Special Issue Final

Journal of Romance Studies
Interdisciplinary Research in French,

Hispanic, Italian and Portuguese Cultures
Managing Editor
Bill Marshall, Institute of Modern Languages Research
Editorial Committee
Abigail Lee Six, Royal Holloway London
Katia Pizzi, Institute of Modern Languages Research
Jordana Blejmar, Institute of Modern Languages Research
Editorial Advisory Board

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, New York University
Michael Caesar, University of Birmingham
Anne J. Cruz, University of Illinois-Chicago
Jane E. Everson, Royal Holloway London
Charles Forsdick, University of Liverpool
Simon Gaunt, King’s College London
Adalgisa Giorgio, University of Bath
John Gledson, University of Liverpool
Barry Ife, Guildhall School of Music and Drama
Jo Labanyi, New York University
Helder Macedo, King’s College London
Bernard McGuirk, University of Nottingham
Paulo de Medeiros, University of Utrecht
Sylvia Molloy, New York University
Hilary Owen, University of Manchester
Letizia Panizza, Royal Holloway London
Luisa Passerini, European University Institute, Florence
Joan Ramon Resina, Cornell University
David Robey, University of Reading
Ellen Sapega, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Paul Julian Smith, City University of New York
Lieve Spaas, Kingston University
Susan Rubin Suleiman, Harvard University
Michael Worton, University College London
Volume 13 Number 3 Winter 2013
SPECIAL ISSUE: Revisiting postmemory: The intergenerational

transmission of trauma in post-dictatorship Latin American culture
Introduction 1
Jordana Blejmar and Natalia Fortuny
Articles
Their lives after: Theatre as testimony and the so-called ‘second 6
generation’ in post-dictatorship Argentina
Mariana Eva Perez
Infancia clandestina or the will of faith 17
Gonzalo Aguilar
Urban photography as counter-monument in Urruzola’s Miradas 32
ausentes (en la calle)
David Rojinsky
Toying with history: Playful memory in Albertina Carri’s Los rubios 44
Jordana Blejmar
Visual archives of loss and longing in Chile: Mi vida con Carlos by 62
Germán Berger Hertz
Lisa Renee DiGiovanni
Humour and the descendants of the disappeared: Countersigning 75
bloodline affiliations in post-dictatorial Argentina
Cecilia Sosa
Ekphrastic anxiety and the technological mediation of memory in 88
post-dictatorship narratives from Brazil
Edward King
Glances in the landscape: Photography and memory in the work of 99
Guadalupe Gaona
Natalia Fortuny
Afterword
Remembering without memories 110
Carlos Gamerro
Notes on contributors 116
LIST OF SPECIAL ISSUES (ONE PER YEAR FROM 2013). THE OTHER
ISSUES EACH YEAR ARE OPEN ISSUES.
Vol. 1.1 (Spring 2001): ‘Women and Representation: Spain, Portugal, Latin America’,
ed. Dorothy L. Severin
Vol. 1.3 (Winter 2001): ‘Forgetting Africa’, ed. Jo Labanyi and AbdoolKarim Vakil
Vol. 2.1 (Spring 2002): ‘Contemporary Women’s Writing in French’, ed. Gill Rye
Vol. 2.3 (Winter 2002): ‘Spaces of Transculturation: Architecture and Identity in Latin
America’, ed. Felipe Hernández
Vol. 3.1 (Spring 2003): ‘Cultures of Remembrance/Culture as Remembrance’, ed. Jo
Labanyi
Vol. 3.3 (Winter 2003): ‘Rewriting’, ed. Ziva Ben-Porat
Vol. 4.1 (Spring 2004): ‘Film Remakes’, ed. Lucy Mazdon
Vol. 4.3 (Winter 2004): ‘Cultural Traffic in the Medieval Romance World’, ed. Simon
Gaunt and Julian Weiss
Vol. 5.1 (Spring 2005): ‘Competing Colonialisms: The Portuguese, Spanish and French
Presence in Asia’, ed. Jo Labanyi and Ross G. Forman
Vol. 5.3 (Winter 2005): ‘Black Paris’, ed. Samantha Haigh and Nicki Hitchcott
Vol. 6.1–2 (Spring– ‘Sartre and his “Others”’, ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman and Sara Kippur
Summer 2006):
Vol. 7.1 (Spring 2007): ‘Women and the Imagined City’, ed. Margaret Andrews with
Katia Pizzi
Vol. 7.3 (Winter 2007): ‘Literature and the Mathematical’, ed. Mairéad Hanrahan
Vol. 8.1 (Spring 2008): ‘The Well-Travelled Lens: Studies in Photography and Cultural
Encounter, Memory and Identity’, ed. Colette Wilson
Vol. 8.3 (Winter 2008): ‘Translation, Adaptation, Performance’
Vol. 9.1 (Spring 2009): ‘Airing the Private: Women’s Diaries in the Luso-Hispanic
World’, ed. Maria-José Blanco and Sinéad Wall
Vol. 9.3 (Winter 2009): ‘The Witness and the Text’, ed. Debra Kelly and Gill Rye
Vol. 10.1 (Spring 2010): ‘Overcoming Postmodernism: The Debate on New Italian Epic’,
ed. Claudia Boscolo
Vol. 10.3 (Winter 2010): ‘Psychoanalysis and Italian Studies’, ed. Lesley Caldwell and
Francesco Capello
Vol. 11.1 (Spring 2011): ‘Fluid Cartographies – New Modernities’, ed. Isabel Capeloa Gil
and João Ferreira Duarte
Vol. 11.3 (Winter 2011): ‘Psychoanalysis and Portuguese Studies’, ed. Paulo de Medeiros
and Hilary Owen
Vol. 12.1 (Spring 2012): ‘The Gothic Mode in the Cultures of the Romance Languages’,
ed. Abigail Lee Six
Vol. 12.3 (Winter 2012): ‘New Approaches to Gramsci: Language, Philosophy and
Politics’, ed. Alessandro Carlucci
FORTHCOMING SPECIAL ISSUES

Introduction
Jordana Blejmar and Natalia Fortuny
In recent years we have witnessed the appearance of a growing corpus of cultural texts
by the so-called ‘second generations’ of the military regimes that ruled Latin America
during the second half of the twentieth century. Simultaneously, the field of memory
studies has seen a burgeoning of investigations into these artistic interventions. Such
academic works have been confronted with the difficulties inherent in discussing a
corpus that draws together primary texts with as many points of difference as points
in common. Indeed, beyond their fragmentary aesthetics, which formally evoke
disappearance and patchy childhood memories, it is not always clear what these texts
have in common. Does the generational mark in these works dominate the class,
gender or national concerns of their authors? What kinds of dialogues do they
establish with their parents’ generations or with the cultural texts of the 1980s and
1990s in Latin America? And what does the prefix ‘post’, so often attached to these
memories (post-revolutionary, post-dictatorial, postmemory, post-traumatic and even
post-generational), actually mean? This special issue addresses these questions by
looking at a series of films, novels, plays and photographic artefacts from Argentina,
Brazil, Chile and Uruguay.
The majority of the articles included here were originally presented at the
conference Visualising Violence: Art, Memory and Dictatorship in Latin America, which
took place on 13 and 14 January 2012, sponsored by the Centre for Research in the
Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) and by the Centre of Latin American
Studies at the University of Cambridge. Perhaps the most striking outcome of the
conference was the realization that the Latin American dictatorships of the twentieth
century were not simply providing ‘cases’ or ‘examples’ to prove theories and terms
coined in Europe and in the United States to explain other liminal experiences of
collective suffering, paradigmatically the legacies of the Shoah. Instead, current
research studies showed how such experiences were challenging these theories, testing
their limits and extending our understanding on the intergenerational transmission
of trauma.
One key example of this phenomenon is the recent debate among Latin
Americanists on the usefulness and pertinence of the notion of ‘postmemory’ (a term
coined by the Romanian Professor Marianne Hirsch in 1997) to refer to the memory
of the children of the disappeared and of other members of the post-dictatorship
generation in the region. According to Hirsch, postmemory describes the specific
structure of an inter- and intra-generational act of transfer involving the memory of
the children of victims of traumatic events, a type of memory that she (and other
Journal of Romance Studies Volume 13 Number 3, Winter 2013: 1–5

doi:10.3167/jrs.2013.130301 ISSN 1473–3536 (Print), ISSN 1752–2331 (Online)
2 Jordana Blejmar and Natalia Fortuny
scholars such as James E. Young) define as mediated, indirect, vicarious, fragmented,

belated and displaced, linked to the past not via recall but via imagination, and shaped
by the testimonies of adult survivors, inherited images and the discourses of mass
media they grew up with. Though Hirsch developed the notion in relation to children
of Holocaust survivors like herself, in a recent article she stated her belief that the term
is useful to designate other second-generation memories of collective traumas,
including those of the Latin American dictatorships.
The notion of ‘postmemory’ has, indeed, become a common reference point in
works on the legacies of the dictatorial past in the region. Yet, it is worth asking to
what extent these studies engage critically with this notion, and what aspects of the
local cases are occluded or highlighted when we approach them under the lenses of
postmemory. In her reading of the Chilean documentary Mi vida con Carlos, for
example, Lisa DiGiovanni argues that one issue requiring further examination is the
relationship between postmemories and nostalgic longing in post-dictatorial literary
and visual material. Against the common assumption that postmemories are more
concerned with the past than with the future, for DiGiovanni the Jamesonian critical
nostalgia that she believes describes some of the works by the descendants of the
victims ‘is not only about the past, but also about visualizing progressive collectivities
and new forms of solidarity in a post-revolutionary context’.
In her article, Mariana Eva Perez is even reluctant to define the performative
testimonies of the actors of Lola Arias’ Mi vida después as postmemories. She agrees
with Argentine literary theorist Beatriz Sarlo who warns us that ‘postmemory’ is a
category (an ‘academic fashion?’, asks Perez, provocatively) whose necessity is yet to
be proved. A key problematic issue at the heart of the uncritical adoption of such a
notion to refer to the recollections of the children of the Latin American dictatorships,
Perez argues, lies in the intrinsic differences between children ‘raised by traumatized
parents who survived Nazi concentration camps’ and those whose parents are absent
because of ‘enforced disappearance’, which converts them into a very particular type
of orphan: ‘they are orphans without a corpse, orphans of spectres’. Perez concludes
that it is perhaps time to find an alternative conceptual framework that considers not
only the transmission of parents’ memory, but also the children’s own memories, a
framework that understands the children of the disappeared not as ‘adoptive’ or
‘secondhand’ victims and witnesses, but as victims and witnesses in their own right,
with their own experiences of the horror that are linked to, but nonetheless different
from, those of their parents.
Although equally cautious of the risks inherent in adapting foreign categories to
local situations, other scholars who have contributed articles here still find the
structure of postmemory a useful tool to refer to the legacies of the Latin American
dictatorships. Cecilia Sosa, for example, echoes Hirsch’s distinction between ‘affiliative
postmemory’ and ‘familial postmemory’ in her study on Felix Bruzzone’s Los topos.
For Sosa, Hirsch’s exploration of a form of generational transmission of trauma that
goes beyond bloodlines and becomes available to other contemporaries (as opposed
to the one that takes place within the family circle) is useful when reading this novel,
Introduction 3
written by a son of disappeared parents who has displaced and ‘queered’, precisely,
kinship ties.
Furthermore, the central role of (family) photographs for post-dictatorship
generations, as demonstrated in the articles by Natalia Fortuny and David Rojinsky,
lends some credence to Hirsch’s claim that photography is the object-bridge between
generations par excellence when it comes to the interruption of a transmission that,
until the outbreak of dictatorships or wars, appeared to have developed more
naturally. In the case of these artistic works, the artists aim to show not only Barthes’
dictum of the ‘having been there’ of photography, but also the ‘not having been
there’, the void left by disappearance, the ‘well of air’ or ‘absent gaze’, structurally
shown in these essays via what Hirsch calls ‘meta-photographic texts’ (meaning family
photographs, reproduced, described and placed in narrative contexts), montage, re-
framings, artistic interventions and counter-monumental practices.
Given these diverse positions, we should perhaps conclude that the question of
whether or not we should keep calling the films, novels, artworks and plays examined
in this issue ‘postmemorial’ works is perhaps less important than acknowledging what
they all have in common beyond national frontiers and the specificities of each
regime. Because even though we recognize the different contexts in which all these
works were produced, we still believe that they pay testament to a new generational
formation of cultural memory in Latin America. At the risk of appearing too
schematic, we will briefly list here what we see as its main features.
Firstly, the artistic productions by the young artists and writers addressed in this
issue bring to light new reconfigurations of the public–private dichotomy. Emerging
in a context of the crisis of testimony, the exhaustion of substantial communities and
the publicization of the intimate through new technologies, the artworks by post-
dictatorship generations are marked by a subjective (yet deliberately fictional) tone.
The focus on the private life of the young that characterizes many of these ‘poetics of
the I’, however, is less a symptom of the withdrawal of politics from the public sphere
than the consequence of a major displacement defined by the understanding of the
relationship between the private and the public as political. In this vein, in his article
on contemporary Brazilian novels, Edward King explores the reconfiguration of the
borders between the individual and collective identities that he sees as being catalysed
by the increasing technological mediation of memory, another key feature of our
times.
A second attribute of these works is the blending of autobiography with fiction in
a way that was not common in films, literature and testimonies of the 1980s and
1990s. Those narratives dealt with the dictatorial past mostly in terms of representation,
whether as realistic accounts or as allegorical figurations. Conversely, the works of the
post-dictatorship generations are less concerned about representing the past in
fictional narratives or about presenting it in autobiographies, than about mixing
testimony and fiction and concealing as much as exposing the identity and lives of
their authors. This attribute is particularly clear in the Argentine texts examined in
this issue, such as the autofictions Los rubios, Los topos and Infancia clandestina, as well
as the biodrama Mi vida después. As Gonzalo Aguilar argues in his article on Benjamin
4 Jordana Blejmar and Natalia Fortuny
Ávila’s film, fiction here should be understood as forgery and construction, rather
than as lie or false story. According to this notion of fiction, Ávila’s film, as well as
similar post-dictatorial autofictions, brings to light a new understanding of the term
testimony. In these works the testimonial value lies not so much in documentary
proof or in indexical references but rather in the way in which the narrative is
assembled, with its own rules and conception of truth, not always coincident with
‘what happened’ for real in the past.
A third key feature worth mentioning here is the interdisciplinary nature of the
cultural texts produced by the post-dictatorship generations. Their performances use
music, photography and cinema in their staging; their film documentaries break the
rules of genre by repressing fact and instead introducing animation and fiction to
depict memory work; and their photographic essays are accompanied by poems and
performance. The articles in this issue explore the original aesthetics of these visual
memories which are marked by the use of montage, collage, text, image, fragmentation
and visual anachronisms.
Finally, many of these works exercise what Jordana Blejmar calls a ‘playful
memory’ of the past, defined by a desacralized and non-solemn form of recollection,
a type of memory that provides a new perspective on the past (the child-like gaze),
and that often connects the horror of the authoritarian regimes with the violence
inherent in everyday objects and market practices in democratic societies. Moreover,
playful memories also create the conditions for a potential discussion of taboo issues,
such as the role of the children in the armed struggles. This singularity of second-
generation memories is also stressed by Cecilia Sosa, who explores the role of (dark)
humour among the children of disappeared parents in dealing with loss, and by
Mariana Eva Perez, who suggests that performers of Mi vida después transmit their
parents’ stories with a playful mood.
To conclude, we would like to thank the writer Carlos Gamerro, who kindly gave
us permission to translate and publish a paper presented at the Frankfurt Book Fair
in 2010, the original version of which was published in Spanish by the Argentine
newspaper Página/12. We find particularly stimulating his idea of autobiography as
a genre that accounts for a history not of what happened in the past but of what could
have happened, a position that offers a useful way of thinking through the cultural
production of recent decades in post-dictatorship Argentina. Gamerro challenges us
to explore the links between truth, experience and memory, not least when he claims
that new generations have the right to do with history what they please as they are
shaped by that history or, in his words, as it is that history that has made them.
Moreover, even though, as this introduction and the articles that follow demonstrate,
there are no two identical representations of the traumatic past (just as there are no
two identical histories of violence, disappearance and inheritance), and even though
Gamerro’s article focuses on Argentine literature, we believe that his ideas apply
equally well to many other post-dictatorship cultural memories in Latin America.
Within what we call a generation there are members of different ages, diverse
backgrounds and distinct (sometimes even opposite) positions towards history, as well
as singular ways of addressing the aftermath of the Latin American dictatorships in
Introduction 5
art. The corpus of the texts analysed here, together with their scholarly interpretations,
recognize that the dialogues between generations and those among peers are made by
continuities and common grounds, but also by ruptures, distances and disagreements;
that is, after all, the true nature of an affective (and effective) act of transmission.
Their lives after: Theatre as testimony and the so-called
‘second generation’ in post-dictatorship Argentina
Mariana Eva Perez
Abstract
In this article, I will examine the play Mi vida después [My Life After], in which six
professional actors present and re-enact the stories of their parents’ experiences of state
terror in Argentina, as well as their own relationship with that past. In other analyses
of this production, authors have turned to Marianne Hirsch’s notion of postmemory
in order to examine the generational dimensions of trauma and its remembrance. I
will argue against this approach to understanding the experience of the so-called
‘second generation’ in Argentina in general and the ‘hijos de desaparecidos’ [children
of disappeared] in particular. Instead, this article aims to show how Mi vida después
highlights the need to search for new categories that can account for what this group of
former child victims has lived firsthand. In addition, I will suggest that this play could
be understood as a collective performance of testimony that relates not to the atrocities
committed in the recent past as such, but to how those who were children at the time,
whether or not they were physically affected by state violence, deal with the legacy today.
Keywords: children of disappeared; postmemory; second generation; theatre; testimony
The so-called ‘second generation’ in post-dictatorship Argentina

Mi vida después, a play written and directed by young Argentinean playwright Lola
Arias, premiered in the municipal Teatro Sarmiento in Buenos Aires in 2009. It was
conceived as part of the acclaimed cycle of documentary theatre, called ‘Biodrama’.1
As the theatre programme explained:
En Mi vida después seis actores nacidos en la década del setenta y principios del ochenta
reconstruyen la juventud de sus padres a partir de fotos, cartas, cintas, ropa usada,
relatos, recuerdos borrados. ¿Quiénes eran mis padres cuando yo nací? ¿Cómo era la
Argentina cuando yo no sabía hablar? (…) Cada actor hace una remake de escenas del
pasado para entender algo del futuro. Como dobles de riesgo de sus padres, los hijos se
ponen su ropa y tratan de representar su vida. (Arias 2009: 7)
[In My life after six actors born in the 70s and early 80s reconstruct their parents’ youth
from photos, letters, tapes, used clothes, stories, dim memories. Who were my parents
when I was born? What was Argentina like before I learned to speak? (…) Each actor
remakes scenes from the past in order to understand something of the future. As if they
were their parents’ stunt doubles, they put on their clothes and try to represent their
lives.]

Theatre as testimony in post-dictatorship Argentina 7
The actors in the play each have a different story to tell: Carla Crespo and Mariano
Speratti are so-called ‘children of disappeared’; Liza Casullo was born in Mexico,
where her parents were exiled; Vanina Falco’s father was – unbeknown to her – a
member of the police under the dictatorship, and was involved in the repression; Blas
Arrese Igor is a son of a former priest; and Pablo Lugones is a son of a bank employee
who had no interest in politics. Although there are no main or secondary characters
in the play – the texts and action are equally distributed between all actors – the
narrative is nonetheless organized around those who directly suffered from state
violence. At the same time, as Cecilia Sosa suggests, it is clear that within ‘this
generational assemblage, the stories of those who (…) were not “directly affected” by
the dictatorship, have a crucial role to play. They help [us] to grasp to what extent the
resonances of trauma can be processed in a collective way’ (2009: 6).
The still unresolved problem of the desaparecidos [disappeared] in Argentina also
implies a dilemma of representation: how to account for these ghostly figures,
suspended between life and death? Mi vida después responds to this challenge with
very contemporary, non-representative strategies. At first glance, then, it seems the
play could be more easily integrated into the current European performance scene
than the Latin American tradition of protest theatre. In fact, the playwright and
director has lived and worked in Germany and Switzerland. A world apart from the
mimetic strategies that prevailed in the realist theatre committed to the defence of
human rights, Mi vida después incorporates a wide variety of stage devices: addressing
the audience, manipulating photographs, playing live music, filming and screening
videos, singing and dancing, setting up and dismantling the scenery, dressing as their
parents or as the parents of the others. The performers seem to try everything they can
to transmit their parents’ stories, and they do so in a playful mood. In an interview I
conducted with Carla Crespo and Mariano Speratti, they explicitly used the verb ‘to
play’ to allude to these moments, experienced by both as a relief from the ‘testimonial’
sections of the piece.2 On the other hand, when the actors recount particularly
dramatic episodes they do so in a tone that combines critical distance and irony, while
still avoiding cynicism. This combination of a haunting subject and ludic devices may
go some way to explaining why the play has been such a great success with both
audiences and critics. As part of different international festivals, the production has
toured several cities in Latin America and Europe. It was presented annually in
Buenos Aires from its premier in 2009 until 2012. It has also received significant
academic attention, both from within Argentina and abroad. Among these scholarly
works, I am particularly interested in those that use the concept of postmemory, as
coined by Marianne Hirsch in her work on the children of Holocaust survivors.
Hirsch has described postmemory as ‘the relationship of the second generation to
powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their births but that were
nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their
own right’ (2008: 103). Paola Hernández turns to this notion in her analysis of Mi
vida después as documentary theatre, in order to reflect upon the performers’
connection with what she calls ‘the archive’ – the original photographs and other
objects manipulated on stage. According to her, the play dismantles the certainty of
8 Mariana Eva Perez
the archive, bringing the referent into doubt and focusing our attention upon on the
private relationship that the children establish with their fathers’ absence – a
connection, she argues, that is characterized by the kind of creative bond that Hirsch
attributes to postmemory (2011: 123–125). Cecilia Sosa also examines the concept
of postmemory in relation to the play, but her analysis is more critical, questioning
Hirsch’s distinction between ‘familial’ and ‘affiliative’ postmemory (Hirsch 2008:
114), which still concedes pre-eminence to the family:
Arias’ piece can help us to challenge Hirsch’s idea of postmemory from a novel
perspective. It can teach us how the forms of recollection of the second generations
divert from the tropes of familial narratives (…) [The] theatrical operation performed
by My life after can help to detach the structure of postmemory from the tropes of the
family. (Sosa 2009: 8, 17)
According to Brenda Werth, the future-oriented dimension of Mi vida después,

which is evident in the final scene entitled El día de mi muerte [The Day of my
Death],
instigate[s] a shift from postmemory to prememory, emancipating characters from

the notion of the past as dominant referent in their lives. Arias’s performers position
themselves in relation to the past, present, and future by focusing less attention on
the idea of aftermath and more on the idea of a continuum of experience, shaped by
both the reinterpretation of past events and the speculation of events to come. (2010:
103–104)
My own approach to the concept of postmemory echoes that of Beatriz Sarlo when
she states that postmemory is ‘una categoría cuya necesidad debe probarse’ (2005:
126) [‘a category whose necessity must be proved’]. But even Sarlo, after debating the
concept and its applicability to post-dictatorship Argentina, concludes that the term
‘postmemory’ should be understood as ‘tanto un efecto de discurso como una relación
particular con los materiales de reconstrucción’ (2005: 157) [‘as much an effect of
discourse as a particular relation with the materials of reconstruction’].
I wish to pose the following questions: is the category of postmemory necessary to
emphasize the creative work with the archive involved in Mi vida después (Hernández),
the emergence of a non-familial politics of mourning (Sosa), the possibility of a future
which is less determined by the past (Werth), or the subjective dimension of the
reconstruction made by ‘children’ (Sarlo)? Is there a significant additional meaning
that this concept brings to these authors’ analyses? Surely they could say the same
about the play (or, in Sarlo’s case, about other artistic productions by ‘children’)
without turning to postmemory. Why, then, has the reference to postmemory become
mandatory? Is it simply a matter of ‘academic fashion’ or is there a more substantive
explanation for the apparent popularity of the term? Besides these questions, I would
like to pay attention to other problems that arise when the concept of postmemory is
‘imported’ into the context of post-dictatorship Argentina.
How and to what extent being raised by traumatized parents who survived Nazi
concentration camps might be analogous to the experience of losing one’s parents
because of enforced disappearance, is something that remains unexplained in all

