Tracing the Past: Marcelo Brodsky's Photography as Memory Art Nerea.

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Paragraph, Volume 30, Number 1, March 2007, pp. 101-120 (Article)

Published by Edinburgh University Press DOI: 10.1353/prg.2007.0011

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Tracing the Past: Marcelo Brodskys Photography as Memory Art NEREA ARRUTI
Abstract: Andreas Huyssen has called the Argentinian photographer Marcelo Brodskys latest project, Nexo (2001), memory art, that is, a form of public mnemonic art that oscillates from installation, photography and monument to memorial, breaking artistic boundaries. The article will explore the role of photography in the eld of human rights and the interspace between private and public spheres. Brodskys work aims to reinstate the gaps in the collective spheres of recollection and this will be contextualized in his artistic production from the late 1970s onwards. Nexo follows on from the internationally acclaimed project Buena memoria (1997) that was also an attempt to create a bridge for the memory for the new generation of Argentinians. This contribution aims to explore how Brodskys artistic production represents what the Argentinian sociologist Elizabeth Jel has described as art that wants to create a symbolic n space to mediate traumatic experiences. Keywords: Buena memoria, Marcelo Brodsky, Disappeared, Human Rights, Nexo, Photography, Postmemory

The photographic essays Good Memory (1997)1 and Nexus (2001)2 by the Argentinean conceptual artist Marcelo Brodsky (1954) explore collective cultural memory in the context of recent Argentinean history: how we think about the present in light of the past and in what ways we are able to recall and represent traumatic events.3 Brodskys conceptual art is framed by trauma theory and engages critically with an international network of memory projects. His work in particular offers us the means to understand the ways in which a generation that has suffered trauma rst hand and the following generation are capable of engaging collectively in memory work by exploring the phenomenon of postmemory.4 Understanding Historical Trauma: Good Memory as Commemorative Project Accompanying the photographs in Good Memory there are texts by Brodsky himself, the Argentinean poet Juan Felman and the writers
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Mart Caparr s and Jos Pablo Feinmann. Part of the photographic n o e essay is based on an exhibition held in 1996, a crucial point in terms of understanding recent cultural trends in Argentina. This exhibition was staged in the prestigious Escuela Nacional de Buenos Aires, the secondary school that Brodsky attended. Marcelo Brodskys brother, Fernando, disappeared in 1979. The aim of the exhibition was to acknowledge, for the rst time, those school pupils who disappeared during the dictatorship. Thus, Marcelo Brodskys photographic essay engages with both private and public spaces; in these photographs the use of private images creates a symbolic space where public debates around cultural memory, specic to the Argentinean context, come to the foreground. The photographic exhibition took place in commemorative mood, marking the twentieth year since the beginning of military rule in 1976. Debates about the politics of memory were centre stage in both the progressive daily newspaper P gina/12 and in the academic a journal Punto de vista. In the particular case of Punto de vista, the impact of intellectuals such as Andreas Huyssen, himself working in the German context, is clear. Thus, in the lecture The Culture of Memory delivered by Huyssen in Buenos Aires and Santiago, the German thinker makes the following important point concerning the interaction between memory and oblivion, which is of particular relevance to a post-dictatorial context: The difculty today is that we need to think of memory and amnesia together rather than oppose them. It is rather a mnemonic fever caused by the virus of amnesia that at times threatens to consume memory itself.5 In the Argentinean case, the documentation in Nunca m s (Never a Again) of crimes committed against human rights during the military period made the report a best-seller, as it became the explicit or implicit material of countless books and lms. However, as many critics have pointed out, not everybody who bought Nunca m s chose a to read it, or could actually read it. Added to this, by the mid-90s, as the critic Saul Sosnowski had noted earlier, there was a clear public uneasiness with books and lms dealing with the military period:6 paraphrasing Huyssen, the new situation revealed the extent to which the virus of amnesia had taken hold in an artistic context gripped by mnemonic fever (CM, 23). Mnemonic fever results in an inability to recall, engage and work with signiers of memories; it also results in the misreading and corruption of signiers of memories of trauma, accepting that these signiers lose value and meaning due to over-exposure or over-simplication. Time freezes for the amnesiac

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whereas Brodsky utilises the frozen photographic image to unlock memories. Mnemonically, the most effective means of memory recall is through the process of visualization of a series of events. This tension between recalling and oblivion had its roots in the manner in which private and public spaces (families and communities; schools, press and government) interacted during the military regime. As Rowe and Shelling argue:
There are conditions under which a massive erasure of memory can occur. A study, begun in 1985, of villas miserias (shanty towns) in C rdoba, Argentina, o has revealed an absence of memory of the period of military government (19761985), as compared with the years preceding it. This silence is not the result of fear: informants were not hesitant with information about their activities in the preceding period, details of which could equally be considered subversive. Nor does it indicate a lack of knowledge, since the issue was what they remembered not about the country or the government but about their own lives. (. . .) All of this amounts to the lack of a place for the articulation of memory, its former location in everyday life having been suppressed (. . .) through self surveillance.7

