The Villa Ocampo Documentation Centre
The Villa Ocampo Documentation Centre consists of the library and personal archive of Victoria Ocampo and the archive of the Sur magazine and publishing house, on loan to UNESCO from the Sur Foundation (created by Victoria Ocampo).
The set of both archives consists of more than 11,000 books, 2,500 periodicals, 1,000 photographs, 4,000 letters, negatives, papers, manuscripts, records, sheet music, a complete collection of Sur magazine bound and annotated by Victoria Ocampo, among other documents.
The documentary collection is associated with the history of Villa Ocampo and the personal and professional history of this exceptional figure, together with the artistic and intellectual circle that surrounded her. It constitutes a unique and irreplaceable testimony to the production process of one of the most important Spanish-language literary projects of the 20th century.
The Sur magazine and publishing house, under the direction of Victoria Ocampo, became a true bridge between cultures and a forum for writing and reading that gave shape to an intellectual circle that knew how to read and intervene in the great debates of its time. From far-flung regions of the world, personalities such as Barthes, Borges, Sartre, Huxley, Gandhi, De Sica, De Gaulle, Lacan, Cortázar, Breton, Malraux, Gide, Mistral, Stravinsky and Le Corbusier were - among others - the interlocutors and producers of the documentary ensemble presented here.
Fundación Sur
Visit their official website
Library
Victoria Ocampo's personal library consists of more than 11,000 volumes that encompass the vastness of her interests: a multiplicity of authors, themes, genres, and languages, with a dominant presence of English and French literature, in a chronological and thematic arc that ranges from classics of all cultures to works on botany, art, and fashion, to literary milestones of the 20th century.
With more than 1,300 books autographed by their authors and more than 1,000 books featuring Victoria Ocampo's marginalia, this library is a faithful testimony of both her personal life and her intellectual journey.
The collection contains books dedicated by Jorge Luis Borges, André Malraux, André Breton, Paul Claudel, Saint-John Perse, Jacques Lacan, Alejandra Pizarnik, Nathalie Sarraute, Tristan Tzara, Marguerite Yourcenar, Graham Greene, Gabriela Mistral, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Le Corbusier, José Ortega y Gasset, Albert Camus, Paul Valéry, Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda, Rabindranath Tagore, Alfonso Reyes and Rafael Alberti, among many others.
"No tengo sino libros que leo, marco con lápiz y acaban medio desencuadernados si los frecuento demasiado. Por consiguiente, no soy bibliófila, aunque me encante hurgar en las bibliotecas de los bibliófilos que me lo permiten. Mi biblioteca es simplemente una montonera de libros alineados sin orden aparente en los estantes, o apilados en mi dormitorio".
Newspaper Library
As a reader and editor of Sur, Victoria Ocampo maintained a fluid relationship with other periodicals of her time. Over the years, she assembled a collection that includes numerous copies of the main cultural journals of the 20th century, such as Revista de Occidente, La Nouvelle Revue Française, Horizon and Partisan Review, with which Sur maintained a fluid dialogue.
There are also copies of small publications, some of them ephemeral but of great literary and artistic importance, such as Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution, with its covers printed in phosphorescent ink, View and Cahiers de l'Art. The collection is enriched by the personal collection of Sur that belonged to Victoria Ocampo, where we find copies with Victoria's handwritten marks and annotations that reflect her editing work.
"Esta revista [Sur] es su revista y la de todos los que me rodean y rodearán en lo venidero. De los que han venido a América, de los que piensan en América y de los que son de América. De los que tienen la voluntad de comprendernos a nosotros mismos".
Photographs
This iconographic collection portrays Victoria Ocampo's biography in its different stages. Photographs of her childhood, family, travels, meetings with great figures of the world and culture that were part of her public and private life. Most of them are vintage and unique prints.
There are also albums and original photographs with annotations in Victoria Ocampo's own handwriting.
Some of the images have the added value of being author's copies, taken by some of the greatest photographers of the 20th century, such as those signed by Man Ray, or the hand-coloured portraits of Eduardo Mallea, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Jorge Luis Borges, José Ortega y Gasset and Victoria Ocampo herself, taken by Gisèle Freund.