works that apply the concept of postmemory to the Argentine case. The first, clear
difference between these two historically distinct scenarios is that the so-called
‘children of disappeared’ are orphans, and very particular ones: they are orphans
without a corpse, orphans of spectres. This is not a metaphor. According to Avery
Gordon:
[D]isappearance is a state-sponsored procedure for producing ghosts to harrowingly

haunt a population into submission (…) It is (…) specifically designed to break down
the distinctions between visibility and invisibility, certainty and doubt, life and death
that we normally use to sustain an ongoing and more or less dependable existence.
Disappearance targets haunting itself, targets just that state of being vulnerable, and also
alert, to the precariousness of social order. (2008: 115–126)
This element of radical uncertainty and the consequent denial of the right to
mourn constitute specific experiences that distinguish the Argentinean case from that
of the children of Holocaust survivors. In addition, in several cases the ‘children of
disappeared’ in Argentina have themselves been kidnapped, detained, tortured,
sexually abused, or even murdered (CONADEP 1997: 299–331), while over 500
babies, most of them born in concentration camps, were taken from their parents,
had their identities erased and were given to families associated with the regime – a
particular technique of disappearance known as ‘apropiación’ [appropriation]. These
are not only the children of direct victims, they are also direct victims themselves; not
a second generation, but the first generation of victims of those crimes. Even those
who were not kidnapped or tortured continue today to suffer the effects of their
parents’ disappearance, the full implications of which have not yet been
comprehensively studied. The ‘Colectivo de hijos (Cdh)’, a group of former child
victims who initially accepted and identified with the name ‘children of detained-
disappeared and murdered’, have now provocatively redefined themselves as ‘orphans
scientifically produced by the genocide’ (Calisto 2012: 5).3 The group asserts that in
the ‘children-of’ discourse sustained by media, the human rights movement and
scholars, ‘permanece velado, detrás de la sobredeterminación del vínculo, el alcance
del accionar genocida sobre sus propios cuerpos’ (Goyochea, Surraco and Perez 2011:
3) [‘there remains, hidden behind the veil of the over- determined familial bond, the
impact of the genocidal action upon their own bodies’].
By drawing attention to the first-hand experiences of this group of victims, I am
not trying to suggest that the ‘transgenerational transmission of trauma’, as Gabriele
Schwab puts it, has no relevance in the Argentinean case (2010: 8). Although Schwab
cites Hirsch’s work, she defines her own central concept of ‘haunting legacies’ in
terms of ‘things hard to recount or even to remember, the results of a violence that
holds an unrelenting grip on memory yet is deemed unspeakable’ (2010: 1). This
alternative approach can be adopted in order to include not only the transmission of
parents’ memory, but also the children’s own memories. Another concept that is
useful in the search for new ways to account for the experience of the ‘children of
disappeared’ is the notion of ‘unthought knowledge’, which Schwab borrows from
10 Mariana Eva Perez
Christopher Bollas to refer ‘to experiences in infancy before the acquisition of

language (…) relevant for the inscription of traumatic experiences that are (…)
registered but not fully lived in a conscious and remembered way’ (2010: 7–8). For
some in this group of victims, this description is accurate: as children, they experienced
– in their own bodies – traumatic events for which they had no language or memory.
Of course, this was not the case for all of them: just as the disappeared were of various
ages when they were kidnapped, so were their children. As Jordana Blejmar warns,
‘Using the rather general concept of “generation” to refer to the memory of the
children of the disappeared also risks erasing the different experiences of the
remembering subjects, whose various ages determine distinct types of memories’
(2012: 35). This may sound obvious, but most of the works that analyse the memory
work of ‘children of the disappeared’ through the lens of generational concepts
overlook this distinction. There are also other variations among this wide group of
victims, which depend on factors such as social class; urban or rural location; family
composition after disappearance; extent of bodily contact with state violence; access
to therapies or other forms of working-through, and so on.
Following on from this discussion, my previous question – ‘why does postmemory
seem to be a mandatory concept for reflecting on the so-called second generation in
post-dictatorship Argentina?’ – could be reformulated in a more productive way as:
‘to what does postmemory draw our attention, and what remains invisible from this
perspective?’ Indeed, it would seem that the conceptual framework of postmemory
conceals more than it reveals. When applied to a specific artistic production such as
Mi vida después, it homogenizes a set of entirely distinct situations, such as being the
son of a disappeared, or being a perpetrator’s daughter. It also limits analysis to the
way in which this ‘second generation’ deals with their parents’ history, making it
difficult to consider the concrete and specific effects produced by that history on their
current lives, ‘their lives after’, as the title of the play suggests. Since Arias’s piece is
rather about what the performers do and have done with the legacy of the past, than
about ‘overwhelming inherited memories’ (Hirsch 2008: 107), postmemory does not
seem to be the most appropriate theoretical frame in which to examine it.
Mi vida después as testimonial theatre

The autobiographical nature of what is narrated and re-enacted on stage during
performances of Mi vida después is, as we have seen, announced from the outset in the
programme of the play. Other paratexts, such as interviews, press releases, and a book
published by Arias and sold in theatres, also insist upon this point. On tour, the cast
added a subtitle in the playbill to remark that the piece was based on their own
biographies. These paratexts precede the play in the audience’s knowledge; in this
sense, they also condition its reception. In addition, during the production, the
performers emphasize the autobiographical element by using their own names and
even, in some performances, through the participation of real family members, such
as Mariano’s young children.
It is claimed that most of the objects they manipulate are originals; whenever this
is not the case, it is announced by the performers. In this way, they highlight the
alleged authenticity of the other objects. This work with original objects was at the
heart of the creative process behind the play. As Mariano Speratti recalls:
Cada uno de nosotros tuvo un primer encuentro con Lola [Arias] por separado. La
consigna era: traigan cosas que tengan que ver con sus padres. La primera instancia fue
sentarse a contar cosas de tus viejos y los elementos, contar por qué los habías elegido
y qué tenían que ver con la historia. Se filmaba y sobre eso se seleccionó a los que
participaron.
[Each one of us had a first meeting with Lola (Arias), one at a time. The instruction was:
bring objects along that have something to do with your parents. The first instance was
to sit and tell stories about your folks and the objects you had chosen, why you chose
them and what they had to do with the history. It was filmed, and on that basis the
participants were selected.]
The mise en scène of the play reinforces this testimonial imprint by directly
addressing parts of the text to the audience. This procedure is not new. While most
plays dealing with the subject of the crimes of the dictatorship and its effects have
tended to adopt a realist approach, it is possible to find examples of what I propose
to call ‘testimonial theatre’ within post-dictatorship Argentine dramaturgy. By
testimonial theatre I do not simply mean a play based on real testimonies; rather, I
wish to describe a genre of theatre that performs testimony. A paradigmatic case of this
might be A propósito de la duda [A Propos of Doubt], by Patricia Zangaro. In this play
several characters (including Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, ‘children of
disappeared’, and perpetrators) alternate in addressing the audience with monologues,
which are interspersed with interactions between the actors on stage (Zangaro 2001:
155–162). On the subject of the monologues, Zangaro wrote:
Intuíamos en la estructura misma del testimonio una clave dramatúrgica: el testimonio

como un monólogo en el que el locutor se constituye naturalmente en testigo, y el
público interpelado, en el depositario de la declaración. La situación testimonial trae
al aquí y ahora, lo que sucedió en otro tiempo y lugar. El in illo tempore, propio de la
narrativa, se convierte en el hic et nunc, esencia del teatro. (Zangaro 2006)
[We sensed in the very structure of testimony a dramaturgical code: the testimony as
a monologue in which the speaker naturally becomes a witness, and the interpellated
audience becomes the receiver of the deposition. The testimonial situation brings to the
here and now that which occurred in another time and place. The in illo tempore, typical
of narrative, becomes the hic et nunc, the essence of theatre.]
Unlike in A propósito de la duda, however, in Mi vida después there is neither

conflict between the characters nor dramatic dialogue. When the performers interact,
they do so in the style of what Arias called a ‘remake’ or reenactment of their parents’
lives, or in order to introduce another actor’s story. Monologues in the play do not
expose inner conflicts, either, but this is not to say that no drama takes place.
Something is being performed on stage, and there is the strong sense that something
is happening, here and now. This may have a lot to do with the fact that the actors are
recounting their own personal histories. If the play were performed by another group
of professional actors, who sought to represent them, would it be equally effective?
Does the moving and stimulating effect of the play lay in the stories that it narrates
or in the fact that the audience knows that these are autobiographical, that the actors
are narrating their own experiences? Following Zangaro, I want to propose that in Mi
vida después the dramatic action resides in the act of bearing witness itself, which takes
place between the actors and the audience, not in every fragmentary monologue in
particular, but in the play as a whole.
According to Carla Crespo, ‘el “testimonio vivo” tenía que ser parte de la obra, era
su génesis y tenía que llegar al público’ [‘“living testimony” had to be a part of the
play, it was its genesis and had to reach the audience’]. Mariano Speratti emphasizes
the director’s work in achieving this: ‘hizo falta que apareciera Lola [Arias] para poder
cristalizar eso. En un punto yo me despersonalicé en relación a la obra. La obra nos
trasciende’ [‘it was necessary that Lola [Arias] appeared in order to crystalize that. At
one point I felt depersonalized in relation to the play. The play goes beyond us’]. In
other words, the piece does not (only) transmit individual testimonies, it performs a
collective testimony that exceeds the personal histories of the performers.
Mi vida después offers another, curious, and more explicit example of its testimonial
nature. During her childhood and teenage years, Vanina Falco believed that her father
was a salesman. She did not know it, but he was a member of the police force, and
had stolen a baby from its detained-disappeared parents in order to raise it as his own
son. Vanina was three years old when she was told she had a new baby brother. In the
play she describes this moment by speaking about a photograph from the time: ‘En
la foto se puede ver que yo estoy feliz pero confundida. No entiendo bien de dónde
vino mi hermano porque no recuerdo haber visto a mi mamá embarazada’ [‘In the
photo I look happy but confused. I don’t really understand where my brother came
from as I never saw my mum pregnant’]. When the boy became an adult and began
to have suspicions about his origins, Vanina helped him to search for his identity.
After he discovered the truth and met his family, the two retained the feeling of being
brother and sister. At the trial, Vanina attempted to testify against her father. At first,
the court would not allow her to so; according to Argentina’s penal law relatives may
not testify against the accused. Vanina and her brother appealed. They argued that
she was already making her testimony public, both in the play and in media articles
about it. While the decision of the Court of Appeal was not unanimous, none of the
judges doubted the testimonial character of Vanina’s narration on stage. Two of the
judges considered that ‘se trata de una información (…) difundida públicamente por
la testigo propuesta, lo cual persuade de la viabilidad de su petición de ser escuchada
en la causa, máxime cuando los datos podrían incorporarse por otros medios’ (Cámara
Nacional de Apelaciones en lo Criminal y Correccional Federal Sala II 2009: 7) [‘this
is information (…) publicly disseminated by the proposed witness, a fact which
should persuade us of the viability of her petition to be heard in the trial, especially
when the data could be incorporated in other ways’]. As a consequence, Vanina was
able to testify not only on stage, but also in court. Her testimony went beyond the
immediate audience to reach a much broader sphere. It produced concrete effects by
contributing to the prosecution of a policeman for the abduction and substitution of

identity of a baby born in captivity.
If Mi vida después stages a testimony, what does it testify about? The answer
changes depending on whether we take a second-generation approach or adopt an
alternative perspective, such as the one suggested by Schwab. From the first point of
view, Carla and Mariano, who both lost their fathers, could be considered as ‘pseudo-
witnesses’, reminiscent of the well-known figure proposed by Giorgio Agamben in
relation to Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved:
The ‘true’ witnesses, the ‘complete’ witnesses, are those who did not bear witness and
could not bear witness. They are those who ‘touched bottom’ (…) The survivors speak
in their stead, by proxy, as ‘pseudo-witnesses’; they bear witness to a missing testimony
(…) Whoever assumes the charge of bearing witness in their name knows that he or she
must bear witness of the impossibility of bearing witness. (Agamben 1999: 34)
In this analogy, the ‘complete witnesses’ would be the disappeared, while their
children would bear witness ‘by proxy’. Agamben and Levi’s concepts could also
enrich our understanding of certain scenes in Mi vida después. For instance, the scene
when Mariano’s little son, sat on his knees, plays the open reel tape recorder and they
both listen to the voice of their disappeared (grand)father, at the same time making
it audible to the audience. Hernández interprets the scene as follows: ‘Aquí, y sólo por
unos instantes, los actores no corporalizan a nadie; sólo dan el espacio para que esta
voz se escuche como parte de un archivo del pasado’ (Hernández 2011: 124) [‘Here,
and just for a few instants, the actors embody no one; they simply make space for this
voice to be listened to as part of an archive of the past’]. In another scene, Carla reads
out the last letter her father wrote to her mother before he was killed while attempting
to take over a military base. Having shared the letter with the audience, she says: ‘Mi
papá se murió cuatro meses antes de que naciera yo. Tenía veintiséis años. Cuando
yo cumplí veintisiete pensé: ahora ya soy más vieja que mi padre’ [‘My dad died four
months before I was born. He was twenty-six years old. When I turned twenty-seven
I thought: now I am older than my father’]. She makes this statement in a sober tone,
neither cold nor emotional. Then, a complete set of drums is brought forward from
the back of the stage and Carla plays a powerful solo. The pain and the anger that she
holds in when she expresses the paradox of being older than her father is released
without words. This drum solo could be understood as an example of bearing witness
to the impossibility of bearing witness. In this sense, the so-called testimonies given
by relatives of disappeared would attest precisely to a central aspect of enforced
disappearance: the impossibility of accounting for a final destiny that remains hidden.
But Mi vida después does not limit itself to exposing this uncertainty. The stories
of how Carla’s father was killed and his body buried in a mass grave, or of how
Mariano’s father was kidnapped and his family never knew anything else about him,
occupy too little space in the piece to be considered as its raison d’être. This small
amount of information coexists with the other performers’ stories and the non-factual
material provided by the six of them, such as childhood questions, nightmares and
how they imagine their future deaths. Facts and dreams, documents and imagination,
all share the space on stage, no one imposing on another. The piece does not fulfil the
promise of reconstructing the youth of the performers’ parents; rather it presents their
dynamic relations with this past. As a result, a conceptual shift is required in order to
offer a proper analysis of Mi vida después. While the notion of postmemory may be
useful to emphasize the ‘imaginative investment, projection and creation’ (Hirsch
2008: 107) involved in the connection of the performers to the past, it runs the risk
of veiling or overlooking their diverse first-hand experiences – of orphanhood in the
case of Carla and Mariano, uprooting in the case of Liza and, in the case of Vanina,
the uncanny discovery of the true identity of her father and brother. In this sense, the
play can be considered as offering testimonies about the consequences of state terror
not as it was in the past, but as it figures in the present, in their lives after.
This shift from postmemory to a new approach that accounts for what the ‘second
generation’ experienced at first hand would be useful for an understanding not only
of this piece but also of an increasing corpus of artistic productions by the so-called
‘second generation’ and ‘children of disappeared’, such as films, novels, poetry and
other theatre plays.
In the specific case of the group of victims collectively named as ‘children of
disappeared’, diverse sets of problems emerge and intersect in their experiences:
torture and abuse perpetrated by state agents on their own bodies (including the
change in their identities); ‘unthought knowledge’ of these traumas; orphanhood
brought about by enforced disappearance or murder; the impossibility or at least the
difficulty of mourning; as well as the ‘transgenerational transmission of trauma’. This
last term is more appropriate than postmemory for incorporating, for instance, the
particular experience of being raised by grandparents or other relatives also affected
by the disappearance of the parents. It is not one or another, first-hand experience
versus inherited memories. It is not bearing witness to their histories versus testifying
‘by proxy’, witnessing on behalf of their disappeared parents or to the impossibility
of accounting for their death. It is both at the same time.
More broadly, the so-called second generation in Argentina comprises a range of
diverse experiences, each linked with different kinds of affect, as demonstrated by the
personal histories of the performers in Mi vida después. As Arias states, ‘[la obra dice]
que todos somos hijos de lo que pasó. Toda nuestra generación fue afectada de una u
otra manera por haber nacido en ese contexto’ (Wajszczuk 2009) [‘[the play tells] that
we are all children of what happened. Our entire generation was affected in one way
or another by having been born in that context’]. The challenge is to find (or to create)
a theoretical frame that allows us to include this variety of experiences. I propose the
category of ‘former child victims’, which might be useful to apply to those bodily
touched by the state terror, victims themselves of diverse abuses when they were
children, who are at present a disregarded population of adults. How can we make
distinctions among this group without imposing hierarchies based on pain, which is
impossible to measure? How can we bring their traumatizing histories into dialogue
with those of their contemporaries?
Mi vida después performs on stage a possible answer to this challenge. The play
does not label the performers or establish hierarchies between them. One scene is
particularly illustrative of the strategy proposed by the piece: in ‘Las muertes de mi

padre’ [‘The Deaths of my Father’], Carla recalls all the versions of this event that she
has known at different times of her life. While she narrates and re-enacts her father,
dressed up as a guerrilla, the other performers, dressed up as their own parents, play
his friends or comrades. By doing so, the play states that the story does not belong
only to Carla; she is not obliged to carry its weight all by herself. By addressing this
testimony to the audience, the performers also involve the public in a collective act of
memory and mourning. This kind of ritual is what confers on Mi vida después its
interpellative power.
Acknowledgement
The research leading to this article has received funding from the European Research
Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-
2013) ERC Grant Agreement no. 240984, ‘NOT’.
Notes
1. The cycle ‘Biodrama’ (2002–2008) was created by the Argentine director Vivi Tellas,
who managed the Teatro Sarmiento (one of the auditoriums of the official theatre circuit)
between 2001 and 2009. ‘Biodrama’ presented theatre plays based on biographical
materials, whose recognition from the audience was a central feature of the artistic
fact. The cycle was so successful that the term ‘biodrama’ became synonymous with
‘documentary theatre’ in Argentina.
2. In Spanish there are two different verbs for ‘to play’ as in ‘to perform’ (‘actuar’) and ‘to
play’ as in ‘to amuse oneself’ (‘jugar’). The actors refer to this second meaning.
3. María Toninetti, member of Colectivo de hijos, explained this term from the genocide
perspective: ‘Lo de “científicamente” se nos presenta como la manera de dar cuenta de
una precisión científica, de una tecnología puesta al servicio del poder, de una maquinaria,
si se quiere. El genocidio no fue producto de una improvisación, sino que existe una
tecnología genocida, basada en investigaciones científicas puestas al servicio de lograr
la reorganización de la sociedad’ (Calisto 2012: 5) [‘“Scientifically” is for us the way of
accounting for a scientific accuracy, a technology at the service of power, a machinery, so
to speak. The genocide was not a result of an improvisation, instead there is a genocide
technology, based on scientific research at the service of achieving the reorganization of
the society’]. I acknowledge the debates of this group about their own identity, some of
which I was able to participate in, as one source of inspiration for this article.
Works cited
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abuelas.org.ar/Libro/f_desaparecidos0.htm (accessed 13 May 2013).
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Zone Books).
Blejmar, Jordana (2012) ‘The truth of autofiction. Second-generation memory in post-
dictatorship Argentine culture’, unpublished doctoral thesis, Darwin College, University
of Cambridge.
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n° 28.390 ‘Cabandié Alfonsín, Juan s/ ofrecimiento de prueba’, Pensamiento Penal, http://
new.pensamientopenal.com.ar/01022010/fallos07.pdf (accessed 13 May 2013).
Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas (CONADEP) (1997) [1984]. Nunca

más (Buenos Aires: Eudeba).
Gordon, Avery (2008) [1997] Ghostly Matters. Haunting and the Sociological Imagination
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).
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universo de víctimas desde el Estado post-genocida: la invisibilidad de los hijos de
desaparecidos y asesinados como sujetos de derecho’, 9th Biennial Conference of the
International Association of Genocide Scholars ‘Genocide. Truth, Memory, Justice, and
Recovery’, http://www.genocidescholars.org/sites/default/files/document%09%5Bcurrent-
page%3A1%5D/documents/IAGS%202011%20GOYOCHEA,%20SURRACO,%20
PEREZ.pdf (accessed 13 May 2013).
Hernández, Paola (2011) ‘Biografías escénicas: Mi vida después de Lola Arias’, Latin America
Theatre Review 45.1, 115–128.
Hirsch, Marianne (2008) ‘The Generation of Postmemory’, Poetics Today 29.1, 103–128.
Lola, Arias (2009) Mi vida después (My life after) (Buenos Aires: [n. pub.]).
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discusión (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Editores Argentina).
Schwab, Gabriele (2010) Haunting Legacies. Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma
(New York: Columbia University Press).
Sosa, Cecilia (2009) ‘My life after (2009): Non-normative acts of mourning in the aftermath
of Argentina’s dictatorship (1976-1983)’, Segundo Seminario Internacional ‘Políticas de
la Memoria’, http://www.derhuman.jus.gov.ar/conti/2010/10/mesa-26/sosa_mesa_26.pdf
(accessed 13 May 2013).
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lanacion.com.ar/1134839-el-teatro-debe-ser-un-arte-vivo (accessed 13 May 2013).
Werth, Brenda (2010) Theatre, Performance, and Memory Politics in Argentina (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan).
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Ciclo 2001 (Buenos Aires: Eudeba).
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ar/publicaciones/rtc_sum.php?cod=24 (accessed 13 May 2013).
Infancia clandestina or the will of faith
Gonzalo Aguilar
Translation from Spanish: Glyn Fry
Abstract
This article argues that Benjamin Ávila’s Infancia clandestina (2012) marks a turning
point in the cinematic representation of the 1976–1983 dictatorship in Argentina. On
the one hand, this film distances itself from works of fiction such as Luis Puenzo’s La
historia oficial, regulated by the archive and by testimonial and documentary evidence
available to the viewer beyond the film. Conversely, Ávila’s film not only includes a
figure absent in films on the period made immediately after the dictatorship, namely the
guerrillero, but it also shifts its discourse away from the referential verification demanded
by testimony and from the autobiographical experience of the first person, to one that
expresses – with the immanent articulation of its own fictional narrative units – a tale of
community identity over the historical past. While the same could be said about more
recent subjective documentary films centred on a point of view (that of the children
of the disappeared who have grown up with an invented biography) characterized by a
blurring of the boundaries between fact and fiction, such as Albertina Carri’s Los rubios
or Nicolás Prividera’s M, Infancia clandestina stands alone as a work of fiction that,
unlike these films, abandons the documentary genre altogether. Ultimately, the article
suggests that the allegorization of the historic past in Infancia clandestina is so powerful
that it manages to subsume in a fictional narration the trauma of the experience of the
years of dictatorship. What is at issue here is not the memory of the narrative, but rather
the value of symbolic construction.
Keywords: Argentina; Benjamín Ávila; children of the disappeared; dictatorship;
documentary; fiction; guerrilla; Infancia clandestina; symbolic construction
Fiction and documentary