My argument is that precisely because of this lack of a place for the articulation of memory, Brodskys essay re-displays photographs from his family album, and of him and his brother with their classmates at school, a visual project that aims to function as a recovery process of the memories of those who have been lost. Brodskys conceptual photography is part of a wider contemporary Argentinean project of reconstructing both private and public spaces, and in the process, articulating memory projects not regulated by ofcial discourse. Memory Work: Art as Symbolic Mediation The secondary schools teachers collective behind the textbook Haciendo memoria en el pas de Nunca M s (1997) point out from a a pedagogical perspective that the human rights report Nunca m s has a to be contextualized both historically and socially. Moreover, the inherent theme of violence that permeates the text has to be discussed from a political and philosophical perspective; otherwise, as they say, the experience of reading the report can end up being a similar experience to that of watching a horror lm which we want over as quickly as possible and left behind in our distant memories.8 Brodsky, on the other hand, aims to do the opposite. Instead of recalling the

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violent acts explicitly, he wants to restore the individuality of the victims masked by statistics. The central photo in the exhibition and essay (and the single image most widely reproduced in publicity and commentary) is the group photograph of Marcelo Brodsky with his National School classmates in 1967.9 Brodsky transformed the standard school photograph into a gigantograph that he further modied by adding words and signs. One of the signs is various coloured circles, each circle representing the arbitrariness inherent in violence in a dictatorial context, therein implicitly playing with the image of moving targets. The loud colours recall traditional childrens board games, such as El juego de la oca where the primary goal is to avoid the square symbolising death (the skull in the game). In its printed form this photograph is shown three times. First, a section is shown in the title page with very little contrast and faded, signifying the passing of time. Second, the photograph is introduced by Brodsky in order to explain his work method (GM, 20). Its third and nal appearance is within the section The classmates, where the photograph is nally displayed in all its contrast and where the human gures are shown with greater accuracy (GM, 23). This progression is the visual expression of memory work, the working through of a painful past, which the photographer is staging in this essay. Memories go from faded distant appearances to lucid and immediate ones, structured in a sequence of three identical images (the past, present and future times intertwined in the Good Memory project). As the photographer himself says when explaining his work method: When I came back to Argentina after living in Spain for many years, I had just turned forty, and felt the need to work on my identity. Photography, with its precise ability to freeze a point in time, was the tool I used for this purpose (GM, 21). Brodsky traced every living pupil and each was photographed in front of the 1960s group image, symbolically marking then and now: the passing of time and the act of remembering a difcult past that not everybody survived. We see each surviving pupil as they were as children and in their middle age with a short, bare narrative about the way their lives have worked out since the photograph was taken. All the photographs were by Brodsky himself, except his own, which was taken by the well-known Argentinean photographer Mario L pez. o Brodsky did not opt for a self-portrait, seemingly marking the ofcial nature of the exercise by using the services of another photographer. It is a simple but powerful strategy, for it uncovers the poignant fact that some have been allowed to grow from youth to middle age

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whereas the faces of a few are frozen in time. Fernando Brodsky, Martn Bercovich, Claudio Tisminetzky and Marcelo Ariel Gelmans youthfulness in their portraits points towards their deaths. Critical analysis of photographic art has established the link between the photographic image as a record of a moment already gone, as explored by Barthes in Camera Lucida (1981).10 Brodskys essay underlines this link by showing the time-frozen images alongside the faces of individuals that were allowed to grow old. The Human Rights movement in Argentina has used photographs as a political tool to denounce human rights abuses, but also from the very beginning as a practical way of nding people. This practice still goes on in contemporary Argentina: the movement has shifted now from grandmothers (in search of grandchildren) to children (the stolen babies) in search of relatives as they themselves have grown to adulthood. In this context, the daily newspaper P gina/12 publishes a messages from relatives paying homage to lost ones and 1970s babies searching for relatives. sthetically, they follow the format of the traditional obituary notice but there is always tension resulting from the information that can be included and information missing due to circumstances. In more recent variations of the obituary notice, living relatives publish their images in the hope that the now grown-up children of the disappeared will recognise themselves in the relatives features. In this particular format there is a projection into the future in search of lost relatives. In the section Nando, my brother there are fteen snapshots taken from the family album. In the essay, Brodsky uses images from his family album as a key source of material. The utopian quality of the family album is outlined in Annette Kuhns book Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination: This past-in-the-future, this nostalgiain-prospects, always hooks into, seeks to produce, desires hinging on a particular kind of story a family story with its own form of plenitude.11 Her book aims to deconstruct personal photographs and explore the complex relationship between private and public spheres. In a similar mode Brodsky offers us readings of selected images that form part of the family album interacting with the Argentinean body politic. One such instance he chooses is a photograph of a social occasion,12 a party, where the adults are looking away, which he sees as the future blindness of the older generation regarding the unfolding social crisis: There also seems to be a generation gap: the grown-ups ignore the children, represented by Fernando, and look the other way (GM, 77). Brodsky is exploring the relationship between