The collection includes the historical photographs of Grupo Sur recorded by the Forero brothers and the views of the Villa Ocampo signed by Horacio Coppola.
"La cámara, como un ojo dotado de singulares poderes, ha captado, guardado, fijado y reproducido fielmente una imagen que se nos había escapado. Nos enseña a mirar, a establecer relaciones entre los objetos".
Editorial Sur Documents
The documents related to Editorial Sur include original materials (correspondence with literary agents, publishing and translation contracts, royalty settlements, etc.) that reflect the activity of the publishing house over its nearly fifty years of existence.
This category includes original contracts signed by Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Jack Kerouac, E. M. Forster, Ingmar Bergman, among others, as well as a number of letters from authors published by the publishing house. The set is completed with account books, minute books, share certificates and the charter of incorporation of the publishing house.
Records and sheet music
Music was one of Victoria Ocampo's dominant passions. In the 1920s and 1930s, she promoted the dissemination of modern music in Argentina, thanks to her friendship with the Swiss conductor Ernest Ansermet and, above all, with Igor Stravinsky, with whom she played the role of recitalist in Persephone, directed by the Russian composer, at the Teatro Colón during his first visit to the country in 1936.
Victoria Ocampo's record collection includes albums of the most varied genres, from classical works by Chopin, Stravinsky, Debussy and Britten, to a sub-collection of Fox Trot, to records of poetry read, some of them recorded for Sur by her most renowned collaborators.
Among the scores, the following stand out: Manuel de Falla's El retablo, with personal binding and annotations by Victoria Ocampo, prepared to be sent to Ernest Ansermet; Igor Stravinsky's Octour, dedicated to Victoria Ocampo by its author, and the original autograph of a ballet by Juan José Castro.
"En este Mar del Plata desierto, con frecuencia pongo discos durante horas mientras camino de punta a punta, como por la cubierta de un barco, por el corredor. Me ofrezco hasta la saturación óperas enteras, cuartetos, sinfonías, conciertos, baladas, ballets".
Shortly before her death, Victoria Ocampo decided to donate her epistolary archive to Harvard University (USA) for preservation, on the express condition that complete copies of the archive would be deposited in Argentina. These copies, property of the Fundación Sur, are now part of the Villa Ocampo Documentation Centre, thanks to a loan agreement between the two institutions.
The archive, which has been classified and indexed by the Documentation Centre's staff, gathers more than 3,000 letters from writers and artists such as Fernando Ayala, Jorge Luis Borges, Roger Caillois, Albert Camus, Julio Cortázar, Charles De Gaulle, Vittorio De Sica, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Sergei Eisenstein, Pedro Figari, Waldo Frank, Gisèle Freund, André Gide, Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Walter Gropius, Aldous Huxley, Victoria Kent, Le Corbusier, María de Maeztu, André Malraux, Jacques Maritain, Gabriela Mistral, Manuel Mujica Láinez, José Ortega y Gasset, Jean Paulhan,, Denis de Rougemont, Victoria Sackville-West, Alfonso Reyes, Igor Stravinsky, Jules Supervielle, Paul Valéry, Mario Vargas Llosa, María Elena Walsh, Virginia Woolf, and Marguerite Yourcenar, among others.
"Cuando desaparecen aquellos a quienes nos atan vínculos de admiración o de cariño, solemos abrir cajones en que duermen fotografías y paquetes de cartas. Es todo lo que nos queda en medio del amargo o dulce sufrir de los recuerdos".
Newspaper clippings
This section consists of more than 1,000 press clippings, ranging from the first publications of articles by Victoria Ocampo in Argentinean and foreign newspapers, to obituaries, portraits and memoirs of the founder of Sur published after her death.
It also contains interviews and notes related to different figures of the Sur group in general and Victoria Ocampo in particular. Also included are articles collected by the director of Sur, mainly book reviews and news about authors she was passionate about (such as Lawrence of Arabia or Virginia Woolf) or about moments in history that she had witnessed firsthand, such as the Nuremberg trial, which she attended as an audience member and for which she had kept some pages of the chronicle published in the English magazine London Illustrated News with her handwritten annotations.