Benjamín Ávila’s Infancia clandestina [Clandestine Childhood] represents a shift in
the corpus of films made by children of disappeared parents in Argentina.1 Unlike Los
rubios [The Blonds] (2003) by Albertina Carri, M (2007) by Nicolás Prividera, Papá
Iván (2004) by María Inés Roque, (h) historias cotidianas [Everyday Stories] (2004)
by Andrés Habegger or Ávila’s 2004 documentary, Nietos, identidad y memoria
[Grandchildren, Identity and Memory], Infancia clandestina (2012) is a work of
fiction.2 Not only does it contain hardly any archive footage or documentary material
but, on the contrary, it aspires to be a mainstream narrative fiction film, with a cast
of stars. To put it another way, whilst the aforementioned documentaries contain
procedures or zones of fiction, Infancia clandestina stands alone as a work of fiction
that abandons the documentary genre altogether. That abandonment is signposted at
the start of the film by the words ‘based on a true story’, highlighting the fact that the

18 Gonzalo Aguilar
film chronicles events that occurred, although it does so with all the artistic licence of
an invented story. Jacques Rancière (2006: 158) states that ‘in general, “fiction” is not
a pretty story or evil lie, the flipside of reality that people try to pass off for it.
Originally, fingere doesn’t mean “to feign” but “to forge”. Fiction means using the
means of art to construct a “system” of represented actions, assembled forms, and
internally coherent signs’. This idea is already evident in Los rubios, which argued that
the past could not be understood without fiction, that is, without the use of invention,
omission and transformation. The idea of pretending to be someone else also plays a
central role in Carri’s film, which leads to a reflection on identities and their
relationship with militancy and history.
The difference with Infancia clandestina is that fiction – understood as forgery and
construction – is not here a part of the film, but affects its totality: in order to become
part of the narrative, personal testimonies are subordinate to the mechanisms of the
film. Thus the effectiveness of Infancia clandestina is not to be found in its testimonial
value, but rather in its deliberate narrative construction of the past that imposes its
own rules (the ‘assembled forms’, as Rancière puts it).
Infancia clandestina tells the story of a twelve-year-old boy, Juan (named after
Perón) and his return to Argentina with his family as part of the 1979 Montonero
counteroffensive. In order to enter the country he is given a false name, Ernesto (after
Guevara).3 The family of Juan/Ernesto is made up of his parents, Cristina/Charo and
Daniel/Horacio (Natalia Oreiro and César Troncoso) and his little baby sister who is
only a few months old. Almost the entire story takes place in the family home-
hideout, where his uncle Beto (played by Ernesto Alterio) also lives. The film relates
the violent deaths of Ernesto’s parents and uncle at the hands of the military. The
narrative is seen through the child’s eyes, and follows two parallel story lines: that of
an awakening love for his girlfriend, María, and the extreme situation that he
experiences with his family. The story begins when the boy is given the name Ernesto
and ends with the restoration of his real name, Juan. His name is recovered as he is
left as the only survivor at the hands of a grupo de tareas [death squad] outside the
house of his grandmother Amelia (Cristina Banegas), who herself had previously
warned her daughter Cristina and her husband about the risks they were running.4
The choice of fiction in Infancia clandestina brings to mind those films, such as La
historia oficial [The Official Story] (1985) by Luis Puenzo, which managed to
condense a variety of political viewpoints, historical perceptions and emotional values
into a narrative. Adherence to testimonial fidelity and to the value of truth, central to
the documentary genre, gives way to creative freedom, which, while it is not entirely
subjected to a referential proof, in turn is regulated by the archive and documentary
evidence available to the viewer beyond the film. However, the strength of
documentary evidence is present in La historia oficial via the marches of the Mothers
of the Plaza de Mayo, who burst into the story as a mark of an unsettling present (the
marches are not staged but the Grandmother of the Plaza de Mayo in the story is
played by an actress).5 At the same time that the film was being made, the victims
were recounting the recent past. Therefore, although it was not a documentary, La
historia oficial could not have been told without the testimonies provided to the
CONADEP, as many Argentines learned about the nature of the repression precisely
from those accounts.6 These testimonies are a form of implicit but clearly present
evidence in the film at the very time that information about crimes committed by the
dictatorship was first coming to light and the trial of the members of the Junta was
taking place. In fact, the trial’s verdict was handed down in December 1985, the year
the film was released.
Infancia clandestina, on the other hand, was made in a completely different context
and the wealth of documentary material accumulated during the years of democracy
allows Benjamín Ávila to concentrate on the story of a family that took part in the
Montonero counteroffensive without having to go into too much detail about the
nature of the repression at the time.7 If La historia oficial highlighted the figure of the
innocent victim, without references to the guerrilla figure (in the film the character
played by Chunchuna Villafañe is very critical of the guerrilla movement), in Infancia
clandestina the figure of the guerrilla takes centre stage. After many years of
suppression, guerrillas began to appear in films such as Montoneros, una historia
[Montoneros, A Story] (1998) by Andrés di Tella and Cazadores de utopías [Hunters
of Utopia] (1996) by David Blaustein. But Infancia clandestina represents a turning-
point in this cycle.
Filmmakers such as Benjamín Ávila identify with the current government’s human
rights policies, and more importantly with their vision of the historical past, which
carries over into the construction of film narrative.8 Certainly the difficulty of
distinguishing between fiction and testimony is evident in both documentary and
fictional films. Moreover, these films are centred on a point of view (that of the
children, above all the children of the disappeared who have grown up with an
invented biography) characterized by a blurring of the boundaries between the two.
Yet Infancia clandestina does something else, for it provides its story with the relative
autonomy of fiction, shifting its discourse from the referential verification demanded
by testimony and from the autobiographical experience of the first person, to one that
condenses – with the immanent articulation of its own fictional narrative units – a
tale of community identity over the historical past.
Of course, the same could be said of Los rubios or M, though in these films, the
fragmented and bricolage-like form of the documentary is linked to a demand,
directed at the state, for recognition and compensation. In M, Prividera traverses the
offices of state agencies admonishing different institutions. In Los rubios, the demand
becomes an aesthetic-political debate with its criticisms of the state cinema agency,
the INCAA.9 This does not happen in Infancia clandestina, which scales down
documentary proof and is built around the figure of the ‘non-person’ of fiction.10 We
go from witnesses to characters, from an ethical regime to a representative one,11 from
fragmented narration with effects of the real to a finished story that is both credible
and produces effects of reality. My hypothesis is that the symbolic construction that
is made about the historic past is so powerful that Infancia clandestina manages to
subsume in a fictional narration the trauma of the experience of the years of
dictatorship. What is at issue here is not the memory of the narrative, but rather the
value of the symbolic construction.
20 Gonzalo Aguilar
If documentaries about the disappeared locate their material between a present

that remembers and a past that shows itself through traces, the fiction of Infancia
clandestina makes no explicit reference to the present. More than an exercise of
memory, it is the putting in place of a narration. In this vein, the present of
enunciation aims mainly to evoke in the viewer a direct identification with the past
(so the past becomes present). In the film we do not identify with someone who
remembers, but with someone who acts and whose destiny we suspect beforehand.
Since the situation of political conflict is already resolved in the past of the present of
the film (there is a dictatorship and a duty to fight against it by all means possible,
even with violence), the viewer finds himself beyond ideas and memory, because what
matters are the passions and actions that move the characters. Whilst, in previous
films about children of the disappeared, fragmentation was structural, here it focuses
on the names of the characters, especially the protagonist.12 The boy in Infancia
clandestina has five names or nicknames: his birth name is Juan (for Perón); he enters
Argentina as Ernesto (for Guevara); his father calls him Chango [kid]; his school
friends know him as Córdoba;13 and his grandmother calls him Pollo [chick]. El Che
[nickname of Guevara] serves as the model for these metamorphoses in both name
and appearance when going underground. In contrast to the protagonist’s unstable
name there is another character that does not have a name: his little sister, who is just
over a year old and spends most of her time crying, whilst her brother soothes her
saying ‘tranquila, tranquila’ [easy, easy].14 Between schizophrenia and anonymity the
narrative takes to the future a reconciliation of all the fragments that the (disappeared)
mother, the girlfriend of the protagonist (María) and the boy (the survivor), are
committed to, namely political commitment and pleasure, bullets and chocolate
peanuts, as seen through the eyes of a child who has already grown up. Because it is
not the child of 1979 that looks, but rather the adult who asks himself what remains
of his clandestine experience:
[Authentic photos of Benjamín Ávila’s mother whilst they listen to a dialogue in

voiceover] Ernesto: I want to be with you forever.
María: Do you promise me?
Ernesto: With all my heart. [My emphasis]
Precisely because of the scarcity of historical documents in the film, the only two
pieces of historic documentary material used by the director take on a particular
importance. In the closing titles we see photos of Benjamín Ávila’s mother, a
procedure often employed in fiction films based on real events (two very different
examples spring to mind, Ciudad de dios [City of God] (2002) by Kátia Lund and
Fernando Meirelles, and Argo (2012) by Ben Affleck). Using this procedure heightens
the nucleus of truth of fiction and creates a space in which the viewer can think about
the fiction without discarding the premise that in real life similar types of events
happened to those depicted in the film. The other piece of archival material used is
footage from the ATC (Argentina Televisora Color) television newscast 60 minutes
– known for its strict support of the dictatorship – that finishes with a photo of César
Troncoso, who plays the role of the father in the film. These sequences define the
shape of Infancia clandestina, that is, the documentary is subordinated to the fictional.
In other words the evidence – often traumatic, threatening remains – is absorbed by
symbolization. This means that symbolism ends up subordinating what is real and that
the indexical nature of evidence is suppressed in favour of the symbolic character of
the drawings. It is no mere coincidence that the most dramatic moments, such as the
scenes of violence, are depicted by drawings, as if in a comic. Violence is the most real
thing, and also the most difficult dimension of that period to both symbolize and
justify. That is why the drawings (fictions of the fiction) give some meaning to the
symbolic machine constructed by Ávila’s gaze, in turn based on – as we will see later
– the memory of the past constructed in recent years.
What do these drawings tell us? That Ernesto’s ordeal can be compared to that
faced by Che Guevara, and that he must say goodbye to María, his frustrated first
love. That is, he has to put off his romantic initiation so he can face up to his political
orphanhood (in the symbolic language of the film, facing up to the fact that chocolate-
covered peanuts are very tasty, but that now is the time for guns).15 When the grupo
de tareas finds Ernesto, his drawings are mixed up with cartoons of the capture and
subsequent death of Che Guevara in Bolivia. The last animations of the film are of
María under an umbrella in the rain – at first glance she looks like Ernesto’s mother
– moving away from the view of the protagonist forever. The images of Che link all
the elements connected to belief in the Revolution, not least the father’s mandate
(‘you’re going to do something similar to what Che did’, he says to Ernesto at the start
of the film), a belief that goes from the mythical presence of Cuba to his mother’s
final promise where she asserts her loyalty to the cause ‘para siempre’ [forever]. Just
as Ernesto had promised María that ‘I want to be with you forever’, now he makes
the same promise to his mother. The protagonist not only aspires – like all heroes – to
live forever, but also lives out a very personal dispute between his girlfriend and his
mother (several times his mother makes fun of his relationship with María and orders
him to stop seeing her on political grounds, though it is obvious that she is jealous of
her). The situation reaches its climax when Ernesto, upset because he has just found
out that his father has been discovered (which is what he sees on TV), falls asleep on
the bed. When his mother comes into the room (with a man behind her), he points
the gun at her. Recognizing his mother, Ernesto does not shoot and both melt into
an embrace on the bed. This scene brings to mind another, more idyllic one, in which
Cristina, lying on the grass with her son, says to him as she hugs him ‘you like your
little classmate, do you?… I’m going to kill that good-for-nothing… you’re mine,
mine, mine’.16
The conflict is made up of the hero’s hesitation when having to choose between
the path of his parents (political militancy, guns) or his loving desire (the courtship
with María, chocolate-coated peanuts). The two positions are poles apart, but there
are several times when attempts are made to reconcile them: not only do the characters
put bullets in the little chocolate-covered peanut boxes (‘the thing with the chocolate-
covered peanuts didn’t work’, Ernesto’s father tells him at one point), but there is also
the character of his uncle Beto, who embodies a spirited defence of ‘enjoy the here
22 Gonzalo Aguilar
and now’. Beto organizes the party, brings Cristina’s mother to the house and finally,
in the face of the insults of Daniel/Horacio, demonstrates that he also ‘has balls’. In
sum, Infancia clandestina narrates a central conflict within the militant groups of that
period, namely the tension between the pleasures of everyday life and sacrifice to a
form of militant action that could result in death.
Blindfolded eyes that see

One of the first conclusions that can be drawn from the film’s story is that in the end
Amalia, the grandmother, was right. The house they lived in was like a rat’s nest.
People came and went all the time, and the fate that awaited them was death. Ernesto’s
parents and uncle reject this, as Beto counters: ‘We are perfect, the kids are perfect,
we live a normal life’. It is only when he arrives at his grandmother’s house that the
boy gets back his identity (‘I’m Juan’) and the spell of his clandestine name is broken.
From the grandmother’s perspective, they are in denial and the Montonero
counteroffensive is crazy. ‘Don’t say that this is crazy, because it isn’t’, says the boy’s
father to his mother-in-law, his rebuttal only serving to reinforce the reality. The most
appropriate way to describe this situation would be delusion, as is illustrated by the
scene in which Ernesto is surrounded by mirrors that seem to fragment his identity,
at which point he suggests to María that they run away to Brazil with the money he
stole from his parents (meant for the armed struggle). The degree of the child’s
isolation and denial highlights the disturbed/delusional nature of the whole adventure.
His clandestine childhood makes him believe that fantasies can become reality. ‘Isn’t
this what you wanted?’, Ernesto asks María, referring to the fact that she had said that
she wanted to go to Brazil when they were in the clapped out car. However, María
knows how to differentiate between everyday life and fantasy, something which
Ernesto, immersed in the clandestine life of his family, does not. Clandestine life
blinds him and prevents him from seeing the real world.
This particular reading of the film, credible as it is, does not go far enough. Faced
with the common sense of Amalia and the delusion of the Montonero counteroffensive,
Infancia clandestina poses the question of how to look at this historic past. In order
to answer the question, the film makes use of one of the symbols of military
oppression, frequently used in other films about the dictatorship: the blindfold.
Blindfolds, a symbol of the hardships suffered by the victims (from La noche de los
lápices [The Night of the Pencils] by Héctor Olivera to Garage Olimpo by Marco
Bechis), are here used by the militants or their friends with their consent.17 Such
image would merely serve to represent the security measures taken by the guerrilla
group, were it not for that fact that the film uses it as a leitmotif in other scenes not
directly related to militancy. To give a couple of examples, there is a noteworthy
sequence when the children, also blindfolded, play blind man’s bluff in the camp and
when they sing a song written by Benjamín Ávila and Pedro Onetto for the film,
precisely about the difficulty of knowing how to see. ‘I don’t see… I can’t see’, sing
the children and then one asks ‘Am I blind?’, to which the rest answer in chorus ‘you
just lack the glasses of the gente decente [respectable people]’.18
But which glasses should we wear to understand the story? Should we use the ones
that the characters do not have – ‘glasses of gente decente’ – or a different pair? In the
sequence of cartoons in which Ernesto dreams about Beto’s death, Ernesto finds his
uncle’s glasses. They are not the lenses of gente decente. Ernesto had tried them on at
the start of the film when he imitates the bespectacled, bald Adolfo Mena, the persona
invented by Che Guevara in order to enter Bolivia (at the start, they show Che’s
metamorphosis through Ernesto’s drawings). Seen ‘through the glasses of respectable
people’, the film is madness. But seen from another point of view, the protagonists
are heroes who never relinquish their goals or lose faith. It is like being called Juan
but also Ernesto. To be blindfolded marks a step towards a different reality, closer to
desire, one in which desire is always about to be fulfilled.19 You have to acquire the
glasses (but not of respectable people) to see the future without losing faith.
In this film, blindfolds are not, therefore, symbols of the lack of freedom, but
rather offer a possible route to freedom. This is what the hero does: he denies –
although by an act of omnipotence or madness – the real obstacles so he can put his
faith in a different world where there is no need to blindfold eyes. This promised world
is not present in the film (the dictatorship ends up defeating it), but it is always
imminent. The imminent realization of desire threads its way through the whole story
of Ernesto, although it is never consummated. There is neither revolution nor
romantic relationship. When Ernesto is ready to kiss María, her brother butts in and
takes their photo and the chance is lost. The whole story carries this sense of
imminence, even Ernesto’s unexpected birthday, on 7 October, one day before the
birth of Perón and two days before the death of Che Guevara. This failure of desire
speaks (as is clearly seen in the story of Daniel/Horacio about his brother Beto) of the
need to maintain desire, to ‘keep the faith’ as stated by the dedication that closes the
film. This imminence is typical of the scatology of revolution.20 The question that
arises from the defeat is: what remains, according to Infancia clandestina, of all this
experience?
Political passions and the power of symbolization

Infancia clandestina can be read from three perspectives that have been applied to an
analysis of the 1970s guerrillas: the political-strategic perspective; the evaluation of
the political project; and the ethics of affects and will. The first has focused primarily
on the running of the armed organizations, above all on certain operations of which
the most criticized was the Montonero counteroffensive of 1979, precisely the theme
of the film. In her book, Política y/o violencia: Una aproximación a la guerrilla de los
años setenta [Politics and/or Violence. On the 1970s Guerrillas], Pilar Calveiro (2005)
pointed out the most negative aspects of the Argentine guerrilla movement at that
time: the pragmatism that cheapened the theoretical debate, the lack of a strong
presence in the poor working-class sectors, the prevalence of revolutionary logic over
‘reality’, the militarization of politics and the lack of an internal debate and of any
acknowledgment of dissent within the organizations (these observations are valid for
the Montoneros as well as the ERP).21 In Calveiro’s view ‘the defeat of the Montoneros
[…] was not caused by too much politics, but on the contrary by a lack of politics’
24 Gonzalo Aguilar
(Calveiro 2005: 23). Ever since it went underground, during a period of democratic
rule, the organization scorned all political channels (of negotiation and consensus) in
favour of waging an absolute guerrilla war against an enemy it only considered in
absolute terms.22
The other two interpretations that are key to understanding the criticism of the
political-military failure, albeit from a different angle, state that though the actions of
the guerrillas might have been wrong, both the ideology that drove them and the
desire/will that motivated them were nonetheless right. The analysis in these two cases
is centred more on the militants than on the leadership and focuses on both affective
and ideological issues. The key concept here is that of will, which, since the publication
of La voluntad (Una historia de la militancia argentina) [The Will: A History of the
Argentine Militancy] by Martín Caparrós and Eduardo Anguita in 1997, has been
applied to militants in general and also to the guerrilla organizations. If the concept
has been useful in the area of examining affects (the unbreakable will of militants who
did not give in even when faced with death is usually not questioned), in terms of
political evaluation it has resulted in a defence of a diffuse ideology summarized by
the vague phrase ‘they just wanted a better world’. This cliché makes use of the magic
words of those years: ‘a fight for a better society’, ‘we were the best generation’, ‘those
who disappeared were the best among us’. It is difficult to maintain a doctrine like
that with regard to the Montoneros today given its inalienable demand for violence.
Furthermore, on a more concrete level, it is difficult to reconcile the notion of free
will with the Peronist movement, as its keystone was loyalty, which opposes, regulates
and directly suppresses free will. When loyalty is the principal value (the only explicit
political slogan in the film is ‘Perón or death!’), free will has to submit to the will of
the other. The plurality of opinions is suppressed, and betrayal follows as a natural
corollary. Thus, this reading maintains a diffuse ideology (without devaluing the
emphatic defence of the Cuban Revolution in Infancia clandestina),23 and at the same
time exploits the rhetoric of affects and pure passions that guided those who took part
in the Montonero counteroffensive.
All these positions are treated cinematically in Infancia clandestina in three ways:
in a commentary made by the grandmother, Amalia; in the defence of the courage
and heroism of the Montonero guerrilla militants; and in the exclusion of the figure
of the traitor. In the three cases, the defence of revolutionary faith as something pure
and imminent has a symbolic power so strong that it subsumes the trauma of violence
and defeat.
Amalia warns her daughter and her family about the risks they are running and,
as the story develops, she is proved right. The film does not deny this, nor does it fail
to show all the defects of the Montonero organization (those stated by Calveiro are
evident in several scenes in the film). If Amalia’s view of the situation fails, however,
it is because for the film political criticism of the guerrilla organizations is only
secondary. There are no ideological debates or discussions of doctrine in the film, nor
are there very precise references to what is happening at the time (apart from Belgrano,
Perón and Che Guevara, no historical characters, let alone contemporary figures, are
mentioned). Thus, although Amalia is right, her discourse fails to address an entire
dimension of militancy: faith in the revolution, in what has to be protected ‘forever’,