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private and public spheres and the complex relationship between past and present when reading past images in a family album. Leonor Arfuch grants a central role to the family album as the site where public and private spaces are intertwined, crucial in the Argentinian case because so much violence was exercised within the family narrative.13 Every family image is selected and read by the photographer as a future sign, a memory of the future. If every family album is a construction of future memories, based on nostalgic longings for the perfect picture of the past, then future events can help us read our past portraits. The key image in this series is that of his brother Fernando (Nando), taken by Brodsky (who says: His movement, today nonexistent, diffuses him before the lens (GM, 71)).14 This is one of the rst photographs Marcelo Brodsky ever took, using an old camera given to him by his father. For Feinmann, the blurred photograph of Fernando is the central image of the project (and not the more widely reproduced group photograph): he sees it as Brodskys labour of love, his objective being to restore the features of his brothers face in this photograph. Brodsky sees it as a poignant image due to the fact that it is a portent of later events. Reappearances, the section of Good Memory composed by Mart n Caparr s, recalls the period when the country became inhabited by o spectres. Derrida refers to spectral presence as a being-with spectres that would also be, not only but also, a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations.15 Stylistic starkness in Argentinian visual arts signies the spectres from the past: the empty landscapes in Guillermo Kuitcas paintings, the ghostly presences in Eliseo Subielas cinema. During the dictatorship the most effective series of images actually expressing that the disappeared were dead was Deaths death (1979) by Andy Goldstein (1943-).16 As the curator and photographer Sara Facio describes, at a time when carrying a notebook and a camera was considered subversive, many photographers developed a very literal, explicit language. In other words, the belief was that in order to be political the photographs had to be explicit, though no images were as powerful as those created by Goldstein: in the 70s he presented a series of precise shots of apparent objectivity, that subtly pointed out to the disappearance of faces and names, and to the loss of social memory.17 There is circularity in the structure chosen by Brodsky when displaying Nandos family snapshots: the series begins and closes with black and white images of Nando where he is either alone or blanked

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(as he is in the party image). The twelve colour images in between show happy family times for Nando, where his individuality is restored and shown to us. However, even these personal images are read against the grain of social events. Specically, the image of his brother in front of the monument of Bol (which has been blindfolded),18 is var described by Brodsky in a poem as in a strange game of premonitions (GM, 73), thus reecting the lack of linearity and closure in the mourning process of a death without a body. In the Argentinean case, the difculty families faced was that these were crimes without bodies or, in Fenmans words, the obscenity of death without bodies (GM, 15). Obituary notices are an intrinsic part of the mourning process: the family announces the date, cause of death and there is always a list of relatives, friends and work colleagues paying homage. However, in this traumatic period of Argentinean history, families were left without anything but the euphemistic desaparecidos. It is not a coincidence then that one of the most important forms of political protest is to release death notices. In the case of the poet Juan Gelman, one of Brodskys contributors, he uses poetry as a form of resistance against the euphemistic nature of ofcial language that represents the disappeared as absent for ever.19 Moreover his active engagement to ght against oblivion forgetting oblivion is key to understanding Gelmans body of work. In the late 1970s and 1980s, he writes poems that establish a dialogue with Marcelo Gelman, his son, who was kidnapped alongside his pregnant wife Claudia, taken in lieu of the poet himself, and whose frozen youthful photographic image is included in the photo-essay. The continuous dialogue with the absent signies the resistance of Gelman to releasing his sons death notice. The closing section Memory Bridge consists of a series of photographs of the public event that took place at the school in order to pay homage to the 98 school pupils who disappeared. This was a formal ceremony where all the names were read. The title Memory Bridge had already been used by the visual artist Viviana Ponieman in an event that took place in the Plaza de Mayo in 1996. Despite this, Brodsky wished to use the same title and asked for her permission to use it to name another visual collective event, since in his view the notion of bridging the generations was the main aim of the public gathering in which the Good Memory exhibition was also going to be part of the ceremony. Brodsky says of the moment current pupils were looking at their 70s counterparts:

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The light of the sun at its zenith penetrated the enormous windows of the hall, shone on the faces of the students who stopped to look, and reected them on the glass that protected the altered photograph. The portraits of these reections constitute a fundamental part of this project, as they represent the instants of the transmission of experience from one generation to another. (GM, 54)

Marianne Hirsch links the use of projected images to the dynamics of memory and specically the notion of postmemory as illustrated by the composite image Past Lives (1987)20 by the Jewish-North American photographer Linda Novak (1954). In Novaks work these ghostly presences from the recent past represent the impact paradigmatic of the impact of collective trauma on the following generation who have access to experiences that they remember only as the stories and images with which they grew up, but they are so powerful, so monumental, as to constitute memories in their own right.21 Ten photographs with reections of the 1990s pupils against the images of their 1960s counterparts are displayed in the essay. These photographs are formally reective in the same manner as the Washington Vietnam memorial. Their reective nature is part of the signifying process. As Marita Sturken points out when describing the interaction between the Vietnam memorial and its viewers: The black stone creates a reective surface (. . .) and allows viewers to participate in the memorial; seeing their own images reected in the names, they are implicated in the listing of the dead.22 Despite the fact that in both works (the memorial by Maya Lin and the photographic exhibition by Brodsky), the viewers symbolically come together with the dead, nevertheless Brodskys and Maya Lins projects are reective in very different ways. Maya Lin was dealing with a highly contested event and project as Sturken shows in her book. In this case the reective quality is also meant to challenge. As Robert Hughes succinctly states: Maya Lin was faced, as she put it, with the problem of designing a memorial that would not tell you what to think about Vietnam.23 Rather this is a monument that is not didactic, and as such it is meant to be reective in both senses of the word. In contrast, Brodskys project Good Memory has a very clear pedagogical agenda, where the reectiveness is closer to the Lacanian mirror-image:
As far as the structure of the subject is concerned, the mirror phase is said to represent a genetic moment: the setting up of the rst roughcast of the ego. What happens is that the infant perceives in the image of its counterpart or in its own mirror image a form (Gestalt) in which it anticipates a bodily unity which it still objectively lacks (whence its jubilation): in other words, it identies with

