and recombining documentary materials, the poem exposes the archive’s own mechanisms of selection, redaction, and narrative construction. In this sense, documentary poetry functions as a form of counter-archival writing.

Focusing on contemporary Latin American works, this project articulates a framework for understanding how self-limiting poetic practices can open alternative modes of memory and political imagination.