in what has to be transmitted from one generation to the next. Thus, more than being
about politics, Infancia clandestina is about the passions that politics triggers and that
precedes it. For this reason, it is less important that Amalia is right, than that she is
frightened. As her daughter tells her, ‘You’re a coward, you always were, dad was
right’. It is less important that she is sensible (or ‘decent’) than that she gives up hope.
Amalia has no faith to protect her.
The two passions that mobilize the political sphere (fear and hope) are the same
ones that are at play in this family venture.24 Fear is the raw material upon which
despotism builds, as Maquiavelo and Montesquieu state. With someone like Amalia,
the dictatorship would last forever. On the other hand, the family made up of
Cristina/Charo and Daniel/Horacio are prepared to sacrifice their lives to change this
state of affairs, even if it leads them to an early grave. Will – whether it be heroic or
irrational – is the basis of their beliefs and what ultimately sustains this story.
By focusing the view of the past on the field of will, Infancia clandestina encourages
an identification with the characters based on their bravery and courage (in the film
this is expressed by the expression ‘to have balls’).25 For this reason the focus of the
film is on the action of the characters and not on the organization to which they
belong, about which little is said and whose most polemic aspects are suppressed. The
most striking example is the lack of any reference to the cyanide pill that the guerrilleros
carried with them so as not to be taken alive. The militants knew that they would be
tortured and also knew that the Montonero organization did not accept betrayal and
judged it harshly, even if it occurred under conditions of torture. In other
organizations, such as the National Liberation Front (Algeria), the prisoners were
given a limited time to hold out, after which they could ‘sing,’ giving their fellow
guerrilla members time to move hideouts and spread the word. Driven by their
Christian upbringing and its worship of martyrs, as they called those killed by the
repression, the Montonero leadership did not put a time limit on torture and
betrayal.26 For this reason, the use of cyanide pills was understandable. Moreover,
from a military standpoint, it was better to lose a soldier than keep a potential
informer.27 In Infancia clandestina there are no cyanide pills, but the death of uncle
Beto is linked to this theme, because he prefers to die than be captured alive. His
brother Horacio, a witness to the arrest of his brother, recalls that Beto shouted that
they would not take him alive, took a grenade, grabbed hold of a policeman and
threw himself into the police car. The car would have ended up in a similar state to
the one in which Ernesto and María had their romantic encounter. As for the
policeman, well, he was the enemy and therefore had no right to live. Beto showed
that he had balls and not even the life of another human being was going to stop him
from achieving his wish: to die for the revolution. If the wrecked car is the place of
desire, Beto’s faith gives it meaning, and calms its brutal presence and destructive
character. In the hero’s story there is destruction, but the form of this destruction
ends up being redeemed by the values embodied by the character, in this case, Beto.
The use of drawings to construct the heroic representation of the act provides the key
to understanding the film. The power of symbolism is so powerful that the evidence
26 Gonzalo Aguilar
of reality is subsumed and even suppressed in the remembrance of the past. This is
why Infancia clandestina can leave the documentary behind and access the non-
indexical par excellence: the cartoon. The power of symbolism that the cartoon brings
should not be underestimated, as it is not merely another part of the film, but it is
articulated at a particular stage in the social memory driven by the state. This is why
it is essential to point out that this symbolization is done at the cost of making
different historical times (past, present and future) equal in terms of moral value and
suppressing the strictly political dimension of the situation. The film maintains the
image of the wonderful youth (as shown in the idyllic scene where the militants sing
‘Sueños de juventud’ [Youthful dreams] by Enrique Santos Discépolo) but leaves out
the violent path, not only in the form of resistance to the dictatorship but also as a
favoured political tool in conflict resolution (Ávila’s thesis).28 The wrecked car is
redeemed by the faith of the characters, the damage and the trauma by the visionary
blindness of faith.
This idyllic representation of the past is present at various points in the film: when
Ernesto watches María dance for the first time; in his drawings and family ‘photos’;
when they record the tape in Cuba; and, above all, in the asado which the militants
of Montoneros share whilst they listen to the song ‘Youthful dreams’.29 The militants
arrive and leave blindfolded, but in between there are scenes of love, companionship,
laughter, tears, sex, and Ernesto’s discovery of the adult world. This idyllic world of
diaphanous light and clear colours contrast with the violent scenes (dark and made
with cartoons) that simultaneously represent and suppress their referent (the first
attack on the family as they arrive home, Beto’s death, and Ernesto’s capture).
Though Infancia clandestina echoes La historia oficial in the way in which both
condense their plot and for the cathartic function they fulfil, they are very different
in the way in which they represent their characters. La historia oficial avoided putting
on screen the guerrillero that had disappeared, namely the husband of Ana (played by
Chunchuna Villafañe). The characters of the film mention him but he always remains
on the periphery of the story like a ghost: he could be evoked but could not be
allowed to speak. Infancia clandestina focuses precisely on the guerrillero figure with
the outside being seen through the child’s eyes. The figure that the characters refer to,
but which is never seen, the fictional ghost, in this case, is the traitor or informer, ‘el
Gallego’, who does not appear in the film but who Ernesto’s father mentions when
referring to a cita cantada.30 Whilst acknowledging that traitors exist, the story does
not include this type of character because – from its perspective on history – it would
put into question the heroism, devotion, and purity of the militants. In other words,
it refuses to show a broken will, albeit under torture. This is precisely the clear lesson
that the dead Beto leaves Ernesto: ‘What’s most important is don’t betray yourself,
don’t betray yourself’.
The impossibility of narrating from the guerrilla’s point of view was linked to the
return to democracy and the construction of the ‘innocent victim’. It was this
narrative demand (tell your story but do not vindicate your past) that closed off all
discussions on the 1970s and prompted a tacit ban on the debate about the guerrillas’
acts that only began to be challenged many years later (with the films Montoneros, una
historia [Montoneros, A Story] by Andrés di Tella and Cazadores de utopías [Hunters

of Utopia] by David Blaustein). If this tacit ban existed as part of the return to
democracy, change was very gradual and, in official discourse, lead to the
reconstruction of the guerrillero as a passionate and innocent victim.31 The vision
offered by Infancia clandestina differs from that of La historia oficial in that it is much
more unilateral. According to the opening credits of Ávila’s film, the violence was a
result of ‘paramilitary groups’ (‘In 1974, after the death of General Perón, paramilitary
groups unleashed a wave of violence in Argentina’). Thus, Infancia clandestina ties
together, through a moving and well-narrated story, all the threads of the vision of
the 1970s that have been constructed in recent years by the state: heroism, juvenilismo
[youthful spirit], the blurring of ideology in favour of abstract principles, and the
glorification of the militant will.
When Ernesto’s father tells of his brother’s death, he makes one crucial point: ‘for
Beto happiness is not a smile, but a belief, a faith’. Is it the same faith that is cited in
the dedication that closes the film: ‘dedicated to all those who have kept the faith’?
This is the child-like gaze that Ávila constructs with his story, different from both the
girl who is placed in a sphere of ignorance and is a victim of the dictatorship in La
historia oficial, and from the children who are caught in a crossfire and are unable to
comprehend what is happening around them in Los rubios.32 The child in Infancia
clandestina is capable of complicity and even of an act of transgression that affects his
own family. He is thus a victim of his parents’ acts (and here the film does not negate
the political criticism of the Montonero counteroffensive, but reinforces it) but one
who keeps the treasure of a more profound experience: the promise to be faithful to
that hope ‘forever’.
Notes
1. Benjamín Ávila was born in Argentina in 1972. He lived most of his childhood in exile
with his mother, Sara Zermoglio. After the 1976 coup he escaped with his mother and
her husband to Brazil, then to Mexico and finally to Cuba. At the beginning of 1979,
they returned to Argentina, as many montoneros did at the time in what was known as the
‘counteroffensive’. Sara disappeared on 13 October that same year. Benjamín’s brother
– nine months old at the time – was raised by a different family and only recovered his
identity in 1984; he was in fact one of the first grandchildren found by the Abuelas of
Plaza de Mayo. In contrast to what happens in the film, after his mother’s disappearance,
Ávila was raised by his biological father, who was divorced from her. Infancia clandestina
is Ávila’s second film.
2. Technical details. Infancia clandestina. Director: Benjamín Ávila. Script: Benjamín Ávila
and Marcelo Müller. Length: 110 minutes. Cast: Ernesto Alterio (tío Beto), Natalia
Oreiro (Cristina/Charo), César Troncoso (Daniel/Horacio), Teo Gutiérrez Moreno
(Juan/Ernesto), Victoria Paluka (María), Cristina Banegas (Amalia). Release date: 20
September 2012.
3. The Montoneros counteroffensive took place between 1979 and 1980 and included the
participation of units from abroad, whose aim was the final defeat of the dictatorship,
which the Montoneros thought to be weak and on the verge of collapse. The action did
not go as planned, and resulted in the death and disappearance of many militants at the
hands of the military government.
28 Gonzalo Aguilar
4. The death squads were made up of members of the armed forces and security forces to
counter the insurgency during the dictatorship in the 1970s and early 1980s. Methods
used included kidnapping, torture, assassination and disappearance, as well as the running
of illegal detention centres.
5. Chela Ruiz (who played the role of Sara, a grandmother looking for her granddaughter)
had been in ten films, and was also known for her television roles.
6. Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas, CONADEP [National Commission
on the Disappearance of Persons] was set up on the return to democracy in 1983 to
investigate the fate of the victims of forced disappearance. In the harrowing story of her
visits to the clandestine detention centre, Ana (Chunchuna Villafañe) stated that she gave
her testimony to the ‘commission’.
7. It is worth noting that as well as not making any reference to the government of the day,
the story left open the baby’s future, which the viewer could reflect on given what was
known about cases of appropriation that took place during the military dictatorship.
According to the director, jokes were made with Luis Puenzo (director of La historia oficial
and producer of Infancia clandestina) about the fact that the baby could have been Gaby,
the girl taken in La historia oficial.
8. The cinema critic Quintín reviewed Infancia clandestina under the following headline:
‘Llega el cine kirchnerista’ [Kirchnerista cinema arrives] (http://lalectoraprovisoria.
wordpress.com/2012/09/30/llega-el-cine-kirchnerista/, published in Perfil on 30
September 2012). Quintín’s hypothesis is based more on the figure of the author than
on what happens in the film. A good response by Julián Tonelli, ‘Sobre una crítica de
Infancia clandestina’ [About a critique of Infancia clandestina], can be read at http://
cinemarama.wordpress.com/2012/10/20/sobre-una-critica-de-infancia-clandestina/.
9. Instituto Nacional de Cine y Artes Audiovisuales, INCAA [The National Institute of
Cinema and Audiovisual Arts] is an Argentine government film production company that
promotes the Argentine film industry.
10. For an analysis of the third person as a ‘Non-Person’, refer to Roberto Esposito (2012).
11. In his essay ‘The aesthetic revolution and its outcomes. Emplotments of autonomy and
heteronomy’, Jacques Rancière argues that there are three regimes of art: ethical (linked
to truth), representational (form over meaning following intrinsic norms) and aesthetic
(‘The key formula of the aesthetic regime of art is that art is an autonomous form of life’
[Rancière 2002: 137]). Of all the films about children of the disappeared, Los rubios is the
only one that questions the ethical regime of art with the tools of the aesthetic regime.
12. These films are fragmentary in the sense that they do not offer us a totality of events already
set out in the script and related via an extra-diegetic narrative point of view, but rather
because they are continuously being shaped out of the fragments of the investigation that
is taking place.
13. Córdoba is the second largest city in Argentina and Juan is supposed to come from there,
to cover up his strange accent. His school friends nickname him Córdoba.
14. Her name is Vicky, but the characters only use it once in the film, and it is not clear if this
is even her real name.
15. Here we see an interesting fictional move: in the real life story of Benjamín Ávila he goes
to live with his father (his mother had divorced him and married a militant), whereas in
the fictional story he goes to live with his grandmother. The figure of the father is not
developed because the story opts for the Oedipal, triangular structure that forms the basis
of the narrative. The age of the child has also been changed: Ávila was seven, whilst Juan/
Ernesto is nearing the age of puberty (he is twelve).
16. The scene is just before the one where Ernesto dreams about being kissed by María and
wets the bed. He is next to his uncle Ernesto (who gives him his first lessons in love and
political courage).
17. Valeria Manzano writes: ‘If the blindfold, as an object, represents a common heritage in
the representations of the concentration camp experience, I suggest that in Garage Olimpo
it evolves, metonymically, to represent the figure of the disappeared and the social space
which (does not) hold him/her’ (Manzano 2009: 158). The image of a blindfolded face is
also used on the posters of La noche de los lápices and on Garage Olimpo, and also on the
poster used in the U.S. for Infancia clandestina.
18. Lyrics: Benjamín Ávila / Music: Pedro Onetto. Complete lyrics: ‘I wash my feet / I climb
up, climb up to the tree top / I fly, fly to the summit / I go down, down to the cellar /
I swim, swim deep down / I clean my hands / (and now back to front) To the cellar, I
climb, I climb / Into the deep, I fly, I fly / To the tree top, I go down, I go down / To
the summit, I swim, I swim / I clean my ears / (I can hardly hear you) / I climb to the
bottom, and fly / I go down to the summit and swim / I fly to the summit and go down
/ I swim to the cellar and climb / I clean my eyes /(I can’t see well) / Up to the tree top, I
don’t see, I don’t see. / Up to the summit, I don’t see, I don’t see. / To the cellar, I don’t
see, I don’t see. / Down to the deep I don’t see, I don’t see. / Why’s that? Did we clean
them well? Because … I can’t see the summit, / if I climb to the bottom. / I don’t see, I
can’t see. / (I don’t see, I can’t see.) / I can’t see the tee top / if I’m in the cellar. / I can’t
see, I don’t see. / (I don’t see, I can’t see.) / I don’t see, I can’t / If I can, if a see / I don’t
see, I can’t see / If I can, if I see / I don’t see, I can’t if I can, if I see / Then I’ll be blind? /
[Everyone] Nooooo… It’s just that you’re lacking the glasses of the wealthy folk / You’re
lacking the glasses of the wealthy folk.’
19. Glasses are mentioned throughout the film. For example, when Ernesto asks his mother
what it was she liked about his father, she tells him: ‘those glasses that he used to wear’
(his father wears glasses throughout the film).
20. ‘This sense of imminence of happening, that reveals itself in different ways, builds a true
revolutionary scatology’ (Vezzetti 2009: 166).
21. ERP: Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo [People’s Revolutionary Army].
22. On the theme of the absolute enemy, this is when the political logic of friend or enemy
is broken; see Teoría del partisano by Carl Schmitt (2005: 112). It is important to point
out that the suspension of political logic by the Montoneros meant a direct confrontation
with the military, which could only end in either victory or defeat.
23. The question of the projection of the Cuban Revolution in the present (because this is a
film from 2012 which still shows some enthusiasm for the project) is a subject that is too
complex to deal with here. I agree with the view of Claudia Hilb (2013: 45).
24. In his book Geometría de las pasiones, Remo Bodei (1995) analyses the political passions
that do not necessarily define hope as positive and fear as negative. If this is the trend,
hope often ‘underestimates its obstacles’ (473) and fear can be aestheticized – Hobbes
adds – in a calculated universal passion. In this respect fear is different from terror panicus
that means despair and according to which ‘each one casually follows the example of the
first such that it appears to be based on some criteria’ (85). According to her daughter,
Amalia is ‘frightened’ and ‘panicky’, while the father acknowledges that he is scared (‘we
are all scared’) but he overcomes it through his dedication and bravery.
25. The whole conversation about commitment and pleasure that Horacio and Beto have
revolves around male genitals as reservoirs of heroism: ‘la gran pija Argentina’ [‘the big
Argentinean dick’], ‘los huevos bien puestos’ [‘he’s got some balls’]. Yet in excess this
masculinity can be counterproductive: ‘sos un pelotudo’ [an English equivalent to this
phrase would be ‘you are an asshole’; however, this translation loses the wordplay in
Spanish, as ‘pelotudo’ literally means ‘big balls’]. In her book Traiciones (La figura del
traidor en los relatos acerca de los sobrevivientes de la represión) Ana Longoni (2007: 163)
mentions Helios Prieto, who writes of the ‘testicular debate’: according to him, guerrilla
actions deal exclusively with knowing who has or does not have balls.
26. The left-wing Marxist ERP had a similar policy. This would appear to have a Christian
martyr element.
30 Gonzalo Aguilar
27. On the problematic nature of survivors who are often considered traitors, read Ana
Longoni (2007: 181): ‘It is a form of understanding politics installed in the register of
the sacrificial: political passion seems to include a sense of the ethical, that does not allow
regret nor abandonment of the organizations without being considered a traitor’.
28. Responding to an article in the Spanish newspaper El país which compared the
Montoneros to ETA, Benjamín Ávila wrote that: ‘Montoneros se formó en dictadura
(1970) y fue aniquilado por la última dictadura. Nunca ejerció esto en democracia. Puedo
agregar además que nadie de los sobrevivientes hoy en día se le ocurriría, ni se le ocurrió
en democracia, levantar las armas para construir el país. La defensa de la democracia y las
ideas fue el motivo de su lucha’ [‘The Montoneros were founded under one dictatorship
(1970) and was wiped out by the last dictatorship. It never operated in democracy. I’d like
to add, that none of the survivors would ever think of taking up arms under a democracy,
in order to improve the country. The defence of democracy and its ideals was the motive
for the struggle’]. However, there are no historic documents that prove such a statement.
The word ‘democracy’ did not form part of the political lexicon of the Montoneros
and in any case carries a negative value when associated with a bourgeois parliamentary
democracy. Even so, they still defended the democratic government of Cámpora and
later of Perón, not because they were democratic but because they considered them
revolutionary. In fact, they declared themselves to be a ‘clandestine movement’ during
Isabel Perón’s government in 1975.
29. An asado is a traditional type of meal/social event, consisting of various cuts of meat grilled
on an open fire, very common in southern Latin American countries, especially Argentina.
30. A cita cantada is a meeting of militants of armed groups who have been betrayed by their
captured comrades or discovered by the forces of repression.
31. From the legal standpoint, it is not possible to speak of guilt because the victims did not
have access to a trial, a basic universal human right. But in contrast to this view, that sees
the guerrilleros of that period as innocent victims (with the blame being put instead on the
leadership), there is a growing literature that speaks of the responsibility of those groups
for the violence that broke out during that period. In other words, it is not simply a matter
of guilt or innocence, but of responsibility.
32. Lorena Verzero (2009: 210) notes ‘on the one hand, the need to have children to make
sure that the revolution continues and, on the other hand, to make revolution for the
children; to create a different world for future generations and, at the same time, educate
them in the revolution’.
Works cited
Bodei, Remo (1995) Geometría de las pasiones (Miedo, esperanza, felicidad: filosofía y uso político)
(Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica).
Calveiro, Pilar (2005) Política y/o violencia. Una aproximación a la guerrilla de los años setenta
(Buenos Aires: Norma).
Caparrós, Martín and Anguita Eduardo (1997) La voluntad (Una historia de la militancia
argentina) (Buenos Aires: Norma).
Esposito, Roberto (2012) The Third Person (Cambridge: Polity Press).
Hilb, Claudia (2013) Usos del pasado (Qué hacemos hoy con los setenta) (Buenos Aires: Siglo
XXI).
Longoni, Ana (2007) Traiciones (La figura del traidor en los relatos acerca de los sobrevivientes de
la represión) (Buenos Aires: Norma).
Manzano, Valeria (2009) ‘Garage Olimpo o cómo proyectar el pasado sobre el presente (y
viceversa)’, in El pasado que miramos (Memoria e imagen ante la historia reciente), eds
Claudia Feld and Jessica Stites Mor (Buenos Aires: Paidós).
Rancière, Jacques (2002) ‘The aesthetic revolution and its outcomes (Emplotments of
autonomy and heteronomy)’, New Left Review 14.
Rancière, Jacques (2006) Film Fables (New York: Berg).

Schmitt, Carl (2005) Teoría del partisano (Buenos Aires: Struhart & Cía).
Verzero, Lorena (2009) ‘Estrategias para crear el mundo: la década del setenta en el cine
documental de los dos mil’, in El pasado que miramos (Memoria e imagen ante la historia
reciente), eds Claudia Feld and Jessica Stites Mor (Buenos Aires: Paidós).
Vezzetti, Hugo (2009) Sobre la violencia revolucionaria (Memorias y olvidos) (Buenos Aires:
Siglo XXI).
Internet sources
Quintín: ‘Llega el cine kirchnerista’. http://lalectoraprovisoria.wordpress.com/2012/09/30/
llega-el-cine-kirchnerista/, published in Perfil, 30 September 2012.
Tonelli, Julián: ‘Sobre una crítica de Infancia Clandestina’. http://cinemarama.wordpress.
com/2012/10/20/sobre-una-critica-de-infancia-clandestina/, published in Cinerama, 20
October 2012.
Filmography
Affleck, Ben (dir.) (2012), Argo.
Ávila, Benjamín (dir.) (2004), Nietos, identidad y memoria.
Ávila, Benjamín (dir.) (2012), Infancia clandestina.
Bechis, Marco (dir.) (1999), Garage Olimpo.
Blaustein, David (dir.) (1996), Cazadores de utopías.
Carri, Albertina (dir.) (2003), Los rubios.
Di Tella, Andrés (dir.) (1998), Montoneros, una historia.
Habegger, Andrés (dir.) (2001), (h) historias cotidianas.
Lund, Kátia and Fernando Meirelles (dir.) (2002), Ciudad de dios.
Olivera, Héctor (dir.) (1986), La noche de los lápices.
Prividera, Nicolás (dir.) (2007), M.
Puenzo, Luis (dir.) (1985), La historia oficial.
Roque, María Inés (dir.) (2004), Papá Iván.
Urban photography as counter-monument in Urruzola’s
Miradas ausentes (en la calle)
David Rojinsky
Abstract
In 2008, photographer Juan Ángel Urruzola pasted sixty gigantic black-and-white

photo-murals of Uruguay’s detenidos-desaparecidos on the walls around the centre
of Montevideo. If the inauguration of the Memorial en Recordación de los Detenidos
Desaparecidos in 2001 had symbolized an end to the politics of silence characterizing
Uruguay’s post-dictatorship ‘transition’ to neoliberal consumerism, Urruzola’s street art
reflected the now flourishing national culture of memory which gradually emerged over
the decade of the 2000s. Yet, while Urruzola’s alternative cartography of remembrance
complemented the precedent set by such official sites of memory, the public’s often
hostile response to the photo-murals suggested a memorial experience more reminiscent
of that associated with the German ‘counter-monument’. Indeed, just as the reaction to
Urruzola’s images demonstrated the continued polarization of Uruguayan society with
regard to how the authoritarian past should be addressed, it also demonstrated how such
memory art could provoke a wider public engagement with today’s memory politics and
could thereby extend the postmemorial community beyond the limited constitution of
visitors to official monuments.
Keywords: counter-monument; disappeared; memory art; photography; Uruguay
But isn’t every square inch of our cities a crime scene? Every passer-by a culprit?
Isn’t it the task of the photographer – descendent of the augurs and haruspices
– to reveal guilt and to point out the guilty in his pictures?
Walter Benjamin, ‘Little History of Photography’ (1931)
No hay que tener ojos en la nuca [‘You shouldn’t look back’] was the slogan that came
to characterize Julio María Sanguinetti’s first administration as Uruguayan President
(1985–1990) with regard to the question of how the memory of the previous twelve
years of civil-military dictatorship (1973–1985) should be addressed.1 In particular,
Sanguinetti’s slogan served to justify the implementation of a statute of limitations
(the 1986 ‘Law of Expiry’) on prosecutions of the Uruguayan military for crimes
committed before 1985 and thus, ostensibly a legal means for forging national
reconciliation and democratic transition.2 A referendum held in 1989 gave a narrow
victory to those Uruguayans who supported the continued implementation of this
controversial law and the concomitant ‘politics of silence’ that would ensue. The
result exposed the starkly polarized character of Uruguayan society and yet, more
importantly, as Lessa (2011) has signalled, it enabled the government to enforce ‘the
most successful’ policy of ‘forgetfulness’ of all Latin American post-dictatorships: in