Tracing the Past: Marcelo Brodskys Photography as Memory Art 109 this image. This primordial experience is basic to the imaginary nature of the ego, which is constituted right from the start as an ideal ego and as the root of the secondary identications.24

The pupils might (come to) understand their own identities through the process of looking at the ten photographs, and by the end of that process, a form of comprehension emerges. The last section of the photo-essay includes testimonies from the 1990s pupils. Andr s (6th e grade) says the following on the mechanisms of memory:
I think that when one sees a picture of any of the kids, one cannot deny that it might be one of his classmates (. . .). We must look back and say that in this country there were people who thought a certain way, who felt in a certain way, who wanted to change things, who worked to do so, and, well, who may have made mistakes. But those people willed a world with more solidarity in it, with values that are now very remote. We have to take the good part, we can leave out the mistakes. One never knows what is good and what is bad. But what we must take is the essence, the intent. (GM, 58)

Even though the pupils testimonies refer to differences between the generations, they also stress common values: the importance that La Escuela Nacional places on academic achievement and the ways in which the school has created bonds between different age groups (their ideals and values were different in the 1970s, but they had all been taught by the same institution); the fact that the desaparecidos look so young and the fact they can see specic life stories, namely people, not numbers. Restoring individuality to each of the faces is one of Brodskys main objectives in staging the exhibition. The reaction he aims to elicit from the viewer is thus akin to what Hirsch terms heteropathic memory: Heteropathic memory (feeling and suffering with the other) means, as I understand it, the ability to say, It could have been me; it was me, also, and, at the same time, but it was not me (PM, 9). Brodsky thus stages a situation where a younger generation of Argentineans will engage with collective traumatic despite the temporal distance. Brodsky is actively searching for an emotional reaction in the viewer/reader, where the bridging of good memory between generations should occur; and only then will this collection of images full their civic mission. In stark contrast, the documentary La Memoria obstinada (The Obstinate Memory) (1996) by Patricio Guzm n, the a Chilean lm-maker, uses a much more confrontational technique when focusing on postmemory in another postdictatorial context.

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The director of the documentary La batalla de Chile (The Battle of Chile) (1973) returned to Chile twenty years later to lm another documentary, this time about the Chilean reception of the 1973 documentary which had only just been shown there for the rst time. There are many reective images but especially, in this particular case, an emphasis on the discontinuities in the process of remembering. Guzm n interviews many of the participants in the old documena tary, lming them against the television screen showing the 1970s lm. However, the relationship between older and younger selves is conictual.25 At the end of the documentary Guzm n shows the lm a to Chilean teenagers, but in this case there is no bridge of memory: he keeps the camera on the shocked faces, some of them crying. There is total disbelief. The new lm is about the failure of memory work in the Chilean context, or the visualization, as Richard says, of the context of la desmemoria (loss of memory) in contemporary Chile (NS, 54). In its search for continuity Brodskys photographic essay forms part of a wider artistic trend in Argentina. As the Argentinean sociologist Elizabeth Jelin says, the use of symbolic mediations (for instance, art) reects the societal need to deal with the traumatic experience.26 In other words, a collective of people cannot forget if transmission of memories has not happened.27 There are many bad memories in the essay but by transmitting them the good memory (the essence the youth Andr s refers to) will prevail. The bridge between generations e is reached by staging the point of transmission of those memories so as to create shared memories in the sense described by the philosopher Avishai Margalit.28 Tracing Trauma: Nexus as Palimpsest The photographic essay Nexus (2001) continues and expands on the previous essay published by Brodsky. On the book jacket the etymology and denition of the title word is included: Nexo: (from the latin nexus derived from nectere: to bind) bond, connection, union, link. Anything that serves to unite other things, materially or morally. The overall aim of the photographic essay is to bond, unite and offer bridges between fragmented realities. The discontinuities between collective and personal accounts have to be addressed and this is exemplied by his own trajectory as an artist. Brodsky collects photographs between the late 1970s and the year 2001 in Nexus, engaging the viewer with his two recurrent

