From The Book

Image and Memory

Since their formation in 1977, the Madres of the Plaza de Mayo (Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo) have made the disappeared visible through their bodies. The act of being in the plaza, occupying that space and circulating within it, gave form to the struggle against the impunity that existed during the worst of times in the dictatorship. Every Thursday, transcending the known cultural repertoire and iconography, they were present with their persistence in the Plaza de Mayo. Through their bodies in motion, they offset the proclamation of martial law and the prohibition against public meetings. 

Since Argentina’s transition to democracy, the Madres have prolonged and vindicated this embodied practice. The white handkerchiefs emphasize that the Mother’s action is highly symbolic and the use of public space is consciously strategic. The Mothers acted against the repressive system of representation that so effectively limited the possibilities of visibility and expression. 

For many years, “Living Ghosts” was the slogan used by the human rights organizations against those culpable for the atrocities. Since its appearance, the slogan was always linked to a forceful use of public space and of the accompanying image. The acts and interventions in the public space produced it as a site in which the traces of the recent past are transmitted and where these traces are placed in relation to the construction of public images.

With the return to democracy came the continued push towards condemnation. At first, the testimonies of survivors, relatives, and witnesses occupied a central space. For many Argentines, the terrible stories of what happened opened many eyes and many ceased to deny the atrocities of years past. The CONADEP report and the trial of the ex-commanders constitute two paradoxical moments in the explosion of testimony. In this moment, the theory of the two demons was elaborated. A little later, still under the presidency of Raul Alfonsín, the laws of impunity are passed (Obediencia Debida and Punto Final). Finally, Menem signed a presidential pardon for those who had led the dictatorship’s state terrorism. 

The Escrache

The escrache that emerged from the works of H.I.J.O.S. also works in the realm of the symbolic. Both the Madres and H.I.J.O.S. use public space denouncing and marking the houses of the dictatorial repressors and their accomplices. Their action consists in signaling and narrating the links that connect thirty years of impunity with the present reality in Argentina. The Madres and H.I.J.O.S., even with their differences in strategy, do not accept the prohibition on public space. On the contrary, they use this as a stage on which they unfold a strategic cartography of action. This is a mode of action that emphasizes the role of memory as a function of the present, and not just the past. A live, active, and actual memory. We always think of the construction of memory in this sense: from the present, from the action, recuperating spaces, denouncing events and people, creating links between the past, present, and future. In this act of making every day the present, memory begins to be constructed from what was recuperated and from where one is intervening. In this way we move, from the escraches to the project of the Parque de la Memoria (Memory Park) in which the official objective was to pay homage to those disappeared between 1976-1983. In the face of the state-sanctioned outline of history emerged our first group initiative of working in a broader historical framework, inquiring into the causes and consequences of the dictatorship as a way of complicating the sense of historical time we were trying to put into question. We arrived at this approach from the action-image that we practice in the escrache, as the escrache was the opening that pushed us into more complete and complicated projects. In the act of denouncing, we felt the necessity to deepen our work, both discursively and textually, making complex the image of the condemnation. Not only for a mere theoretical undoing but also to take responsibility for limitations when it comes time to communicate. We need to, then, feed from other discourses to create new images. It is in this way that we construct a rich collective reading of diverse materials on the dictatorship and the period that preceded it–from a different analysis. We propose research as part of this communication process using images that from starts from feeling and not purely from a rational place. At the same time, we have formed strong bonds with H.I.J.O.S and with other human rights organizations.

Neighborhood Actions

These neighborhood actions have precedents such as what happened in San Telmo beginning in the mid-90s with the group “Encuentro por la Memoria” (“Meeting for Memory”) and its work there. For a long time, together with the San Telmo assemblies, they organized marches that passed in front of the homes of the neighborhood’s desaparecidos, or the places where they were kidnapped. The important thing here was to create a mark, but in an inverse way from what was achieved with the escraches, where the mark was for the repressor. The mark of the homages works to create a sense of everyday memory and to construct micro-histories. It wasn’t about looking for a symbol for the desaparecidos, but rather we did think about what could characterize each one of them. In that way, the pictures of the disappeared of San Telmo were resignfied using only their gaze.  During the march-homage we placed little squares with the cropped photos, together with the name and former address of each person. At the same time we told the neighbors about who lived or worked in those places, who had been kidnapped in such in such corner or building. These type of actions were realized in several different neighborhoods in the city of Buenos Aires.