Urban photography as counter-monument 33
the decade following the referendum all recognition and discussion of state terrorism
would be limited to affected families and human rights organizations (2011: 179).
Nevertheless, the late 1990s and early 2000s would witness the gradual emergence
of a national postmemorial community constituted by a broader range of social actors
and supported by both state and private initiatives. During the Jorge Batlle (2000–
2005) and Tabaré Vázquez (2005–2010) administrations respectively, the forced
disappearance of Uruguayan citizens was officially recognized and documented, while
legislative reform would eventually allow the prosecution of former members of the
state security forces and even the imprisonment of the first civil president sponsored
by the military, Julio María Bordaberry. The increasingly effective popular
mobilization to overturn the Law of Expiry culminated in the 2009 plebiscite which,
although it resulted in another ‘no’ vote, nevertheless reflected the fact that a
flourishing culture of memory was exerting greater pressure for more dramatic
legislative reform (Levey 2010, 2012; Lessa 2011; Fried 2011).3
This shift from post-dictatorship Uruguay’s politics of silence of the 1980s and
early 1990s to the memory politics of the 2000s cannot be better symbolized than in
the contrast between two major ‘monumental’ urban projects in post-dictatorship
Montevideo: the exclusive Punta Carretas shopping mall that opened in 1994 and the
inauguration of the Memorial en Recordación de los Detenidos Desaparecidos
[‘Monument in Memory of the Detained and Disappeared’] in 2001. The former has
attracted much critical attention, quite justifiably, given that the transformation of a
notorious prison for political dissidents into a space of consumption represents a
striking illustration of how the prevailing culture of amnesia was consolidated in the
aftermath of the 1989 referendum.4 This architectonic embodiment of the apparent
opposition between memory of dictatorship and market ‘progress’ has hence been
described as a ‘monument to a city of impunity’ (Draper 2011: 143). Meanwhile, the
inauguration of the official monument to Uruguay’s disappeared in the Parque Vaz
Ferreira on the Cerro de Montevideo has been heralded as ‘a new physical marker of
memory’ that defies ‘fifteen years of government politics of silence that had wished to
condemn victims to oblivion’ (Lessa 2011: 195). Along with the Centro Cultural
Museo de la Memoria, [‘Cultural Centre and Memory Museum’] inaugurated in 2007,
the Memorial thus contributed to the transformation of Montevideo’s urban space in
a decade in which the ‘consumerism-equals-amnesia’ paradigm symbolized by Punta
Carretas was to be significantly undermined by the national culture of memory.
Much like contemporary Buenos Aires, then, the inauguration of the memorial and
the museum in Montevideo has unsettled the neoliberal consumer city imagined and
promoted by transitional governments since, on both sides of the River Plate, ‘the
dead’ have been ‘re-introduced’ into urban spaces where they had previously been
‘made invisible at a time of progress negotiated through forgetting’ (Draper 2011:
145).5 Similarly, in both cities ‘official’ memorial projects must be considered within
the context of what Druliolle terms ‘micro-memorial projects’ or community-based
initiatives and interventions occupying a wide range of conspicuous urban spaces
(Druliolle 2011: 17). Performative activities, such as the emblematic 1983 Siluetazo in
Buenos Aires, the ongoing public shaming of former torturers through escraches by the
34 David Rojinsky
human rights organization HIJOS in both Argentina and Uruguay, or the annual
March of Silence in Montevideo (which has taken place every year since 1996),
represent notable examples of micro-memorial projects that have facilitated the
insertion of the past into daily life and thus have made national memory visible to a
broader public. The ‘re-introduction of the dead’ in these contemporary post-
dictatorship cities is therefore effectuated within a citywide network of sites and
activities related to a memorial culture in which collective involvement is encouraged
from a variety of subject positions and for a variety of social actors. When official and
micro-memorial projects are viewed as mutually affirming, the whole city can hence
be conceived of as ‘a participatory, visual, and discursive battleground’ (Druliolle
2011: 35) since overlooked urban spaces are politicized and public debate and
participation encouraged while the postmemorial community can both include and be
extended beyond the limited constitution of visitors to official memorial institutions.
A recent example of a specifically Uruguayan micro-memorial visual project,
which has served precisely to draw a wider public into the politics of memory debate,
is Miradas ausentes en la calle [‘Absent Gazes in the Street’] by photographer and
former militant Juan Ángel Urruzola (Montevideo 1953–). During the campaign for
a second referendum on the Law of Expiry between 2007 and 2009, Urruzola
produced a series of black-and-white photo-montages enlarged to the size of
advertising hoardings and pasted sixty of them in a variety of locations on the often
crumbling and graffiti-emblazoned walls of downtown Montevideo’s streets. Each of
the gigantografías [‘photo-murals’] confronted pedestrians and passing motorists with
Urruzola’s adaptation of a technique largely associated with North American
conceptual photographer Kenneth Josephson (1932–): a single black-and-white ID
photograph of one of Uruguay’s detenidos-desaparecidos being clasped between the
thumb and index finger of an outstretched hand and then held up against either
desolate cityscapes or virtually deserted esplanades (ramblas) along the River Plate.
Each photograph within a photograph was accompanied by a caption indicating the
name of the person in the image, and the place and date of their abduction, thus
restoring ‘biographical singularity’ to a face originally targeted for archival anonymity
and existential erasure (Richard quoted in Avelar 2006: 267). The somewhat crude
superimposition of one image within another was thus to be read as a symbolic ‘re-
insertion’ of a figure within the environment from which they had previously been
violently ‘extracted’ and hence, a rupture in the illusion that the memory of state
violence in the past can simply be conveniently ‘airbrushed’ out of contemporary reality.
Indeed, Urruzola had performed his own rudimentary version of reversed airbrushing
so as to boldly proclaim the irruption of an erased figure into the national ‘frame’.
Even though state terror in Uruguay is associated most readily with the mass
imprisonment and torture of dissidents, not to mention with the vast numbers of the
country’s population driven into exile, the phenomenon of disappearance remained
‘highly significant in its contribution to the nation’s spread of an unprecedented culture
of fear’ between 1973 and 1985 (Fried 2011: 160).6 As an allegory of social trauma, a
symbol of protest and demands for justice, therefore, the ID photograph or black-and-
white portrait of the disappeared became as indispensable to Uruguayan human rights
Figure 1: Miradas ausentes en la calle (Montevideo 2008) with kind permission from Juan
Ángel Urruzola.
groups as in other post-conflict Latin American countries.7 Clearly, the potency of

archival portraits of individual disappeared citizens lies in their capacity to symbolize
the rupture of the wider social fabric during periods of authoritarian rule: ‘The
photographs of the faces became a collective sign, each one of those traces of a singular
life metonymically representing all of the disappeared’ (Longoni 2010: 2). Since the end
of the Uruguayan dictatorship, these images have thus also come to represent the
current struggle against the official politics of silence and the Law of Expiry.
In adapting this symbolism to his own politicized aesthetic, Urruzola is continuing
a tradition of Uruguayan art and photography devoted to the figure of the detenido-
desaparecido which dates back at least to Antonio Frasconi’s emblematic woodcuts Los
desaparecidos from the 1980s (Larnaudie 2005).8 Yet it is Urruzola who, perhaps more
than any of his contemporaries, has been most concerned with exploring the struggle
for national memory as expressed specifically in the form of the standardized foto-
carné rather than any other kind of portrait. This preference for ID photographs
36 David Rojinsky
derives from Urruzola’s concern with the gaze (mirada) as a metaphor for memory
and the political transparency denied by the transitional governments. For instance,
it is precisely because of the unwavering and penetrating stare of the subject in an ID
photograph that Urruzola was able to convey an ironic allusion to Sanguinetti’s No
hay que tener ojos en la nuca, most overtly in the specific case of Miradas ausentes en la
calle. Urruzola both invokes and ridicules the slogan by making an irresistible eye-to-
eye contact (mirarse a los ojos) with images of the disappeared his symbolic conduit
for witnessing and remembering the past. Hence, if Urruzola conceived of his urban
intervention precisely as a means for ‘advertising’ the campaign in favour of the
second referendum, he appeared to be doing so by suggesting the return of a
phantasmagoric witness to events previously intended to be ‘unseen’ and beyond
testimony. In this way, viewers of Urruzola’s images were encouraged to reject the
‘blindness’ of the politics of silence and to remember (‘see’) Uruguay’s previously
repressed past by experiencing it literally ‘staring’ them in the face.
In this same respect it is worth noting that in the promotional brochures for his
exhibitions and on his website entries, Urruzola has on several occasions alluded to
the security forces’ practice of blindfolding or placing a hood over the abductee’s
head, just as he himself had experienced before being forced into exile in Europe: ‘En
1972, cuando los militares uruguayos me detuvieron, su primer gesto fue ponerme
una capucha. A otros les vendaban los ojos. A todos los detenidos se les “amputaba”
la mirada. Estaba prohibido “mirar”, acaso “ver”’ (Urruzola 2006, CCE Brochure)
[‘In 1972, when the Uruguayan army arrested me, the first thing they did was cover
my head with a hood. Other prisoners were blindfolded. All detainees had their
capacity to look “amputated”. “Looking”, even “seeing” was prohibited’]. On
encountering one of the re-framed images from Miradas ausentes en la calle, then, the
viewer is exhorted to meet the gaze of the once blindfolded or hooded detainee and
in doing so, to confront the uncomfortable history of [a] death[s] that until 2001 the
Uruguayan state had refused to acknowledge.
Unavoidable eye-to-eye contact between viewer and Urruzola’s subjects is, by
extension, intended as a moral imperative. The hand holding the image at arm’s
length further underscores the invitation to the viewer to adopt the photographer’s
(technical and ethical) point of view and to ‘remove’ their own ‘blindfolds’; that is,
to reject the temptation to deny history and to enter into an inter-subjective exchange
of looks with an apparition from a past generation making its own historical claim on
the present. Urruzola’s wider message would therefore appear to be that of an appeal
for a ‘redemptive’ intergenerational memory whereby contemporary Uruguay
recognizes its own historical ‘legacy’ as ‘redeeming’ a lost generation by, at the very
least, acknowledging their prior existence and thus offering the possibility of mourning
a past which, until recently, had itself been ‘disappeared’.9
In that sense, Hirsch’s original notion of a ‘postmemorial’ community interpellated
specifically through photography, is especially useful for considering the reception of
Urruzola’s work and its implicit message by the general public (Hirsch 1997). Even
though Hirsch has been concerned primarily with post-conflict family photography
as the postmemorial medium par excellence, her overarching preoccupation with the
affiliative identification of the viewer with the narratives and subject positions offered
by other people’s photographs remains potentially instructive in accounting for public
responses to Urruzola’s images. For the imaginary and yet, always incomplete
identification with those portrayed in photographs from an earlier generation allows
the expansion of a wider community of viewers predicated upon a shared, ethical
imperative to remember and to mourn human rights abuses of the past and present
(Hirsch 1997: 267). Consequently, we can appreciate the critical role of the context
in which images are exhibited and hence, the importance of the public exposure of
Urruzola’s photo-murals as ‘street art’ in creating the possibility of such a community.
The earliest version of Miradas ausentes had been exhibited in the vestibule of the
Intendencia Municipal de Montevideo in 2000 for a visiting public largely limited to
directly-affected relatives and survivors and those human rights groups, artists and
intellectuals who were already committed to memory politics (Oroño 2008). It was
therefore when Urruzola decided to transform this earlier project into an urban
installation and to take the images literally out into the streets and onto the buildings
of Montevideo that his ‘spectral witnesses’ were able to extend their viewing public:
that is, beyond the anticipated politically-engaged gallery visitors to include a new
generation of ordinary citizens not directly affected by state terror. While the images
were certainly billboard-size, Urruzola rejected the idea of actually hiring elevated
billboard space in the city to exhibit his works, claiming that elevated advertising
space retains a protective but also alienating distance from the potential consumers
down below. Instead, Urruzola preferred to go ‘down’ to street level to exhibit his
pieces directly amidst the hustle and bustle of daily life so as to engage passers-by and
hence, to have ‘los ojos del transeúnte a la altura de los ojos del desaparecido’ [‘the
pedestrian’s eyes at the same level as those of the disappeared subject’], thus
maximizing the possibility of an inter-subjective exchange of gazes (Urruzola 2009).
In striving for this eye-to-eye contact between image and viewer, Urruzola thereby
signalled his Barthesian faith in the photo-image as the magical restoration of the
absent/dead referent and, by extension, as a spectre-like witness returning from the
past to insert itself within the contemporary politics of memory (Barthes 1980).
Rather than dismissing this vitalistic conception of the photo-image as a
superstitious regression to the popular mid-nineteenth-century reception of the
medium or to an ‘irrational’ neo-primitivism, we might bear in mind contemporary
anthropological theories of the artwork which posit that, far from being antithetical
to industrialized societies, animistic conceptions of images (as much as fetishized
social relations) remain the contemporary cultural norm (Gell 1998; Pinney 1998;
Mitchell 2005). The plethora of images circulating in a hypermediated contemporary
culture are ostensibly treated as substitutes for, or extensions of, absent beings and
hence ‘persons’ (rather than inanimate objects) who exercise agency over the social
relations of which they are an integral part: ‘works of art, images, icons, and the like
have to be treated, in the context of an anthropological theory, as person-like; that is,
sources of, and targets for, social agency’ (Gell 1998: 96). By extension, the notion
that an inanimate object such as a photographic image might actually be received as
an emanation of the dead who have returned to exercise social agency in the present
38 David Rojinsky
would seem appropriate for a generation inheriting a past haunted by silenced

witnesses. In that respect, it is worth noting Bell’s germane argument that the
detenido-desaparecido captured in an ID photograph can be read as a version of Primo
Levi’s abject ‘absolute witness’ who now resists their mute confinement to the
historical archive and becomes a ‘desiring’ subject. As such, these images make a claim
on the viewer to recognize each one ‘not for an individual story but [for] the story of
the configurations of power and the machinations’ that put the subject in the frame
in the first place (Bell 2010: 83).
The public’s response to the project provided further dramatic evidence of a
contemporary faith in the magical conflation of referent and image in such
photographs, and yet, at the same time, in some cases indicated little enthusiasm for
the calls for justice invoked by these political revenants. On the contrary, the often
violent reaction to the images exposed the continued polarization of Uruguayan
society with respect to state terror even as, quite ironically, it revealed that Urruzola’s
project had certainly attracted a broader community of viewers beyond those already
committed to memory politics. In fact, this expanded community now appeared to
include a number of citizens opposed to memory politics altogether and who viewed
the street art simply as an intolerable affront. Within hours of being displayed, many
of the images had been vandalized, completely ripped down, daubed in graffiti or
simply covered over with fresh advertising posters. Moreover, given the significance
of the gaze in Miradas ausentes, it is worth noting that vandals often chose to scratch
out the eyes of Urruzola’s subjects (as if to allay any lingering doubts about the
existence of contemporary animism) and thereby strove to once again ‘blindfold’
these ‘image-beings’ who sought eye-to-eye contact so insistently. Urruzola himself
was initially left aghast at the speed with which such vandalism manifested itself.10
However, any sense of disappointment soon gave way to indignant frustration with
those Uruguayan citizens who continued to oppose any reform of the Law of Expiry:
‘¿lograremos en este país re-encontrarnos con nuestra historia? o ¿seguiremos
borrando, arrancando, tapando, negando, hablando mucho para no decir nada?’
(Urruzola 2009) [‘Will we ever manage to reconcile ourselves with our history in this
country? Or will we simply carry on wiping out, tearing down, covering over, denying
and talking a lot without saying anything?’].
The use of vandalism as a metaphor for the denial and repression of the past in this
blog entry already revealed Urruzola’s realization that his urban intervention had been
successful in inciting even the most entrenched opponents of legislative reform to at
least engage in the debate over memory politics in some form. It is therefore more
than tempting to view the social impact of the photo-murals as analogous to that of
the German ‘counter-monument’ (Young 1992). For, in both cases, the destruction,
defacement or (gradual) disappearance of such public art served to reflect the ongoing
struggle for memory and became an active embodiment of memory as a social
practice. Indeed, the primary intention of the counter-monument, which might be
equally applicable to Urruzola’s urban photography, had been to encourage citizens
to exceed the role of passive spectatorship and to assume a more active engagement
with national remembrance on a daily basis, however unsavoury or even violent the
form that ‘engagement’ might take (Young 1992: 274). Hence, if national memory
is to have any social relevance to the present, the counter-monument, like Urruzola’s
installation, should:
not console but provoke; not remain fixed but change; not be everlasting but disappear;
not be ignored by passers-by but demand interaction; not remain pristine but invite its
own violation and desecration; not accept graciously the burden of memory but throw
it back at the town’s feet. (277)
The counter-monument had thereby been intended to expose and reverse the paradox
of the traditional monument, that is, the fact that, ironically, permanent urban
monuments ‘absorb’ the work of memory and end up alleviating the city dweller of
the burden of remembrance (Young 1992: 276). Rather than embodying any illusion
of memorial permanence, the counter-monument was instead designed to trigger
internal ‘living memory’ in the viewer and, counter-intuitively, to convince her/him
that ‘once the monument moves its viewers to memory, it also becomes unnecessary
and so may disappear’ (Young 1992: 278). Similarly, while the Uruguayan vandals had
made their symbolic rejection of an inter-subjective gaze with the figures in Urruzola’s
photo-murals evident for all to see, they also revealed that the issues at stake in the
politics of memory had been ‘seared’ into a wider public consciousness (Young 1992:
272). For despite their efforts to ‘disappear’ the memory of state terror for a second
time, the vandals had by default entered the debate over the politics of memory in
Uruguay and hence demonstrated that the eventual disappearance of Urruzola’s visual
triggers for memory did not necessarily mean the erasure of memory tout court.
Nevertheless, in the days following the initial hanging and pasting of his pieces, as
Urruzola embarked upon the laborious process of recovering and re-pasting those
photo-murals that had been damaged, or of uncovering those already hidden beneath
new advertising posters, he also decided to both photograph and film that very process
of restoration. In this way, he could retain at least some record of and visual testimony
to the process whereby his own ‘disappearing’ counter-monuments had become
metaphors for an antagonistic process of repression and revelation and then counter-
repression of the national past. Ultimately, an even wider national and international
postmemorial community of internet viewers could now witness this restoration and
could thereby appreciate how social memory in post-conflict cultures might constitute
a series of ‘collected’ memories and counter-memories vying for ownership of the
national past in an ongoing, unresolved process, rather than constituting a single
‘collective’ memory, or rather than simply being doomed to ineluctable erasure
(Young 1993: xi).
In conceiving of Urruzola’s photo-murals as visual counter-monuments, however,
we might wonder to what extent the limitations of Montevideo’s Memorial and
museum of memory become exposed by comparison. After all, there is no denying
that the relatively distant location of both of these official memory markers from
Montevideo’s busiest areas further supports the view that institutionalized
remembrance is characterized primarily by the affective or intellectual pilgrimage of
40 David Rojinsky
an informed public, rather than by uncomfortable provocation for the general public
on a daily basis (Druliolle 2011; Lessa 2011).11 Similarly, we might reiterate the fact
that the ethos of the counter-monument is to provoke the active participation of
citizens in often overlooked urban spaces, whereas traditional institutions tend to
restrict the memorial experience to their material confines and to the contemplative
subject-position of the museum visitor. On the other hand, we should nevertheless
be wary of dismissing official memorial markers as ‘institutional gravestone[s] for
memory’ (Druliolle 2011: 17) or the temptation to simply place them in opposition
to popular micro-memorial projects. Instead, while acknowledging their potential
limitations, we should also recognize their role as official symbols of the increasingly
successful erosion of the culture of amnesia and by extension, their symbolism in
recovering ‘monumental’ urban space for the culture of memory in a city previously
dominated by images of and ‘monuments’ to neoliberal consumerism. Indeed, it is
precisely with this notion of a recuperation of urban space from the frenzied
circulation of consumer images that Miradas ausentes en la calle complements and
extends the precedent set by Montevideo’s official memory markers.
In the first place, Urruzola’s ‘nomadic’ and ‘portable’ visual counter-memorials
were obviously able to occupy a greater expanse of urban space simply by constituting
a cartography of phantasmagoric images at disparate points around the city, rather
than being restricted to the confines of a single location. Furthermore, Urruzola made
no distinction between sites of consumption and sites of memory when deciding
where to hang his pieces: he simply ‘reintroduced the dead’ directly into the daily flow
of mass-produced consumer images in downtown Montevideo. In contrast, we might
bear in mind that just as the Punta Carretas mall and the Memorial may represent
‘monumentally’ polar opposites with regard to the remembrance of dictatorship, they
also represent an allocation of separate urban spaces for consumption (oblivion) and
for memory within the post-dictatorship city. By avoiding this urban spatial binary,
Urruzola was able to acknowledge the postmodern penetration of the market into all
cultural practices and at the same time, to draw a jarring contrast between his photo-
murals and mass-produced images promoting spectacular and disposable products.
Indeed, prior to their complete disappearance, the ripped and torn photo-murals
revealed layers of earlier, mostly commercial hoardings pasted beneath them and thus,
not only invoked the notion of memory as a temporal palimpsest of multiple
inscriptions, but also stood as testimony to the ongoing tensions between a consumer
culture identified with the politics of silence and a politics of memory identified with
the struggle against impunity.12
Ultimately, the photo-murals drew public attention to the human cost of state
terror in the past and yet, unlike official markers of memory, they also temporarily
punctured the mystifying effects of image saturation in contemporary Montevideo.
Even as they faded, were vandalized and eventually became submerged beneath layers
of new publicity images, Urruzola’s spectral witnesses had succeeded in suggesting
that time was ‘out of joint’ and had therefore fulfilled their wider purpose as counter-
monuments: they had demonstrated that the post-dictatorship city of the present was
predicated upon the socio-economic fulfilment of authoritarian rule in the past.
Whether viewers reacted with violent indignation or with approval to Urruzola’s

provocation, they had all nevertheless been interpellated as members of a wider
postmemorial community. They had all been called upon to reflect on the continuities
between past and present as – willingly or unwillingly – they remembered those who
had opposed the transition from state to market.
Notes
1. A literal translation of the slogan would be ‘You shouldn’t have eyes in the back of your
head’.
2. I am referring here to Uruguay’s Ley de Caducidad de la Pretensión Punitiva del Estado,
essentially an amnesty law comparable to Spain’s Ley de Amnistía (1977) and Argentina’s
Punto Final (1986).
3. In 2011, the Uruguayan senate voted to allow certain human rights abuses to be
prosecuted as ‘crimes against humanity’ thus ‘effectively overturning’ the Expiry Law
(Levey 2012: 211).
4. On the transformation of the Punta Carretas ‘prison-mall’, see Ruetalo (2008), Achugar
(2009), Lessa (2011), Draper (2011, 2012), Levey (2012).
5. In particular, the opening of former clandestine detention centres as espacios para la
memoria over the last decade in Buenos Aires offers a stark contrast to the inauguration of
a number of exclusive urban malls during the previous decade dominated by Menemist
neoliberalism (1989–1999). For instance, Buenos Aires malls such as Alto Palermo were
inaugurated in 1990, while the pre-existing Galerías Pacífico and Patio Bullrich were
renovated and re-opened as modern shopping centres in 1992 and 1995 respectively.
6. Almost 200 Uruguayans have been confirmed as ‘detained and disappeared’ during the
dictatorship, but the predominant policy pursued by state security forces was one of
incarceration and torture of political prisoners. By imprisoning the largest proportion of
dissidents per capita in the world at the time, the Uruguayan military earned the country
the unenviable reputation as the ‘torture chamber of Latin America’ (Fried 2011; Lessa
2011; Levey 2010, 2012).
7. Beginning in 1981, Uruguayans had appropriated the state’s use of such images to inscribe
an evidentiary index of subjectivity when searching for their own missing family members
and by 1984, the organization Madres y Familiares de Uruguayos Detenidos-Desaparecidos
was employing enlarged photographs on demonstrations to challenge the state’s erasure
of those same subjects from public space and discourse (Broquetas 2007: 182).
8. Uruguayan artists who have produced works based on photo-images of the disappeared
include the late Antonio Frasconi (1919–2013), Más de 120 Mil Desaparecidos en América
Latina – García Márquez (1983); Ana Tiscornia (1951- ), Retratos 1 (1996); photographer
Annabella Balduvino (1948–), Nomeolivides (2001); Ernesto Vila (1938–), Cual retazo de
los cielos (2012).
9. In proposing that the past’s ‘claim’ on the present generation is to ‘redeem’ the loss and
injustice suffered by earlier generations, I am of course indebted to Walter Benjamin’s
messianic conception of redemptive history (Benjamin 1985 [1940]: 254).
10. Personal interview with Urruzola in Montevideo, December 2011.
11. In fact, according to Lessa (2011) the difficult access, lack of publicity and of guided tours
have only exacerbated the limited constitution of visitors to the Memorial over the last
decade (192).
12. In this sense, Miradas ausentes en la calle can be viewed as comparable to Chilean artist,
Carlos Altamirano’s Retratos from 1996 in which single black-and-white ID photographs
of desaparecidos accompanied by the caption ¿Dónde están? were each inserted into a series
of collages of colour images associated with entertainment and consumerism. See Richard
(2000).
42 David Rojinsky
Works cited
Achugar, Hugo (2009) ‘On maps and malls’, in City/Art: The Urban Scene in Latin America,
ed. Rebecca E. Biron (Durham and London: Duke University Press), 185–210.
Avelar, Idelber (2006) ‘La Escena de Avanzada: Photography and writing in postcoup Chile –
a conversation with Nelly Richard’, in Photography and Writing in Latin America: Double
Exposures, eds Marcy E. Schwartz and Mary Beth Tierney-Tello (Albuquerque: University
of New Mexico Press), 259–270.
Barthes, Roland (1980) Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang).
Bell, Vikki (2010) ‘On Fernando’s photograph: The biopolitics of aparición in contemporary
Argentina’, Theory, Culture and Society 27: 69–89.
Benjamín, Walter (1985) Illuminations. Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken Books).
Benjamin, Walter (1999)[1931] ‘Little history of photography’, in Selected Writings. Vol 2.
1927-1934, eds Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA:
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), 507–530.
Broquetas, Magdalena (2007) ‘Fotografía y desaparecidos’, in Segundas Jornadas sobre
fotografía. La fotografía y sus usos sociales (Montevideo: Editorial Centro Municipal de
Fotografía), 181–205.
Draper, Susana (2011) ‘The business of memory: reconstructing torture centres as shopping
malls and tourist sites’, in Accounting for Violence: Marketing Memory in Latin America, eds
Ksenjia Bilbija and Leigh A. Payne (Durham: Duke University Press), 127–150.
Draper, Susana (2012) Afterlives of Confinement. Spatial Transitions in Postdictatorship Latin
America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press).
Druliolle, Vincent (2011) ‘Remembering and its places in postdictatorship Argentina’, in
The Memory of State Terrorism in the Southern Cone: Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, eds
Francesca Lessa and Vincent Druliolle (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), 15–41.
Fried Amilivia, Gabriela (2011) ‘Private transmission of traumatic memories of the disappeared
in the context of the transitional politics of oblivion in Uruguay (1973–2001): “Pedagogies
of Horror” among Uruguayan families’, in The Memory of State Terrorism in the Southern
Cone: Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, eds Francesca Lessa and Vincent Druliolle (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan), 157–178.
Gell, Alfred (1998) Art and Agency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Hirsch, Marianne (1997) Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge,
MA and London: Harvard University Press).
Larnaudie, Olga (2005) ‘Uruguay en dictadura. Imágenes de resistencia y memoria’, in
Escrituras, imágenes y escenarios ante la represión, eds Elizabeth Jelin and Ana Longoni
(Madrid: Siglo xxi de España Editores), 27–38.
Lessa, Francesca (2011) ‘No hay que tener ojos en la nuca: The memory of violence in Uruguay,
1973–2010’, in The Memory of State Terrorism in the Southern Cone: Argentina, Chile and
Uruguay, eds Francesca Lessa and Vincent Druliolle (New York: Palgrave Macmillan),
179–208.
Levey, Cara (2010) ‘Chronicle of a childhood in captivity: Niños en Cautiverio Político
and the (re)construction of memory in contemporary Uruguay’, ACME: An International
E-Journal for Critical Geographies 9.3, 368–376.
Levey, Cara (2012) ‘The Memorial de los Detenidos Desaparecidos: Fragile memory and
contested meaning in post-dictatorship Uruguay’, Journal of Latin American Cultural
Studies 21.2, 203–219.
Longoni, Ana (2010) ‘Photographs and silhouettes: Visual politics in Argentina’, Afterall 25
(Autumn/Winter), 1–10.
Mitchell, W.J. Thomas (2005) What do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago
and London: University of Chicago Press).
Oroño, Tatiana (2008) Mirada y memoria: reconfiguraciones materiales y simbólicas. Fotógrafo