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themes: rst, the ethical need to remember, and second, the need to nd bridges between different generations. Nexus introduces the viewer/reader to personal and collective re/collections of events and objects. The overall aim of the work is ambitious, namely to represent photographically the memory archives of contemporary Argentina. As Huyssen remarks in a contribution to Nexus, there has been a mini boom in the visual arts in Latin America in recent years: the focus on human rights in a transnational realm has also opened up new avenues for a political and public role of the visual arts, of installations, monuments, memorials, and museums (N, 9). The visual mode of communication facilitates the trans-national political agenda of artists who are also human rights campaigners, such as Marcelo Brodsky. The visuality of this work makes it possible for the work to be easily accessed from within other cultures. This goes beyond the initial role of photography in the Argentinean Human Rights movement, that is, as a practical tool to denounce each disappearance. In the introduction to Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Cathy Caruth speaks of the dislocation produced by the traumatic event that can only be accessed by connecting with another place and time where [i]n a catastrophic age, that is, trauma itself may provide the very link between cultures: not as a simple understanding of the pasts of others but rather, within the traumas of contemporary history, as our ability to listen through the departures we have all taken from ourselves.29 Hence the trans-national network (that is, engaging critically with different experiences of trauma across cultures), is part of the therapeutic process going beyond the isolation imposed by the traumatic experience itself. The search for the nexus between cultures is the cornerstone of all contemporary memory projects and in this context the very title of Brodskys essay Nexus resonates further aeld. Two photographs side by side of monuments in Carrara marble contrast the ephemeral material nature of non-digital photography and the classical monument. Both prints of the marble inscriptions are the same size and style: one from Erice Sicily from the XVII Century; the other the 2001 version commissioned by Brodsky himself (Buenos Aires). The Sicilian marble summarizes the history of the town and this classical, historical account (in gold lettering on white marble) of the major collective events during the XVII century in the Sicilian town is juxtaposed by Brodsky with the New World marble, which records not only collective events from 1905 to 2001 but also personal landmarks. The year 1976 is recorded as Coup and State terrorism

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and My best friend is disappeared . As Brodsky himself explains, I inscribed the principal events that I had lived in the previous century into Carrara marble as well, tying episodes of collective history in with those of my personal history (N, 22). For instance, in his previous photographic essay, Good Memory, Brodsky used an image from his family album of his grandfathers uncle arriving in the River Plate in 1905. These domestic landmarks become part of the 2001 monument. Commemoration, the creation of monuments and photography as memory art, are entwined in these images merging both Argentinean history and family history. The label memory art has been coined by Andreas Huyssen in connection with Brodskys artistic practice. In his view, this is a type of mnemonic public art that crosses the boundaries between installation, photography, monument and memorial (N, 9). In the Carrara images, the roles of the commemorating monument and the recording photograph merge, contradicting Roland Barthess analysis in Camera Lucida:
The only way I can transform the Photograph is into refuse: either the drawer or the wastebasket. Not only does it commonly have the fate of paper (perishable), but even if it attached to more lasting supports, it is still mortal: like a living organism, it is born on the level of the sprouting silver grains, it ourishes a moment, then ages (. . .). Attacked by light, by humidity, it fades, weakens, vanishes; there is nothing left to do but throw it away. Earlier societies managed so that memory, the substitute for life, was eternal and that at least the thing which spoke Death should itself be immortal: this was the Monument. But by making the (Mortal) Photograph into the general and somehow natural witness of what has been, modern society has renounced the Monument. (CL, 93)

The technology of the two Carrara images is not digital, hence the permanence of the monument is combined with the temporality of the photograph, the link between remembering and forgetting. The two white monuments unite the traditional collective rites of paying homage to the dead and, in Barthess perspective, expressing the perishable. By means of the juxtaposition, Brodsky creates two images side by side that explore the tension between remembering and forgetting. His is a memorialization project but its inherent difculties and troubles are expressed by choosing a format considerably less solid than marble. It also highlights the fact that Barthes was premature in announcing the death of the monument. As Andreas Huyssen has shown in Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia,30 the postmodern is a period obsessed with memorialization projects as evidenced by the proliferation of monuments and museums. In

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contemporary culture the photograph has not substituted the monument but both, hand in hand, are growing stronger in the search to record collective history and personal stories. The image Ex taken in Rome in 2000 opens a series of eight photographs that depict the dislocation of exile. Brodsky draws again on his own experience. Exile is thus described as being divided: A portrait in exile is a picture of a fragment of someone (N, 28). Many of the images presented deal with traces and fragments. The goal is to express (and not represent) the dislocation imposed by forced exile. The fractured experience of exile is, in Brodskys work, expressed by a trace, a fragment of a word and a great deal is left unsaid, as if the dislocation of the traumatic experience can only be expressed by the void. The grey grainy image of the trace-like lettering Ex with its non-permanent quality points towards the sthetics established by contemporary Holocaust art. The cinematographer Claude Lanzmann remarked that in the documentary Shoah he was working with traces of traces of traces31 (DT, 99). As Dorota Glowacka explains, the nexus between ethics and sthetics is a laborious process:
The artists who incorporate Holocaust themes writers, painters, lmmakers carry out a preponderant task of producing testimony to the unique individual suffering of the Other. In speech and image, they wish to bear witness to the victims broken or extinguished lives in such a way that their traces will reverberate for both present and future generations of witnesses. (. . .) It is the witnesss speech that sustains the trace of the traumatic event. Such ethical speech carries a risk: in the process of bearing witness, even if it consists of passing on a story rather than providing rsthand testimony, the witnesss own world has been irreparably fractured. (DT, 102)

In the Argentinean context, the use of the Holocaust is more than the application of a series of familiar images and tropes. Rather, the trauma of the desaparecidos can be inscribed as historical palimpsest, acted out against the historical backdrop of the experience of the Holocaust exile in the Southern Cone. Many of the descendants of those who left Europe had to face the anti-Semitic attacks of the Argentinean military decades later. Brodsky again creates visual palimpsests that echo the specic yet unifying Jewish experience. For instance, the black and white image entitled The Keys (Barcelona, 1979) echoes a different set of keys and a different experience of exile, as Brodskys text succinctly presents it: As did the Jews who, expelled from Sepharad, took with them the keys to their homes and kept

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them for ve hundred years, our keys came with us too, in suitcases and in pockets (N, 27). The nature of the exodus from the Old World to the New World as a result of anti-Semitism is symbolized by the fact that, for many, the only links between them, and what they left behind, were family photographs. These small portable objects would be their only reference point throughout their long boat journeys and throughout the process of resettlement settling into their new destinations. The frailty of humanity cannot be expressed more poignantly, hence the analysis of photography as being perishable makes this fact even more touching. Added to this, Sara Facio explains in her history of Argentinean photography that the strength of the medium in the country is contextualized precisely by the immigrant nature of many of the inhabitants in Buenos Aires (LF). Here photography would be the ideal new medium to search for an identity in the New World. As the Chilean writer and critic Marjorie Agos says in n connection with the experience of the Jewish communities in Latin America:
These women who have already lived with their grandparents and parents memories of journeys, begin to live their own exiles, remembering their countries while they adapt to new countries (. . .). Many of those who emigrate from Latin America gradually articulate a kind of postmemory of their grandparents and parents fused with their own memories and the collective memory of the Jewish people.32

Staging a nexus between trauma across generations, the photograph entitled The Camps II (Buenos Aires, 2001) of a temporary urban installation erected in front of the Escuela de Mec nica de la Armada, a site of crimes against human rights during the Dirty War, is inscribed into The Camps I (Berlin 2001) with the concentration camps being listed. The nexus between old and new trauma and the ght of photography against time merge together in these images. Both permanent German and temporary Argentinean memorials are recorded digitally. The more recent anti-Semitic atrocity committed against the Jewish AMIA (the Association representing Argentinean Jews), when eightysix people were murdered, is recorded in the series entitled Remains (20001). Brodsky found remnants from the bombing dumped in the site chosen for the Memory Park project in Buenos Aires. With the fragments, he created a series of collages in the shape of stars: anti-Semitic violence inscribed into a Jewish symbol. The palimpsest

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is one of the key expressive means in Nexus where images are superimposed onto others, presenting interwoven historical narratives. Daniel Goldman, in his reading of the series, refers to the nexus between past and present traumatic events: The conuence of both histories is the starting-point for his photographs assault on oblivion, carried out by setting our memories in motion, by legitimizing denunciation as one of the possible functions of art (N, 104). Marking Time: Archives, Forest and Buried Books In the same mode of political resistance against oblivion, Brodsky created the series The Archives (2001). In 1999, the existence of archives kept by the Province of Buenos Aires Intelligence Department was made public. Human Rights activists were allowed access and photographs were taken of the archives. Brodsky, having seen this photographic evidence, decided to photograph the les himself. His brothers le takes centre stage in this series. Brodskys digital images of decaying ofcial records, photographed in the strong light of the archive, serve to emphasise the existence of documents but without bodies, as do titles such as Titles such as Bodies and H beas Corpus a S-T. The poetic takes of deteriorating les infer the basic human need to mourn. This is not only a human need but a human right so the search for justice is recorded digitally, and the perishable fragile papers are recovered through an electronic medium. In the series The Memory Forest (2000) Brodsky is not in search of enduring memory but the transient nature of any act of memorialization. In the city of Tucum n, a city that suffered a particularly during the dictatorship, a forest was created as homage to the disappeared. Each family planted a tree and messages were added. Five trees are shown in Nexus (Tucum n 2000). With the a ravages of time the signs left by the relatives are slowly becoming the disappearing traces of these young lives. The photographers role here is to record what is left whilst working against time. James E. Young refers to an example of a disappearing monument erected in Germany (The Harburg Monument Against War and Fascism and for Peace, 198693).33 The monument was unveiled in October 1986 and by November 1993 had disappeared. In Youngs study this work is seen as a counter-monument, created to provoke the viewer by self-consciously problematizing the ways time, memory, and current history intersect at any memorial site. How better to remember a vanished people than by the perpetually unnished, ever-vanishing