conceptual por las calles de Montevideo. Available at: http://www.urruzola.net/obra/miradas-
ausentes-en-la-calle/
Pinney, Christopher (1998) Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press).
Richard, Nelly (2000) ‘Memoria, fotografía y desaparición: dramas y tramas’, Punto de Vista:
Revista de Cultura XXIII, 68, 29–33.
Ruetalo, Victoria (2008) ‘From penal institution to shopping mecca: The economics of
memory and the case of Punta Carretas’, Cultural Critique 68 (Winter), 38–65.
Urruzola, Juan Ángel (2009) ‘La memoria de los muros’. Available at: http://www.urruzola.
net/obra/miradas-ausentes-en-la-calle/
Young, James E. (1992) ‘The counter-monument: memory against itself in Germany today’,
Critical Inquiry 18.2 (Winter), 267–296.
Young, James E. (1993) The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New
Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press).
Internet Sources
Urruzola’s artworks:
http://www.urruzola.net/obra/montevideo-12-anos-despues-1985/
http://www.urruzola.net/obra/miradas-ausentes/
http://www.urruzola.net/obra/memoria-para-armar/
http://www.urruzola.net/obra/de-eso-no-se-habla/
http://www.urruzola.net/obra/intervencion-fachada-cce/
http://www.urruzola.net/obra/el-general-y-ellos/
http://www.urruzola.net/obra/album-de-memoria/
http://www.urruzola.net/obra/miradas-ausentes-en-la-calle/
http://www.urruzola.net/obra/hijos/
Blog entries (2007–2013):

http://vascoloco.blogspot.co.uk/
Youtube video:
Miradas ausentes en la calle (2008), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ywa1b85U3ag
Toying with history: Playful memory in Albertina
Carri’s Los rubios
Jordana Blejmar
Abstract
This article analyses the use of Playmobil figures in Albertina Carri’s autofictional film,
Los rubios [The Blondes] (2003). Deploying what the author calls a ‘playful memory’
of the traumatic past in Argentina, Los rubios is a pioneering example of a new trend
of post-dictatorship cultural remembrance that takes a desacralized, non-solemn and
de-monumental approach to the past. Young writers and filmmakers, many of them
children of disappeared parents like Carri, employ dark humour and make explicit
references to children’s games and toys in their representations of the 1976–1983
military regime. The use of toys in the reenactment of traumatic episodes of history,
however, is not new, for it echoes similar artistic re-appropriations of a vicarious past
by second- and third-generation artists of the Shoah. Drawing on this transnational
corpus, the article argues that toy art and playful memories not only redirect our gaze
away from the experiences of the adult survivors and towards those of their descendants,
offering a new (child-like) perspective on twentieth-century liminal experiences. They
also connect state violence to the violence inherent in everyday objects of childhood.
Moreover, the nature of anthropomorphic toys such as Playmobil – deformations of
their worldly counterparts (Young), a sort of ‘dead among us’ located between the
animate and inanimate world (Stewart) – is particularly suitable for depicting both the
neither-dead-nor-alive figure of the disappeared and the distortions of memory. Finally,
against those who consider playful memories acts of dispassion and an insult to victims,
this article suggests that in their rejection of realism and mere reproductions of the past,
playful memories revitalize the intergenerational transmission of history by offering
images of ‘sacred’ events (meaning events that resist representation) at the same time
as – in Ernst van Alphen’s words – hinting at the ontological impossibility of completely
and comprehensively mastering trauma.
Keywords: toys; playful memory; postmemory; Argentina; dictatorship; post-
dictatorship; Albertina Carri; Los rubios; the disappeared
In 2010 a writer (Ivan Moiseeff), a visual artist (Lola García Garrido) and a musician
(Xoel López) worked in collaboration to create a promotional poster and soundtrack
for a non-existent, big-budget film. Borrowing elements from animé and science
fiction, the script for Mazinger Z against the Military Dictatorship, printed on the
reverse of the poster, outlines how a group of young guerrilleros resist the 1976–1983
Argentine military dictatorship assisted by the famous Japanese super robot. In Mi
vida después [My Life After] (2008), a theatrical biodrama by Lola Arias, six actors,
born in the 1970s and 1980s, reconstruct the lives of their parents on stage (some of
them disappeared, others accomplices of the aforementioned dictatorship), by

Playful memory in Albertini Carri’s Los rubios 45
dressing in their parents’ clothes, playing with toys and acting out militant training
sessions in Chaplinesque scenes. And, in Las teorías salvajes [Wild Theories] (2008)
by Pola Oloixarac, the protagonists create a videogame, Dirty War 1975, in which the
players select the characters that they want to be (for example Che I, ‘with black beret,
uniform Sierra Maestra, without cigar’ or Che II, ‘cigar, bandana with red star and
beard)’ and win points by carrying out certain militant tasks.1
These works, which form part of an ever-growing corpus, are examples of a new
trend in post-dictatorship Argentine cultural memory, one that takes a playful,
desacralized, non-solemn and de-monumental approach to the traumatic past.
Deploying what I call a ‘playful memory’, these young artists and writers often use
humour, popular culture, children’s games, toys and visual techniques commonly
taught at school in their representations of the dictatorship. Playful memories have a
clear generational imprint, as they are mostly exercised by the so-called second post-
dictatorship generation, and mainly by children of disappeared parents. With the arrival
of these artists, playing with the Argentine traumatic past is no longer unthinkable.
The inclusion of toys, superheroes or games in such works as a means of
representing the dictatorship creates a clear autobiographical link to the violent
contexts that shaped the births and upbringings of these artists. But beyond such
autobiographical motivations, I wish to ask in this article what role toys and play have
in the collective memory of authoritarian rule in Argentina. Following Ernst van
Alphen’s study of toys as memory play and what he calls a ‘pedagogy of remembrance
through play’ (2002: 61), as well as James E. Young’s considerations of toys as cultural
icons and what he terms ‘the play of memory’ (2000: 47), I ask the following
questions: how do post-memorial Argentine works provide the objects of play with
alternative uses to those prescribed by the market? And to what extent do toys and
play transmit to us the dictatorial past in ways that monuments, testimonies,
traditional conceptions of pedagogy and historical genres fail to do?
The playful memories and toy art that have emerged in the new millennium in
Argentina demonstrate two crucial new aspects in relation to earlier politics and
aesthetics of remembering the years of dictatorship. Firstly, they extend our
understanding of the recent past (and its effects in the present) by displacing the focus
of the object of memory: our gaze is relocated away from the experiences of the adult
survivors and towards those of their heirs. One of the most innovative elements of
this generational perspective is that it reformulates the hegemonic notion of victim
present in previous accounts of the dictatorship by stating, for example, that children
of the disappeared were not just adoptive or second-hand witnesses but were just as
much victims as their parents. At the same time, these works reflect on a figure often
relegated in former visual representations of the traumatic past, namely the
perpetrator. Secondly, playful memories reintroduce a memorial role to childhood
objects of consumption whose own history and politics have been erased by the
neoliberal forces of the market, thus connecting state violence to the violence inherent
in everyday objects and practices during both dictatorship and democracy.
These two aspects of playful memories, I argue in the first section of this article, help
to reshape and reinvigorate images of the 1976–1983 period, countering a certain
46 Jordana Blejmar
tedium that many young people feel when thinking about these years as a result of the
way they have been taught in schools or consumed via mass media. In the second
section, I explore these hypotheses by looking at filmmaker Albertina Carri’s
controversial use of stop motion and Playmobil figures to reconstruct her parents’
disappearance during the dictatorship, as seen in her pioneering 2003 film Los rubios
[The Blondes]. Finally, in the conclusion, I draw on certain trends in the toy industry
that look for (hyper)realist depictions of their worldly referents in their products. I
compare these trends with the criticisms directed at Los rubios and other playful
memories that are reluctant to depict the past and the ‘reality’ as it was/is, and suggest
that, ultimately, these exigencies of realism result in playbacks, repetitions or
reproductions of the past that are of dubious use for the cultural transmission of trauma.
Play as ‘topsy-turvy sacred’

In his analysis of the photographs of Nazi toy figures by American artist David
Levinthal entitled Mein Kampf (1994–1996), James E. Young (2000: 47) reminds us
that toys are not so much anti-monuments as ‘de-monumentalizations’ of their
worldly counterparts, diminished deflections of their subject’s pretensions within the
private fantasy world of children. This particular aspect of toys contrasts with oversized
monuments that play a role in public space and that inflate the importance of their
referent, transforming it into part of the (national rather than the domestic) landscape.
Van Alphen has further suggested that both figurative expressions and toy memory
art are not only as legitimate as history or documentary narratives for historicizing the
past but are in fact ‘more precise’, as they have the capacity to represent events and
experiences – I am thinking here of absence/disappearance – that cannot be evoked by
literal expressions (1997: 29). Like Young, van Alphen is particularly interested in the
potentialities of toy art and playful memories on the Holocaust, as is made evident, for
example, by a text he wrote for a catalogue that accompanied the art exhibition
Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imaginary / Recent Art, inaugurated at the Jewish Museum of New
York on 17 March 2002, a few months before the release of Los rubios in Argentina.2
This exhibition contained works by thirteen young artists, born between 1954 and
1970, who were exploring the ways in which the iconography of National Socialism
was appropriated by mass culture, Hollywood cinema, fashion and the toy industry.
Among the works on display, there was, for example, the 1996 LEGO concentration
camp designed by Polish artist Zbigniew Libera, made up of three identical series of
seven boxes that included sets of building blocks and other pieces of a miniaturized
black-and-white concentration camp: models of the barracks, the crematoria, body
parts, smiling skeletons and clothing. The images on the boxes are particularly
disturbing. In one of them, two white skeletons carry a third to what is presumably
the crematorium, while in the background we see a small pile of body parts. In
another image, a white figure with a Hitler-like hairstyle is torturing a white skeleton
with an electric device. Equally shocking artworks were Anselm Kiefer’s self-portraits
posing on top of German monuments and performing Hitler’s Sieg heil salute (1975),
Tom Sachs’ ‘Prada Deathcamp’ (1998), a model of a Nazi camp made with the
material of luxury fashion items, and Alan Schechner’s ‘Barcode to Concentration
Camp Morph’ (1994), in which he digitally transformed a barcode into a photograph

of camp victims wearing striped uniforms. We find a similar playful spirit in other
contemporary works on the Holocaust, such as in the videos made by the Dutch
theatre company Hotel Modern established in 1997. In ‘Kamp’, for example, the
company recreates the daily routine of mass murder at Auschwitz using miniature
puppets made of plasticine.3
As with Carri’s use of Playmobil figures in her film, all these works sparked
controversy. They were variously considered to be scandalous, offensive, obscene and
immoral, acts of dispassion, a dangerous flirtation with traumatic events, and an
insult to the victims.4 Their playful spirit and use of toys led older generations to
accuse the young authors of being frivolous, self-indulgent, and evasive, and of
stripping politics and history from the reconstruction of the past.
One thought-provoking aspect of these works was the way in which they
destabilized the empathic nexus between viewers and victims, encouraging us instead,
as van Alphen puts it, to ‘play’ the perpetrator. The artists referred to invite us to
create our own concentration camp (Libera), to play at being Nazis (Kiefer), and to
‘become’ Nazi photographers (Levinthal).5 But is the invitation to identify with the
perpetrator merely a provocative gesture or is there something to be learnt from it?
Kaja Silverman (cited in van Alphen 2002: 77) suggests that identification takes
two possible forms. On the one hand, there is what she calls the ‘idiopathic’
identification that focuses on similar features between the subjects involved in the
process, simultaneously suppressing or ignoring dissimilar ones. Through this
mechanism we take the other into the self, based on a link of likeness, so that the
other becomes ‘like’ the self. In the second form of identification, which she calls
‘heteropathic’, the self becomes momentously and partially (like) the other (van
Alphen, ibid.). For van Alphen, while the idiopathic identification with the victims
is useful in learning about their horror, it is also a way of reassuring us of our
fundamental innocence, which is unhelpful when trying to achieve the fundamental
purpose of trauma education, namely to prevent undesirable historical events from
happening again. Conversely, the heteropathic identification with the perpetrator can
help us to realize how easy it is to become an accomplice of such crimes, to connect
with certain aspects of the ‘others’ that attract us despite what we rationally and
ethically think of them. This type of identification helps us to understand, for
example, the enormous consensus that many authoritarian regimes enjoyed among
the civil societies that made them possible.
A second controversial aspect of works that use objects of play in the reconstruction
of the past lies in the doubly imaginative nature of toys, ‘as things to play with and to
play out, as toys and art’ (van Alphen 2002: 164). Some believe that toys are in this
respect opposite to historical genres and discourses such as documentary, memoir,
testimony, or the monument, which are often considered to be more effective,
respectful and morally responsible as modes for instructing us about the collective
traumas of history. However, as Susannah Radstone has argued, ‘history and fiction
both constitute forms of play. The crucial thing is rather the distinction between
history’s concern with “the happened” and contemporary, more experiential
48 Jordana Blejmar
engagements with the past – or, better put, the past in the present – (that) may
nevertheless prove illuminating’ (2013: 293). It is thus not, strictly speaking, the use
of toys per se in these works that has been criticized.6 What produced discomfort
among certain spectators is a specific (reproachable) way of playing with toys that
offended, albeit to different degrees, the sensibility of survivors and historians as well
the interests of toy manufacturers who did not like to see their products used in such
provocative artworks.
But just as one cannot dictate the remembering subjects how to remember (Macón
2004), one cannot impose on players how to play. Play has rules, but these are agreed
only among those who are participating in the game. What is more, it is only because
Carri or Libera ‘misuse’ toys – challenging and shocking our horizon of expectations
of play – that they are able to bring to light hidden political narratives of childhood
in objects of consumption that link those objects to the collective traumatic events of
the past.
In the case of Playmobil toys, for example, they ‘are not just any kind of toys but
they reinscribe, from a child’s perspective, the dictatorship era as one of imposed
social uniformation and economic surrender to transnational imports (the Playmobil
brand started to be distributed worldwide in 1975, a year before the military coup)’
(Andermann 2011: 118). This observation indicates why a Chilean artist, Marcela
Moraga, has also deployed Playmobil figures in her own act of remembering the
Chilean dictatorship. Her work Allende, Hitler, Lenin (2003) is comprised of
photographs of plastic Playmobil figures carrying weapons or wearing swastikas,
looking at posters of Hitler, Lenin or Allende. These works suggest that the Playmobil
figures are not just mediums for representing historical events, but are themselves part
of the history in question.
Overall, at the heart of the debates about Los rubios and about the Mirroring Evil
exhibition lay the belief that playful memories on the Holocaust and on the Latin
American dictatorships have violated something too sacred, too ‘serious’ to play with.
Giorgio Agamben has noted that the realms of play and sacred are closely linked,
evident in the origins of most games, which lie in ancient sacred ceremonies, in
dances, ritual combat and divinatory practices. At the same time, ‘if it is true that play
derives from the realm of the sacred, it is also true that it radically transforms it –
indeed, overturns it to the point where it can plausibly be defined as “topsy-turvy”
sacred’ (2007a: 78). Following Benveniste, Agamben argues that the difference
between the sacred act and play is that if the former is made up of the myth that
articulates history and the ritual that reproduces it, the latter preserves the ritual form
of the sacred drama, abolishing and forgetting the myth, ‘the meaningfully worded
fabulation that endows the acts with their sense and their purpose’ (Benveniste, cited
by Agamben 2007: 78). Thus, concludes Agamben with reference to Collodi’s
Pinocchio, ‘Playland is a country whose inhabitants are busy celebrating rituals, and
manipulating objects and sacred words, whose sense and purpose they have, however,
forgotten’ (79). The crucial thing here is that while rites seek to adjust ‘the
contradiction between mythic past and present, annulating the interval separating
them’ (79), play breaks the connection between past and present, thus highlighting
the loss of meaning of certain words, myths and narratives in the present.7
The capacity of play to address and transform the sacred (a term applied here to
events such as the Shoah or disappearance that resist representation), at the same time
as showing the impossibility of bringing the past back to the present, is particularly
useful for the transmission of trauma. Van Alphen has argued, in this vein, that
traditional conceptions of pedagogy imply that learning is cumulative, and progressive,
and leads to the mastery of the subject studied. From this perspective, in order to
prevent another crime against humanity, later generations have to accumulate as
much knowledge as they can to know, and eventually dominate the past and keep it
under control. But this kind of teaching fails in the face of experiences that resist
precisely that: mastery. The history of trauma, he concludes, is the history of non-
mastery. The proof of this failure is that what many young people experience after
having faced this accumulative notion of teaching is indeed not mastery but a
‘mémoire saturée’ [‘saturated memory’] (Robin 2012) and consequently boredom. In
this respect, Libera has confessed to having been ‘poisoned’ (van Alphen 2002: 72)
by the way in which the Holocaust has been transmitted to him over the years. Van
Alphen himself said he ‘was bored to death by all the stories and images of that war,
which were held to me “officially” as moral warnings’ (72).8
Similarly, in the case of the transmission of the Argentine dictatorship, playful
memories positioned themselves in opposition to the sentimental and nostalgic
cultural representations of the past – from the songs of León Gieco to films such as
La noche de los lápices [The Night of the Pencils] (1986, dir. Olivera) – still used in
Argentine schools to teach about the period. Albertina Carri has claimed in this vein
and in various interviews that she was never able to relate to most of the fictional films
on the dictatorship that always used the same images of the past and that deliver what
she calls a ‘supermarket memory’ (Moreno 2003). Together with the frozen,
unchangeable images of culture, the epic narratives of the 1960s and 1970s lead to
what Carri has called a ‘sanctification of Argentine history’ (2007: 23). In its rejection
of realism, mere reproduction and faithful representation of the past, toy memory art
revitalizes these images and allows these young artists to appropriate them, at the same
time as suggesting the ontological impossibility of completely and comprehensively
mastering trauma.
Albertina Carri’s Kampf