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monument? (AME, 131). In a similar gesture, unlike the archival material, the trees are captured using non-digital technology. Each tree represents a memento mori, a disappeared body, the frailty of humanity and of memory (Today, the signs have almost completely deteriorated, implying a kind of second disappearance for those who would have been remembered (N, 67)). New narratives could be inscribed into these ones. Again, the idea of the palimpsest is a cornerstone of the series, where a seven hundred year old Irish stone tablet is photographed and included symmetrically in a double spread, in the middle of the Tucum n trees. Nowadays the inscriptions in the a Irish stone are hardly legible. The same theme of frailty and temporality is explored in the series The Condemned of the Earth based on images from an installation produced by Brodsky in 1999. The books he photographed had stayed in the garden of N lida Valdez and Oscar Elissanburu for nearly twenty e years. Many Argentineans at the time burnt or buried books for fear of reprisals. This is particularly signicant in a country described by the Argentinean writer Julio Cort zar as being one of full-time readers.34 a Brodsky uses the reference to Rayuela, in this case the multilayered mobile structure of the narrative in search of the complicit reader, to explain the actual reception of the discovered material: Legible in spite of it all, recomposed, they search once again for a reader, after their abandonment, resurrected from the earth (N, 84). Brodsky, by creating these shots of unearthed books that have fallen pray to the ravages of time and decay, highlights the paradox that books were buried, but not bodies. Again the frailty of the material is highlighted. The installation is named after one of the buried books, Fanons The Wretched of the Earth. As Huyssen says, this is not the burial of bodies but the burial of ideals (N, 10). The installation was exhibited as part of the 2000 Buenos Aires Book Fair. During this exhibition Brodsky took photographs of the spectators. A series of four photographs of people gazing at the books are reproduced in the essay. The images I, II and III (N, 8083) capture the moment when the connection is made (again returning to the Nexus of the title). By using these composite images based on mirror images, the reection of the gazes and reactions of the viewers to the display takes centre stage and our focus as viewers is on the responses of past viewers. The same formal display was a key to Brodskys previous photographic essay Good Memory.

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Towards a Conclusion: Re-framing the Figure of the Disappeared Andreas Huyssen in his conference paper Resistance to Memory35 described the historical development of the representations of the gure of the desaparecido in Argentinean culture. He sees a marked distancing now from the initial phase, when only the more personal, familiar characteristics were prominent in the depiction of the desaparecido. In the tentative years after the restoration of democracy, the characteristics that were underlined were those of a more familiar, personal nature in the socio-historical context of the search for societal consensus. Thus, in the initial years of the democracy, certain aspects of the desaparecidos were conveniently forgotten about or played down as part of a series of strategies in order to foment a public debate about the recent traumatic events. Here we have examples such as the 1985 lm directed by Luis Puenzo, La historia ocial (The Ofcial History), where the political drama is played out as a family melodrama. In the current climate, Huyssen sees a politicization of the gure of the desaparecido in the search for a heroic narrative. Many want to revive the idealism of the dead youth ghting against dispossession during the period of economic freefall. In his analysis, Huyssen sees the gure of the desaparecido recast as that of the activist,36 instead of the victim of earlier representations. If we apply this reading of the general situation to Brodskys work, we can see that, by comparing Nexus with his previous photographic essay, there is a clear shift in the representation of the disappeared: In Good Memory Nando (Brodskys brother) is represented exclusively in the familiar context (a family drama in the style of La historia ocial). In Nexus all the material included on Nando originates from the polices secret les where all his subversive activities were detailed. If Huyssen sees a changing trend in representation that goes from victim to activist, this analysis works when contrasting the two photographic essays by Brodsky. In a climate where political exile is no longer an issue whereas nancial exile or marginalization is rampant, the activities of a more idealistic past youth can be reinscribed against the unfolding social situation. In Hugo Vezzettis analysis Scenes from a Crisis his view on the dynamics of social memory is the following:
In reality, memory is made of facilitations (a Freudian notion), that is to say, dense signications, gures and scenes that establish points of condensation and anchorage with respect to the past and forge exemplary values, which are not given once and for all but require constant reworking and reinforcement from the present. (AAVV , 166)