Albertina Carri’s take on disappearance and the dictatorship in her film Los rubios
draws on the ability of playful memories to tackle societal taboos via a ‘child-like’
gaze, to reveal the ideological narratives that lie behind objects of childhood
consumption, and to offer alternatives to sentimental or nostalgic accounts of the
past. The film is a very complex docu-fantasy or an autofictional documentary along
the lines of Federico Fellini’s Amarcord (1973), Chris Marker’s Sans soleil (1983),
Jonathan Caoette’s Tarnation (2003) and Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg (2007). Carri
explores the limits of the documentary form – and of the mediums that would
supposedly deliver the truthful version of its object, namely testimonies, photographs
50 Jordana Blejmar
and letters – and ultimately concludes that it is impossible to faithfully represent (the
absence of) her parents, Ana María Caruso and Roberto Carri, using traditional
documentary resources.9 Instead, the film mixes documentary and fiction and presents
us with a series of playful and distancing devices: the presence of an actress (Analía
Couceyro) to play Albertina’s role, the blond wigs that the film crew wear to refer to
the way the director’s parents were mistakenly perceived to be foreigners in the
neighbourhood where they had moved in order to mix with ‘the people’, and the
collages made up of old photographs of the Carris that the actress creates at one point
while sitting at a desk covered with Playmobil figures.
But the sequences I want to focus on here are those in which Carri uses Playmobil
figures and stop motion to reconstruct her childhood memory of the abduction of her
parents at the hands of the military when she was three years old. Los rubios opens
with a close-up shot of a toy house at night. An artificial light illuminates the interior.
The house is empty, but there are traces of someone having been there: some bottles
and dishes are on a table, the door of the house is open. Later sequences with
Playmobil toys reconstruct the cause and effects of that empty family house. Evoking
the process of the construction of Carri’s identity after the abduction, at one point we
see a loop of a Playmobil figure wearing different hats, one after the other, first slowly
then more quickly: a fireman’s hat, a bowler hat, a turban, a crown and so on.
Couceyro’s voiceover, quoting Régine Robin’s statement that the necessity of
constructing one’s own identity emerges when it is under threat, helps us to make
sense of the sequence. But the way in which the hats are shown repetitively, in a
circular sequence, suggests that this process, when confronting disappearance, is
always incomplete.
British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott considered ‘play’ to be a creative activity
that allows both children and adults to use the whole personality as a means of
discovering the self.10 With this scene, however, Carri insinuates that if in general
‘play, like dreams, serves the function of self-revelation’ (Winnicott 1991: 146), play
could also serve to show the impossibility of self-revelation in the absence of parents.
Couceyro’s voiceover explains why: because ‘to develop yourself without the one who
gave you life becomes an obsession, at odds with daily life, disheartening. Since most
of the answers have been lost in time, in the mist of memory’.
In addition the sequence indicates, from the very beginning of the film, that what
we are going to see is not a simple reconstruction of the past but instead Carri’s child-
like and subjective perception of it. In this respect, Los rubios echoes the works of
artists born in the aftermath of the Holocaust who have also employed toys to refer
to the impact that past events have had on their lives. Pointing to his right to
‘remember’ the Shoah as he pleases, Levinthal responded to a professor from Yale
University, who had demanded that he take photographs of real people instead of
photographing Nazi toys, by stating that ‘these toys are my reality’ (Young 2000: 44).
Similarly, one of the connotations of the image of the mirror in the title of the
Mirroring Evil exhibition is that these works are not replications of reality, but rather
reflections, distortions, mediations, and effects (of the past in the present). Art
Spiegelman, author of the classic comic book Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1980), himself
accused of banalizing the Holocaust by using cats, pigs and dogs in his re-enactment
of his father’s experiences in a Nazi concentration camp, has also defended his right
to speak freely, in content and form, about the Holocaust, using, like Levinthal, the
title of Hitler’s autobiography: ‘The book was a text about my … my struggle, “mein
kampf”. And within that context I was trying to tell the story without falling into two
pits on either side of the project: either coming off as a cynical wisenheimer about
something that had genuine enormity, or being sentimental, a form of trivialization
on the other side of the road’ (Spiegelman 2011: 75, my emphasis). The use of
Playmobil figures in Los rubios responded to a similar rejection of effrontery and
sentimentality, at the same time as it implied a certain freedom to remember the past
using a more flexible relationship with the referent.
The multiple disguises of the Playmobil figures might also refer to the different
ways Carri has said that she has ‘remembered’ her parents at various stages of her life:
alternatively as superheroes, as geniuses and as ordinary people (Carri 2007: 17). Yet
toys are deployed in the film not to bring the past back to the present but rather to
confirm absence. ‘No hay modo de desprenderse de los recuerdos, sólo puedo
reinventar, redefinir, releer. Pero ahí estarán, confirmando la ausencia por siempre’(10)
[‘I cannot get rid of memories, I can only reinvent them, redefine them, and reread
them. But they are still there, forever confirming absence’], writes Carri in the book
that she published in 2007 about the process of making the film. Toys that imitate
the human body, she believes, are a deformation, an optical illusion, just as memory
does not re-enact the past but instead deforms it. At the same time, however, toys are
not the opposite of experience but rather, as with dreams and nightmares, a
‘diminutive, and thereby manipulatable, version of experience’ (Stewart 1993: 69).
As stated by Susan Stewart, ‘the inanimate toy repeats the still life’s theme of arrested
life (…) But once the toy becomes animated, it initiates another world, the world of
daydream’ (57). Toys (particularly anthropomorphic ones) are thus a kind of ‘dead
among us’, a ghostly condition that they share with the complex neither-dead-nor-
alive figure of the disappeared.
The potentiality of toys to manipulate experience and their nightmarish, unheimlich
nature becomes evident in the scene in which Carri reconstructs the episode of her
parents’ kidnapping. Carri has in fact explicitly referred to the nightmares she had
after the abduction, in which all kind of monsters attacked her while sleeping (2007:
17). The sequence starts at night. A yellow toy car stops in a gas station. Two
Playmobil figures get out of the car and meet with a group of other Playmobil toys
that hand weapons over to them. They get in the car again and start driving along an
isolated road. Suddenly, we see a spaceship that abducts one of the toys. We hear
horror-movie-like screams. Then the spaceship snatches the other figure in the car.
Some dry leaves fly in stop motion over the deserted road. Three blond Playmobil
figures (the three Carri sisters?) arrive at daybreak only to find open empty suitcases
at the scene of the crime. The whole sequence looks as if it had been taken from a B
movie and is set to the soundtrack of The Day the Earth Stood Still, by Robert Wise,
a film that Carri might have seen as a child (Aguilar 2006: 188).
52 Jordana Blejmar
Beatriz Sarlo and Martín Kohan, two of the most prominent cultural critics in
Argentina, have expressed their disapproval of the ‘excess’ of subjectivity evident in
these reconstructions of the past, a point of view that, they have argued, removes
history and politics from the memories of those years. Kohan has written, for example,
that though in the stop motion sequence we see a group of Playmobil figures carrying
weapons, the scene is not resolved through an armed confrontation but through a
situation more typical of science-fiction films, which is ultimately a deceptive gesture:
‘El grupo que irrumpía con agresividad en la noche, y el arma que le vimos, han sido
eliminados, y suplidos por esta versión que remite más bien a una escena emblemática
de Encuentros cercanos del tercer tipo. Lo que iba a ser o pudo ser causa política, ahora
pertenece al más allá’ (2004: 29) [‘The group that irrupted aggressively during the
night, and the weapon that we saw, have been eliminated and replaced with this
version of the abduction that rather evokes a scene from the emblematic film Close
Encounters of the Third Kind. What was going to be, or could have been, a political
cause, now belongs to the afterlife’]. For Kohan the removal of politics cannot be
attributed to a child-like gaze because the film mentions other children (notably
Carri’s nephew) who, despite their age, understand that the abductions were
motivated by the political activism of the Carris. Thus, unlike critics such as Gonzalo
Aguilar, who has argued that this sequence is a clear manifestation of a mourning
process, Kohan affirms that what we see here is the removal of reality.
Sarlo attributed this (subjective) approach to the fact that the director’s parents
were well-known middle-class intellectuals, making Carri’s images of them less
vicarious than the memories of, for example, children of working-class disappeared
parents, who are alone in the situation of reconstructing the past (2005: 154). Thus,
unlike Carri, these children cannot afford to show disinterest in the testimonies of
those who knew their parents (as Carri does in her film), nor to replace them with a
(playful) memory that does not refer, in any shape or form, to the political militant
agency of the disappeared.
Ana Amado (2004), Gabriela Nouzeilles (2005) and Laia Quilez (2008), among
many others scholars, have read Los rubios as an example of what Marianne Hirsch
(1997) has famously called ‘postmemory’, a term that defines the mediated, imaginary
and fragmentary memories of the children of victims of traumatic events, who
‘remember’ these events assisted by the memories of ‘first-hand’ witnesses and the
discourses of mass media. For Sarlo, however, all memories and not just postmemories
are fragmentary and vicarious. Therefore, what distinguishes Carri’s memory from
other reconstructions of the dictatorship is not the fact that it is a memory after
memory, but that, unlike the testimonies of other children of disappeared parents and
members of the group HIJOS (Hijos por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y
el Silencio), founded in 1995, Carri’s memory is a subjective (rather than a political)
memory, a point also supported by Kohan.
Even those who describe Carri’s memory as postmemory (a term that, according
to this view, could also be applied to the memories of the members of HIJOS) agree
with Sarlo and Kohan that, in other aspects, Los rubios is opposed to the practices of
this group. One clear example of this opposition is the way in which Los rubios
challenges the mimetic approach to inheritance that underlies the practices of HIJOS
(Nouzeilles 2005: 265). Carri’s own reluctance to participate in HIJOS – because she
did not feel that her pain was similar to or identifiable with the pain of other children
(2007: 111) – seems to lend credence to this view.
I agree with Sarlo that all memories are mediated and vicarious and that within
the same age group there are diverse positions towards the past as well as diverse ways
of addressing it in artistic form. I equally believe, however, that something still
distinguishes the cultural memories of second and third generations from previous
ones in Argentina, and that this differential element is not only the biographical link
between the remembering subjects and the dictatorship. Hirsch’s more recent work
on the appropriation and recontextualization of archival images in post-Shoah
memorial works, including her analysis of Levinthal’s photos, might even allude
precisely to that ‘something’ in the works of her corpus. But if the mediated nature
of these memories is not sufficient to distinguish post-conflict memories from other
(equally mediated) memories, what is the distinctive element of these memories then?
Where should we find the continuities (and not just the points of rupture) between
Carri’s film and the practices and memories of HIJOS? The answer, at this juncture,
should be obvious.
Indeed, one key similarity between Los rubios and HIJOS, particularly with the
latter’s famous escraches (in the Rioplatense slang form lunfardo, ‘escrachar’ means ‘to
expose’ or ‘to uncover’), is their playful spirit. Under the banner of ‘Si no hay justicia,
hay escrache’, members of HIJOS gather at locations where (former) members of the
military and their accomplices live. During the escraches, and in collaboration with
collective art groups such as GAC (Grupo de Arte Callejero) and Etcétera (renamed
Internacional Terrorista), the organization circulates flyers, holds open broadcasts and
prepares highly theatrical and noisy urban interventions, using giant puppets, masks
and live music to capture the attention of both anonymous pedestrians and the
members of the military and their accomplices who are the targets of the protest
(Taylor 2002: 151). In addition, GAC frequently use toys in their urban interventions,
for example when they threw toy soldiers with parachutes from the Torre de los
Ingleses clock tower in Buenos Aires in December 2000, while singing and parodying
military marches. Thus, the non-solemn and carnivalesque memory enacted by
escraches, as well as the performative representations using giant puppets and toys in
the streets, could be read as an antecedent of Los rubios’ playful memory.11
Moreover, the figure of the perpetrator also plays a central role in escraches. Not
only are they the main targets of escraches but they are also metonymically and visually
represented in the traffic-sign posters of ‘Juicio y castigo’ [trial and punishment] with
the iconic drawing of a military cap. In this respect, escraches offer an alternative visual
framework to the famous silhouettes of the disappeared made by the Mothers of Plaza
de Mayo, which focus on visually representing victims.
What distinguishes these memories from previous recollections of the past in
Argentina, therefore, is not so much, or not only, their alleged mediated or vicarious
nature but their playful spirit, a feature that – despite the many and evident differences
between both experiences – they share with many cultural memories of the Holocaust.
54 Jordana Blejmar
It is this spirit that stoked the anger of critics and older generations. Just as with the
works of Mirroring Evil, Los rubios was also accused of – to put it in Kohan’s words
– not only erasing history but also the fundamental differences between the victims
and their perpetrators, thus leaving to one side the fact that monstrousness is not
universal nor equivalent nor exchangeable between the military and the militants:
there are victims and there are perpetrators (2006).12 Carri was categorical in her
response: ‘¿Pero qué clase de necedad es pensar que los militares deberían estar
representados por otro tipo de muñeco? Eso es Caperucita y el lobo, es un tipo de
pensamiento que deja a la generación de mis padres como unos borregos que fueron
al matadero. Versión a la que me opongo fervientemente’ (2007: 112) [‘What kind
of foolishness leads someone to think that the military should be depicted with
another type of doll? That is like Red Riding Hood and the Wolf, a way of thinking
that portrays my parents’ generations as sheep willingly sent to the slaughterhouse, a
version of history to which I am strongly opposed’]. Drawing a parallel between her
film and Downfall (dir. Ganz, 2004), Carri has pointed out that Ganz’s film was
criticized for portraying a humanized Hitler, as if demons or monsters (and not
humans) had carried out inhuman crimes (2007: 112). Her decision to use the same
characters for both ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’ – after considering employing a Dracula
figure biting a Barbie doll to represent the abduction of her mother – highlights her
desire to break free of that logic.
Other second-generation works in Argentina have also explored this emphatic
nexus and heteropathic identification between victims and perpetrators. The
experimental film Nariz [Nose] (2011), directed by Leopoldo ‘Polo’ Tiseira, son of a
disappeared father, looks at the last days of Horacio Domingo ‘Nariz’ Maggio, the
first prisoner to escape the ESMA (later killed by the military), using other children
of disappeared parents to play the role of infamous repressors such as Alfredo Astiz or
Emilio Massera in the film. In the semi-autobiographical film Infancia clandestina
[Clandestine Childhood] (2011), Benjamin Ávila, director and son of a disappeared
mother, has a cameo role as the interrogator of the seven-year-old who in turn plays
him in the film.
But it is perhaps in literature that complex and yet ‘humanized’ perpetrators are
beginning to appear more widely in the second-generation autofictional memories;
this is evident, for example, in novels by children of disappeared parents such as Los
topos [The Moles] (Bruzzone 2008), where a transvestite whose parents are disappeared
falls in love with a former perpetrator of the dictatorship, and in Soy un bravo piloto
de la nueva China [I am a Brave Pilot from New China] (Semán 2011), which presents
us with a troubled torturer whose traumatized condition stresses his humanity and
who, despite all expectations, has raised a likeable son. In reference to his depiction
of El Capitán, the perpetrator of his novel, Semán has said: ‘traté de desarrollar una
empatía por ese otro que te parece incomprensible, pero ante quien necesitás saber
por qué hizo lo que hizo, y sólo en ese contexto podía imaginar el dolor del torturador.
Sin establecer ningún tipo de equivalencia moral sobre los lugares de cada uno, pero
sí buscando respuestas que fueran más allá del lugar del hijo’ (Friera 2011) [‘I tried to
develop an empathy with “the other”, a person who was incompressible to me, but
whom I somehow needed to get to know so that I could understand why he did what
he did. Only in the context of fiction was I able to imagine the torturer’s pain,
without establishing any moral equivalence between our different positions, but
rather looking for answers beyond my condition as son of a disappeared father’].
If the young artists addressed here reject any accusation of trivializing the horrors
of the past, their works allude to a different type of banality, namely Hannah Arendt’s
banality of evil. A second possible connotation of the image of the mirror in the title
of the Mirroring Evil exhibition is that despite our reluctance to see ourselves reflected
in the perpetrators we are all, perhaps, capable of Evil.
In Los rubios we see the places of abduction and captivity (the façade of the Carris’
house and the former clandestine camp ‘Sheraton’ now converted into a police
station, respectively) but there are very few references to the military. Only at one
point does Couceyro/Carri remember what she witnessed on the fatal day of the
kidnapping but her memory is blurred and not even she trusts it. The Playmobil
figures are among the few representations of the perpetrators, though they appear
only in the form of a spaceship rather than as individual figures. But the film delivers
a much more complicated image of those responsible for the disappearance of the
Carris in the image of the old lady interviewed by the crew at one point and who lives
in the working-class neighbourhood where the Carris went to proletarizarse.13 This
lady was supposed to be ‘like’ the Carris, with whom they identified because she, in
turn, represented ‘the people’, the amorphous mass that gained social consciousness
in the 1960s and 1970s, as stated in the paragraph of Roberto Carri’s book on Isidro
Velázquez that Couceyro reads out at the beginning of the film. But instead what we
see is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, someone who never considered the Carris as an equal
(hence her perception of them as blond, even when they were not) and who does not
hesitate to betray them to the military, stating later that after the abduction everyone
in the neighbourhood felt ‘una tranquilidad súper’ [‘enormous relief’].
As if playing at role play, in Los rubios everyone simulates being a different person:
Couceyro pretends to be Carri, the film crew pretend to be students conducting
interviews for a university project, the survivors and the staff members of Antropología
Forense pretend not to know that Couceyro is not Carri, the director requests a blood
test (normally used to find out the likelihood of being a relative of a disappeared parent)
and pretends not to know the result. But if in these cases pretending to be someone else
lies at the heart of the definition of acting and is also a playful device, and if in the case
of the Carris there was an honest desire to become ‘like’ the others/the people (even if
that attempt failed), in the case of the old lady the act of pretending (to be a good
neighbour) paradoxically unmasks her real self. One of the most striking revelations of
Los rubios is therefore that there are victims and there are perpetrators, but not everything
is that simple when it comes to Argentina’s recent past, either because the perpetrators
are more similar to us than we would like to think, or because those we thought our
most faithful allies turn out, in fact, to be the cause of our disgrace.
56 Jordana Blejmar
Toy (hi)stories and playbacks