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Brodskys photographs aim to facilitate the nexus between past and present traumas, between cultures and generations, concepts and objects, stories and history, and between ethics and sthetics. The strength of Brodskys images lies in the fact that his photographed objects manage to convey loss and mourning, and in the process recover memories. Brodsky has evolved as an artist from Good Memory to Nexus when dealing with social memory and trauma. Nexus offers a more political reading of history whilst at the same time problematizing representation in photography. In Horacio Gonz lezs words: a Marcelo Brodskys art consists of the patient interrogation of those objects, and of the photograph, also, in its condition as object (N, 17). The photographers weathered books, trees, archives and stolen personal belongings are moving objects (present signiers of absence) in a continuous past, exploring the formal qualities of the photographic image to reveal the passing of time and resistance to oblivion. NOTES
1 Marcelo Brodsky, Buena memoria (Buenos Aires, Asunto impreso, 1997), hereafter abbreviated GM. 2 Marcelo Brodsky, Nexo (Buenos Aires, La Marca editora, 2001), hereafter abbreviated N. 3 The preliminary research for this piece was carried out in Buenos Aires with the generous support of the British Academy. 4 For an extensive analysis of the notion of postmemory see Mieke Bal, Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (Hanover NH, University Press of New England, 1999). 5 Andreas Huyssen, The Culture of Memory, transcript of lecture delivered in Buenos Aires and Santiago (Buenos Aires, Proyecto Memoria archive, 1998), 23; hereafter abbreviated CM. I accessed a transcript of this lecture a photocopied version was circulated within memory-related academic projects in Argentina in the archives of Proyecto Memoria, housed at the University of Buenos Aires. 6 Saul Sosnowski, Represi n y reconstrucci n de una cultura: el caso argentino (Buenos o o Aires, Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires, 1988), 48. 7 William Rowe and Vivian Schelling, Memory and Modernity: Popular Culture in Latin America (London, Verso, 1991), 11920. 8 Silvia Finocchio and In s Dussel, Haciendo Memoria en el pas de Nunca M s e a (Buenos Aires, Eudeba, 1997), ixxi. 9 The group photograph can be accessed in the web exhibition of Buena memoria at http://www.zonezero.com/exposiciones/fotografos/brodsky/ grupo.html.

Tracing the Past: Marcelo Brodskys Photography as Memory Art 119 10 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (London, Vintage, 1981), hereafter abbreviated CL. 11 Annette Kuhn, Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination (London, Verso, 2002), 23. 12 Photograph no. 15 in the series can be accessed at http://www.zonezero.com/ exposiciones/fotografos/brodsky/memo/nando.html 13 Leonor Arfuch, Album de familia, in Punto de vista 56 (1996), 89. 14 This image of Nando can be viewed in the web exhibition http://www. zonezero.com/exposiciones/fotografos/brodsky/memo/nando.html 15 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (New York and London, Routledge, 1994), xix. 16 Goldsteins series Deaths death can be viewed at http://www.andygoldstein. org/. 17 Sara Facio, La fotografa en la Argentina: desde 1840 a nuestros das (Bilingual edition Spanish/English), (Buenos Aires, La Azotea, 1985), 923; hereafter abbreviated LF. 18 Photograph no. 6 in the series that can be accessed at: http://www.zonezero. com/exposiciones/fotografos/brodsky/memo/nando.html 19 Juan Gelman, Interrupciones I (Buenos Aires, Seix Barral, 1997). 20 This image can be accessed in Novaks website project Collected Visions: http://cvisions.cat.nyu.edu/novak/photographs.html. 21 Marianne Hirsch, Projected Memory: Holocaust Photographs in Personal and Public Fantasy, in Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, edited by Mieke Bal (Hanover and London, University Press of New England, 1999), 8; hereafter abbreviated PM. 22 Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the Aids Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997), 46. 23 Robert Hughes, American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America (London, The Harvill Press, 1997), 570. 24 Jean Laplanche and J.B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis (London, The Hogarth Press, 1973), 251. 25 Nelly Richard, Notas sobre La Memoria Obstinada (1996) de Patricio Guzm n, Revista de crtica cultural 15 (1997), 5960; hereafter abbreviated a NS. 26 Elizabeth Jelin, La pol tica de la memoria: el movimiento de derechos humanos y la construcci n democr tica en la Argentina, in Juicio, castigos o a y memorias, edited by Acu a Carlos et al (Buenos Aires, Ediciones Nueva n Visi n, 1995), 142. o 27 Yosef Yerushalmi, Reexiones sobre el olvido, in Usos del olvido, edited by Y. Yerushalmi, N. Loraux, H Mommsen, J. C. Milner and G. Vattimo, (Buenos Aires, Ediciones Nueva Visi n, 1989), 18; hereafter abbreviated o REF. The act of transmission is the main aim of Brodskys project, having

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Paragraph taken on board the responsibility of the witness as understood by Yerushalmi, where a community cannot forget what has not been given (REF, 18). Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge and London, Harvard University Press, 2002). Cathy Caruth (ed.), Introduction in Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore and London, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 1011. Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York and London, Routledge, 1995). Dorota Glowacka, Disappearing Traces: Emmanuel Levinas, Ida Finks Literary Testimony, and Holocaust Art, in Between Ethics and Aesthetics: Crossing the Boundaries, edited by D. Glowacka and Stephen Boos (Albany, State University of New York Press, 2002), 99; hereafter abbreviated DT. Marjorie Agos (ed.), Taking Root: Narratives of Jewish Women in Latin America n (Athens (Ohio), Ohio University Centre for International Studies, 2002), xv. James E. Young, At Memorys Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 2000); hereafter abbreviated AME. Julio Cort zar, Rayuela, edited by Julio Ortega, Sa l Yurkievich (Madrid, a u CSIC, 1991). The main character in the novel, Oliveira, depicts the citizens of Buenos Aires as a race of full-time readers whose daily routines are dominated by their obsessive reading habits. Andreas Huyssen, Resistance to Memory, conference paper delivered at the International Conference Forgetting held at the Institute of Romance Studies, 45 July 2002. This also has to be contextualized in terms of the increased role of the anti-globalization movement in Argentina.

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