The fundamental problem of most of the criticisms levelled at playful memories
discussed here is that they are animated, I believe, by a fundamental confusion
between ‘laughing at’ past horrors and ‘playing with’ them. Certainly the verb ‘to
laugh at’, in the sense of scorn or ridicule, and with the dismissive nature of ‘laughing
something off’, shares common ground with the verb ‘to play’, especially when the
latter refers to pleasure and recreation. But, as I hope to have shown here, play can
also have serious, practical and political ends. Moreover, in Spanish, the reflexive
form of the verb (‘jugarse’) also means to risk something, sometimes life itself, a
connotation also present in the English expression ‘to play with fire’.
In fact, Carri’s playful memory addresses some of the most controversial and
serious issues of the 1970s: the role of the militant’s offspring in the armed struggle;
the coexistence between ‘fierros’ (weapons) and children in the clandestine meetings
of militancy; the betrayal of members of ‘the people’ to the revolution that would
supposedly free them; and so on. Toy art and a playful aesthetics have allowed her to
discuss these topics in her film without the grave, nostalgic or judgemental tone that
often marks the discourses of testimony, realism or documentary accounts. It is this
potentiality of playful art that gives Carri’s memory not only its generational imprint
but also its political stamp, its capacity to intervene in the critical debates on the
recent past. In this sense, playful memories like Carri’s ultimately remind us that the
main purpose of memory and transmission is not to reproduce the past as it was via
playbacks, but to transform it so it can speak to the future.
Prior to Los rubios, Carri had already explored other pressing political issues by
using toys, namely in Barbie también puede eStar triste (sic) [Barbie Gets Sad Too,
2000], a short pornographic animation. This explicit and melodramatic cinematic
production – in the words of the director a film of denunciation, an anti-sexist fable
(Clarín, 10 August 2003) – tells the story of a sexually unsatisfied and aristocratic
Barbie, the symbol of Western female beauty and ‘The Blond’ par excellence, who
leaves the sadistic and masochistic Ken, and falls in love with her maid, the Latin
Barbie of the collection. Barbie también puede eStar triste brings to light the racist
elements underlying Barbie culture but also the class struggles, machismo and
xenophobia that shape social relations of power in Argentina, a country that has one
of the highest rates of Barbie consumption and one of the least inclusive treatments
of immigrants and indigenous people in its construction of national identity in Latin
America (Goldman 2007: 274).14
Thus, far from removing history and politics from the representation of reality,
Carri historicizes and politicizes toys, illuminating the underexplored responsibility
of the toy industry in the social and cultural practices of childhood during and after
the dictatorship in Argentina. It is not surprising, therefore, that Mattel, the producer
of the Barbie dolls, got a court order banning Barbie también puede eStar triste from
a festival in Mexico, arguing that the film would spoil the doll’s image. Something
similar happened with Libera’s LEGO concentration camp set: whereas in 1996 the
artist worked with the LEGO Corporation of Denmark to produce his box set, a
collaboration proved by the inscription ‘This work of Zbigniew Libera has been
sponsored by LEGO’ in the upper left corner of the box, the company later began a
legal battle with the artist to prohibit him from using its logo.15
Both reactions demonstrate the discomfort of toy manufacturers when their
products are made to disrespect the rules of play and are not used as they intended.
It is interesting to note that toys have become progressively more normative over the
years, leaving less space for children’s imagination. There is a strange paradox here in
the sense that toys are now more varied and realistic, and yet they offer fewer options
for use. Indeed, when Barbie was ‘born’ in 1959, ‘the only choice you had was over
her hair colour – blonde, brunette or redhead. Now there are many sorts of Barbies
(…) A girl’s focus has been shifted from the single object to the collection, her
fantasies harnessed to stereotypes’ (Petrignani 1988: 12). Similarly, as North
American writer Michael Chabon has pointed out, in opposition to the simple,
austere, abstract, minimal pieces of the original LEGO, which left everything to the
imagination of the child, there is a sense of imposition in the recent introduction of
the minifigures or ‘minifigs’ (LEGO figurines of Harry Potter, Disney or Lord of the
Rings characters), whose scale and detailed accessories predetermine a ‘formulary of
play’ (2009: 52) that dictates how children should play with them.16 In contrast to
the purpose of the first LEGO sets, namely to encourage exploratory approximation
and versions of things you were trying to make, a ‘full-blown realism reigned supreme
in the Legosphere’ (54). According to Chabon, the authoritarian nature of the new
LEGO has more in common with puzzle-solving, of reaching pre-established and
provided solutions, which implies that there is a right way and a wrong way to play
with your toys. For Chabon, we find a similar assumption in the orthodox subtext of
Pixar’s film Toy Story (1995), where Andy, the hero of the story, uses his toys the way
the manufacturers intended (cowboys are cowboys and astronauts are astronauts),
while Sid, the bad boy ‘quasi-psychotic neighbor kid’ hybridizes and breaks the rules
of orderly play, ‘equipping an Erector-set spider, for example, with a stubbly doll’s
head’ (55).17 He argues that a similar orthodoxy, structure of control, implied
obedience to the norms of the manual, and exigencies of realism itself are present in
the current Republic of Lego.
I find it interesting that Chabon speaks of ‘orthodoxy’, ‘structure of control’ and
‘exigencies of realism’ here because these are exactly the implicit requests behind the
discourses of those who have criticized Carri, Libera or Levinthal for their use of toys
in the representation of historical events. For Chabon, LEGO realism, as with all
types of realism, is meant to fail, partly thanks to the technical limitations inherent
in its system, which cannot keep up with the exigencies of realism itself, such as
accuracy, precision, and faithfulness to experience. But realism in toys will also fail
because children (and adults who use them for memory play) are less like Andy and
more like Sid, the little Frankenstein creator of hybrid freaks. They prefer disorder,
unlikeliness, and recombination of pieces as this is a closer reflection of the imagined
experience than the real world, of the structure of memory rather than the parameters
of ‘what happened’.
The young artists addressed here use the unrestricted, borderless power of imagination
and play to reunite what was not supposed to be reunited – concentration camps,
58 Jordana Blejmar
abductions and disappearance with long-loved children’s toys and games – in monstrous
play-scenes. One certainty lies behind this gesture: that horror has contaminated
everything; that there is no sacred zone, no sanctuary where the fundamental events of
our century can be preserved in an ‘intact memory’ (Robin 2012: 343), not in popular
culture, not in Hollywood cinema, and certainly not in Playland.
Notes
1. Oloixarac’s image may have an antecedent in Carlos Gamerro’s inclusion of a videogame
that allows the (Argentine) players to win the Malvinas/Falklands War in his novel Las
islas [The Islands] (1998).
2. I want to thank Stef Craps for drawing my attention to many of the playful memories of
the Shoah mentioned in this article and also to related bibliographical material.
3. Another work that combines play/toy and violent events, albeit not related to the Shoah,
is ‘In the Playroom’. For this piece, Canadian Jonathan Hobin took pictures of children
recreating world tragedies such as 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and acid attacks on women in
the Middle East using toys to act out these scenes. Hobin said that with these pictures he
aimed to break down the notion that childhood is a time of innocence and to counter the
idea that children are somehow unaffected by the horrific events that surround them.
4. On 2 February 2002, Menachen Z. Rosensfat, founding chairman of the International
Network of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, wrote an editorial in the New York Post, entitled
‘The “Art” of Desecration’, in which he accused the works of the Mirroring Evil exhibition
of ridiculing the Holocaust and making it banal, as well as of disrespecting the experiences
of the victims. Both the reactions of the Argentine critics and of Menachen ironically serve
as a reminder of the critical importance of the appropriateness and ownership of memory
that both Los rubios and the exhibition wanted to address, an issue summed up by the
question, who has the right to speak? For a detailed study of the debates on the Mirroring
Evil exhibition, see Pearlman (2004).
5. In the Mirroring Evil exhibition this identification with the perpetrators was also present
in Piotr Uklanski’s The Nazis (1998), a series of photographs of elegant Hollywood actors
characterized as Nazis that have seduced spectators for years. With respect to Levinthal’s
photographs, Marianne Hirsch has suggested that ‘the camera is located in the same
place as the executioner, and perpetrators are visible in the image primarily through this
disturbing co-implication’ (2012: 145).
6. This distinction is important because it explains why not all of the works that have
employed or referred to toys and games in their exercises of memory in post-dictatorship
Argentina have generated controversy. To give just a few examples, in the Centro Cultural
de la Memoria Haroldo Conti, visitors are invited to play the ‘Memotest’ (‘the memory
game’), with the black-and-white faces of disappeared people in democracy. Seven years
earlier, the Argentine Ministry of Education chose for the cover of a book that was sent
to schools around the country a Memotest with iconic images linked to the dictatorship
– the scarfs of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, the Malvinas/Falklands, a military hat
– depicted as if they were illustrations for a children’s book. Moreover, ‘Evidencias’
[‘Evidences’], by Norberto and Lisandro Puzzolo, is a permanent art installation in the
Museo de la Memoria (Rosario), comprised of pieces of a puzzle that contains the names
of the ‘appropriated’ children of the dictatorship placed in one panel, and of pieces with
the names of the young men and women who have already recovered their identity on
another panel. When a lost child is found, the museum moves her/his piece to the other
side of the puzzle. Lastly, it is worth mentioning the pioneering 1989 play by the theatrical
group El periférico de objectos, El hombre de arena, an adaptation of Hoffmann’s famous
story recreated with dolls that represented the disappeared.
7. Agamben also suggests that ‘to return to play its purely profane vocation is a political task’
(2007b: 77). Play opens up the possibility of new temporalities. The time of play is an
alternative time to the homogenous empty-time of the status quo: ‘in the wake of extreme
technological domination and of the onset of the biopolitical horizon of humanity, play
would be the form in which resistance and disruption would occur. Or better, it would
be the way in which reified social-political institutions might be rendered inoperative’
(Bernstein 2011: 50). Play allows the non-instrumental use of play objects that once
belonged to the realm of the practical-economic. Play is thus profane not only in the
religious sense: ‘Children, who play with whatever old things fall into their hands, make
toys out of things that also belong to the spheres of economics, war, law, and other
activities that we are used to thinking as serious’ (Agamben 2007b: 76). Drawing on the
links between toys, biopolitics and the state of exception highlighted by Agamben, Leigh
Pillips, a European Union and affairs journalist and writer on post-democracy in the
EU, has created a website called Agamben Toys: Toys for the State of Exception, where he
shows images of Lego, Playmobil and Fisher Price sets such as riot police, multipurpose
helicopters, Chinese urban pacification unit playsets, and armoured patrols.
8. Another good example of this phenomenon is Ram Katzir’s playful installation Your
Colouring Book (1996). Katzir, an Israeli member of the third generation of the Shoah,
invited the visitors to the museums and places where his work was being shown to colour
in images inspired by photographs of Nazis in a colouring book similar to those used by
children. His intention was to reinvigorate the images of the Holocaust shown to him at
school, images that he had become over-familiar with and which had therefore lost their
power to move him (Schwartz 1998: 40).
9. The Carris were Montonero militants disappeared in 1977. Hardly any other Argentine
film has awakened so much interest, both in Argentina and abroad, as Los rubios. Among
the ever-growing corpus of critical bibliography on this film, see Amado (2004), Kohan
(2004), Trímboli (2006), Nouzeilles (2005), Sarlo (2005), Aguilar (2006), Page (2009)
and Andermann (2011).
10. Winnicott uses play in a broad sense: ‘Whatever I say about children playing really applies
to adults as well, only the matter is more difficult to describe when the patient’s material
appears mainly in terms of verbal communication. I suggest that we must expect to find
playing just as evident in the analyses of adults as it is in the case of our work with
children. It manifests itself, for instance, in the choice of words, in the inflections of the
voice, and indeed in the sense of humor’ (2005: 54). I would like to thank Susannah
Radstone for directing me towards Winnicott’s ideas of play and for sending me her
article.
11. This is true even when Carri’s films differs from more conventional documentaries
directed by members of HIJOS, such as Andrés Habbegger’s (h)istorias cotidianas (2001).
12. Kohan’s remarks are surprising, given that in his own novels on the dictatorial years
(Dos veces junio [Twice June, 2002] or Ciencias morales [School for Patriots, 2007], for
example) he managed to present grey zones of complicity with the dictatorship.
13. During the 1960s and 1970s middle-class militants used to move to working-class
neighbourhoods and work in factories because they were convinced that such a space
would provide them with the strength required for the forthcoming revolution. This
physical and intellectual displacement was called ‘proletarización’.
14. Plata segura [Easy Money], another Argentine stop-motion film (2003), directed by
Néstor F. and Martín C., also uses a (blond) doll in a story of childhood and violence
during the dictatorship. It is the tragicomic story of a naïve blond toy boy called Cuchu,
‘the little blond crack’, born in a shantytown during the 1978 World Cup. Cuchu is
abandoned by his father and is exploited by those around him but has no resentment
towards them. Instead he spends his lonely life dreaming of playing football with the
Argentine national team and hoping, in vain, that things will get better soon. Both Plata
60 Jordana Blejmar
segura and Barbie también puede eStar triste were screened together in 2003 at the mythical
Buenos Aires cinema Cosmos.
15. In another work, Ken’s Aunt (1995), Libera used Mattel’s models to present us with a
Barbie doll in the form of an overweight woman, a sharp contrast to the sexualized Barbies
of Carri’s film.
16. I would like to thank Edward King for the reference to Chabon’s book.
17. Strictly speaking, as Natalia Fortuny pointed out to me, Chabon’s understanding of
these characters is not entirely accurate. Andy is very imaginative, constantly making up
stories for his toys. On the other hand, unlike his sister, Hanna, Sid does not really play
with the toys: he destroys them. At one point, for example, he tortures Woody with a
magnifying glass that leaves a hole caused by the heat of the sun in his head. In another
sequence, he decapitates Hanna’s doll on an ‘operation table’ and replaces it with the head
of a dinosaur. Nevertheless, one can equally argue that destruction is also a part of play,
symbolized by the way that the younger children play at the nursery in Toy Story 3.
Works cited
Agamben, Giorgio (2007a) ‘In Playland: reflections on history and play’, in Infancy and
History: On the Destruction of Experience (London and New York: Verso), 73–96.
Agamben, Giorgio (2007b) ‘In praise of profanation’, in Profanations (New York: Zone
Books), 73–92.
Aguilar, Gonzalo (2006) ‘Los rubios: duelo, frivolidad y melancolía’, in Otros mundos. Un
ensayo sobre el nuevo cine argentino (Buenos Aires: Santiago Arcos), 175–191.
Amado, Ana (2004) ‘Ordenes de la memoria y desórdenes de la ficción’, in Lazos de familia:
Herencias, cuerpos, eds Ana Amado and Nora Domínguez (Buenos Aires: Paidós), 13–81.
Andermann, Jens (2011) New Argentine Cinema (London and New York: I.B. Tauris).
Bernstein, Jeffrey A. (2011) ‘Child’s play. Reflections on Agamben’s conception of
contemporary historical exigency and its Winnicottian dimension’, Epoché: A Journal for
the History of Philosophy 16.1, 49–64.
Bruzzone, Félix (2008) Los topos (Buenos Aires: Mondadori).
Carri, Albertina (2007) Los rubios: Cartografía de una película (Buenos Aires: Artes Gráficas
Buschi).
Chabon, Michael (2009) ‘To the Legoland station’, in Manhood for Amateurs. The Pleasures
and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son (London: Harper Collins), 51–57.
Goldman, Karen (2007) ‘La princesa plástica. Hegemonic and oppositional representations
of Latinidad in Hispanic Barbie’, in From Bananas to Buttocks. The Latina Body in Popular
Film and Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press), 263–278.
Hirsch, Marianne (1997) Family Frames: Photograph, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge,
MA and London: Harvard University Press).
Hirsch, Marianne (2012) The Generation of Postmemory. Writing and Visual Culture After the
Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press).
Kohan, Martín (2004) ‘La apariencia celebrada’, Punto de Vista 78, 24–30.
Kohan, Martín (2006) Interview with the author, 1 July.
Macón, Cecilia (2004) ‘Los rubios o del trauma como presencia’, Punto de vista 28.80, 44–47.
Moiseeff, Iván (2010) Mazinger Z contra la dictadura militar (Buenos Aires: Clase turista).
Nouzeilles, Gabriela (2005) ‘Postmemory cinema and the future of the past in Albertina
Carri’s Los rubios’, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 14.3, 263–278.
Page, Joanna (2009) Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema (Duke: Duke
University Press).
Petrignani, Sandra (1988) The Toy Catalogue (London: Boulevard Books).
Quilez, Laia (2008) ‘Sutiles pretéritos. (Post)memoria(s) y (auto)biografía(s) en el cine
documental contemporáneo’, in Cineastas frente al espejo, ed. Gregorio Martín Gutierrez
(Madrid: T&B), 83–99.
Radstone, Susannah (2013) ‘“The place where we live”: memory, mirrors and The Secret River’,
Memory Studies 6.3, 286–298.
Robin, Régine (2012) La memoria saturada (Buenos Aires: Waldhuter).
Sarlo, Beatriz (2005) Tiempo pasado: Cultura de la memoria y giro subjetivo: Una discusión
(Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI).
Schwartz, Gary (1998) ‘Introduction: teach it to the children’, in Your Coloring Book. A
Wandering Installation, Katzir, Ram (Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam), 35–42.
Semán, Ernesto (2011) Soy un bravo piloto de la nueva China (Buenos Aires: Mondadori).
Spiegelman, Art (2011) MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic (London: Penguin).
Stewart, Susan (1993) On Longing. Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the
Collection (Duke and London: Duke University Press).
Taylor, Diana (2002) ‘“You are here”: the DNA of performance’, TDR 46.1, 149–169.
Van Alphen, Ernst (1997) Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature
and Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press).
Van Alphen, Ernst (2002) ‘Playing the Holocaust’, in Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imaginary / Recent
Art, ed. Kleeblatt L. Norman (New Brunswick, New Jersey and London: The Jewish
Museum and Rutgers University Press), 65–84.
Winnicott, D.W. (1991) ‘Why children play’, in The Child, the Family, and the Outside World
(London: Penguin), 143–146.
Winnicott, D.W. (2005) Playing and Reality (London and New York: Routledge).
Young, James E. (2000) At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art
and Architecture (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press).
Internet sources
Friera, Silvina (2011) ‘Quise hacer un collage de distintos recuerdos y memorias’, Página/12,
7 March, http://www.pagina12.com.ar [accessed 10 March 2013].
Moreno, María (2003) ‘Esa rubia debilidad’, Radar, Página/12, 3 October, http://www.
pagina12.com.ar [accessed 9 February 2012].
Pearlman, Jeanne (2004) ‘Mirroring evil: Nazi imagery/recent art: case study: the Jewish
Museum, New York City’, Animating Democracy, http://animatingdemocracy.org
[accessed 20 June 2013].
Trímboli, Javier (2006) ‘Los rubios y la incomodidad’, Conference given at the Escuela de
Capacitación de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires, 18 February, http://www.buenosaires.gob.
ar/areas/educacion/cepa/conferencia_trimboli_los_rubios.pdf [accessed 16 March 2012].
Visual archives of loss and longing in Chile: Mi vida con
Carlos by Germán Berger Hertz
Lisa Renee DiGiovanni
Abstract
In this article, I will explore how contemporary Chilean documentary film, produced
by a new generation of filmmakers, renders visible the need for redress and repair in
the wake of the state-sponsored violence in Chile (1973–1990), as well as the desire to
return to the lost revolutionary utopianism that characterized the period of the Allende
years (1970–1973). I will focus specifically on the autobiographical documentary Mi
vida con Carlos (2010) [My Life with Carlos] by Germán Berger-Hertz, a film that sets
out to unravel the story of the filmmaker’s father who was executed on 19 October 1973
by the notorious ‘Caravan of Death’. Using this film as an example, I will consider how
the discourse of nostalgia has the potential to shape valuable meanings from histories
of repression and to contribute to a cultural continuity in opposition to the regime’s
narratives of identity while remaining cautious of flat idealizations of a previous era.
This research ultimately undermines dominant assumptions about nostalgia and raises
new questions surrounding the ongoing tensions between loss and longing, despair and
hope, past and future in the wake of state-sponsored violence in modern Chile.
Keywords: memory; Chile; Latin American documentary film; postdictatorial Southern
Cone; exile; return; loss; nostalgia
The crime and the aftermath

Mi vida con Carlos is a hybrid historical documentary film that tells the story of the
filmmaker’s father, Carlos Berger Guralnik, a communist lawyer dedicated to the
reformist projects of the Popular Unity (1970–1973) led by Salvador Allende. Berger
was executed on 19 October 1973 by the notorious ‘Caravan of Death’, a Chilean
Army death squad appointed by Pinochet that travelled between 30 September and
22 October by helicopter from southern to northern Chile targeting Leftist opposition
and instilling a fear of the newly installed military regime. This Chilean secret police
executed a total of seventy-five loyalists with small arms and bladed weapons, then
buried their bodies in unmarked graves in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile.1
As the film recounts, at the time of the raids the filmmaker’s father was working
in the desolate northern town of Chuquicamata, where the Allende government had
appointed him Chief of Communications of the Copper Mine. As director of the
only radio station that existed in the region (Radio Loa de Chuquicamata), his job
was to convince workers to keep producing Chile’s most important export – copper.
Right-wing reactionaries, with the help of the CIA, had bribed workers to paralyse
production, thus destabilizing the country’s economy and the Popular Unity

Visual archives of loss and longing in Chile 63
Government. On the day of the coup, Carlos Berger was ordered by the military
insurgents to stop transmission and abandon the radio station. He did not obey.
Within two months he was imprisoned, hooded, tortured and executed in the
outskirts of Calama, a city in the Atacama Desert. According to the film, he asked for
his hood to be removed before his execution, demanding to look directly at his
assassins. He paid for his defiance with a posthumous punishment – they gouged out
his eyes. After the execution, Berger’s wife, Carmen Hertz, a twenty-seven-year-old
lawyer also appointed by Allende, and his son (one year old) went into political exile
in Buenos Aires and Caracas, and then returned, after five years of exile, in 1978 to
work with the Vicaría de la Solidaridad.2 In the context of continued political terror,
Hertz spearheaded the campaign to bring to trial the perpetrators of the Caravan of
Death and to stop the ongoing clandestine executions of opponents. In 1987 after
Hertz had become a powerful voice of opposition in Chile, she and her son were once
again forced into exile under threat, this time to Paris, France where they lived
temporarily until Hertz once again returned to Chile and Berger-Hertz (as a young
adult) relocated to Barcelona, Spain, which he ultimately made his home.
Building pressure on the regime soon set in motion the October 1988 referendum
that finally transferred power to the coalition of centre political parties, La Concertación,
in 1989. Nearly two decades later, Germán Berger-Hertz planned his return to Chile,
back to the sites of memory, where the past remained a source of political contention
and legal debate. By the time the film was produced in 2008, Carmen Hertz, among
other lawyers, had made significant progress in exposing the covert military operations
in the Calama; however they were working within a legal and political system
engineered by the regime to protect the perpetrators. In 1998, Hertz represented
plaintiffs in the Caravan of Death case against Pinochet and helped to achieve the
lifting of the former dictator’s parliamentary immunity from prosecution. In 1999,
Judge Juan Guzmán Tapia ordered the arrest of five retired military officers for their
participation in the massacre, and shortly thereafter Ricardo Lagos (president 2000–
2006) proposed a campaign called ‘The Caravan of Life’ which involved a symbolic
appropriation of the sites of the Caravan of Death. As Lessie Jo Frazier indicates, ‘the
2001 Caravan of Life was to take the form of a pilgrimage of consecration and healing
in which, as in all pilgrimages, the sacredness of the sites visited would confer moral
authority on the pilgrims. This was to be life affirming in its project of reconciliation
(understood as healing and closure)’ (2007: 218). While some argued that ‘The
Caravan of Life’ was a productive step towards a politics of memory, many critics
found the move problematic in the sense that the aim was to build ‘an official, state-
authored monument, which the president was to consecrate – as a final act of
mourning, as a final tombstone’ (2007: 218). Significantly, seven years later in 2008
the Supreme Court sentenced former General Sergio Arellano Stark to six years in
prison; however, that same year, he was diagnosed with dementia, and his sentence was
thereby reduced. Pinochet was also indicted in December 2002 in the ‘Caravan of
Death’ case, but he died four years later while under house arrest.
Against this socio-political backdrop, marked by a sense of disenchantment with
the disparity between the efforts of the opposition and the insufficient change during
64 Lisa Renee DiGiovanni
the transition, Germán Berger-Hertz returns to Chile not to recover a homeland, per
se, but rather to grapple with a history of repression and resistance that is both
national and personal, political and gendered. As the filmmaker reaches out to his
father who remains ‘disappeared’ on what becomes a geographic and temporal
journey, he traces the origins of his own identity, wandering through the places of
dictatorial violence that continue to shape his and the nation’s present. Instead of
turning inward, he engages in the meaningful process of mourning with his mother
and paternal uncles: Ricardo, an economist who stayed in Chile after the military
coup, and Eduardo, a doctor who fled from Chile to Canada after his brother’s
execution.
Postmemories of resistance and critical nostalgia

This documentary film is a visual act of memory informed by a broader landscape of
contentious commemorative politics and memory work produced in the Southern
Cone since the end of military rule. As has been foregrounded in this special issue,
one key development in postdictatorial cultural production is the increased visibility
of the child’s perspective.3 The relatively new term ‘postmemory’ has emerged from
the growing field of Holocaust studies and has provided critics in the field of Latin
American studies with a critical framework through which to interpret a
heterogeneous body of work created by and featuring a younger generation that
either experienced the dictatorships as children or grew up in the aftermath of the
regimes. In Family Frames, a now canonical text for memory studies, Marianne
Hirsch defines postmemory as ‘a very particular form of memory precisely because
its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but
through imaginative investment and creation’ (1997: 22). Hirsch discusses the stakes
of this mediated and creative process of recollection in her most recent elaboration
of the paradigm-shifting concept, asking, ‘What do we owe the victims? How can
we best carry their stories forward, without appropriating them, without unduly
calling attention to ourselves and without, in turn, having our own stories displaced
by them?’ (2012: 2).
The value of the generational framework is significant insofar as it provides a
necessary vocabulary to contribute to an ‘evolving ethical and theoretical discussion
about the workings of trauma, memory, and intergenerational acts of transfer’ (Hirsch
2012: 2). However, as with any generation or period, we must be cautious of
categorical or prescriptive definitions. I agree with Fredric Jameson who suggests that
period concepts and generational logic are classificatory systems that often seek a
totality that does not entirely reflect the heterogeneity of experience. For Jameson,
‘the collective reality of the multitudinous lives encompassed by such terms’ is
‘nontotalizable’ and ‘can never be described, characterized, labeled, or conceptualized’
(2003: 229). In the case of the Southern Cone, the postmemory (or postdictatorship)
generation spans over three decades and therefore requires nuanced understandings
that take into consideration differences among, for example, those who were born
during the Allende years and came of age during the dictatorship as opposed to those
born in the context of the 1989 plebiscite. Equally important is the need to distinguish
between the heterogeneous understandings of history, memory and representation

embraced and contested within such generations.
Salient examples of recent Argentine and Chilean feature films that bring together
writers, directors, and actors with different generational claims in the interest of
foregrounding how children experienced and remember the dictatorships include
Kamchatka (2002) by Marcelo Piñeyro, Cautiva (2004) by Gaston Biraben, Machuca
(2004) by Andrés Wood and La faute à Fidel! (2006) by Julie Gavras. In the last
decade, the documentary genre has also provided a platform for the children of the
disappeared to contemplate the legacies of loss and what Gabriela Nouzeilles calls ‘the
complex sense of identity that they carried with them as a result of the foundational
absence that defines their lives’ (2005: 265). Notable Argentine and Chilean
documentaries that belong to this group include Los rubios (2003) by Albertina Carri,
Papá Iván (2004) by María Inés Roqué, El edificio de los Chilenos (2010) by Macarena
Aguiló and Mi vida con Carlos (2010) by Germán Berger-Hertz.
One issue in need of further examination is the relationship between postmemories
and nostalgic longing in postdictatorial literary and visual material. The films listed
above, to varying degrees, constitute not only powerful denunciations of right-wing
authoritarian practices, but also vehicles for younger generations to re-negotiate and
reclaim a collective identity in opposition to the Nationalist ideology of the right-wing
military regimes and to imagine alternative futures in the context of the neoliberal
postrevolutionary present. From this standpoint, the decade of the 1970s in Chile has
become a site of origins, to which a symbolic homecoming through memory work and
the cultivation of emotional attachments represents the potential regeneration of
progressive goals and values. Yet at the same time, as we know, age cannot denote a
single or unified experience since it is always intersected by social and political
identities, thereby yielding a wide plurality of longings and a concomitant range of
aesthetic memorial practices. All of the documentary and feature films listed above
stage denouncements of the regimes, but whereas some, like Los rubios (2003), combine
an inclination to re-establish a transgenerational bond of communication or emotion
with an attendant inquiry about the incongruities and ironies of the political milieu
and choices of the militant Left, other films, such as Machuca (2004) and Mi vida con
Carlos (2010), engage the interrelated discourses of melancholy and nostalgia.
Within contemporary memory studies a large bibliography dating back to the
seventeenth century has been mined in order to grapple with the meaning of and
relationship between these two affective responses to broken attachments and
disenchantment with the present. Both sentiments are frequently criticized as
unproductive, but whereas nostalgia has often been identified with rosy idealizations
of better personal or national pasts, melancholia has been associated with the
depression and paralysis caused by an unmourned loss. Within the context of the
postdictatorial Southern Cone, Christian Gundermann has challenged this definition
of melancholia, drawing from the Freudian distinction between mourning and
melancholia to favourably recognize melancholy as a form of resistance to closure and
detachment from the leftist militancies of the 1960s and 1970s. His book Actos
melancólicos (2008) foregrounds groups such as the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo to
demonstrate how melancholia can become a collective force to inspire action rather
than an individualistic form of immobilizing yearning. This conceptualization differs
from that of other contemporary critics, such as Svetlana Boym who reassesses the
political agency and critical possibilities of nostalgia through a negative critique of
melancholia: ‘One can think of nostalgic stories as a series of migrating plots, hybrid
and cross-cultural, that go beyond national attachments. Unlike melancholia, which
confines itself to the planes of individual consciousness, nostalgia is about the
relationship between individual biography and the biography of groups or nations,
between personal and collective memory, individual home and collective homeland’
(2011: 151–152). While I agree with Boym’s argument that nostalgia is much more
than the uncritical idealization usually identified with it, I also challenge the suspicion
with which she treats melancholia as a mere source of individual self-indulgence. As
I see it, the ever-widening landscape of postmemorial films has the potential to
effectively problematize reductive binary definitions of both nostalgia and melancholia,
rendering visible the interrelations and oscillations between individual nostalgic
longings to rehabilitate severed familial roots in the interests of engaging with and
mobilizing melancholic suffering and the broader collective desire to understand and
reconnect with the political struggles that have been rendered irrelevant by the
defenders of neoliberal capitalism.
The question, then, is how exactly can the plural discourses of melancholia and
nostalgia be suited to the task of undermining the regressive worldview of the Pinochet
regime, which itself used a nostalgic discourse to appeal to classist, sexist and racist
fantasies of roots and nation? It is precisely the Nationalist version of nostalgia that
has compelled many critics to condemn it as a political instrument that ignores
contradictions and negative dimensions of the past (Lowenthal 1989; Davis 1979;
Tannock 1995; Shaw and Chase 1989). For its detractors, nostalgia’s backward-
looking gaze inherently transfigures history into a flat narrative, paralysing the
potential process of mourning and forward-thinking reflection. Fredric Jameson, for
example, has criticized the ‘nostalgia mode’ as ‘an alarming and pathological symptom
of a [consumer capitalist] society that has become incapable of dealing with time and
history’ (1985b: 117). But, as Jameson suggests in his article ‘Walter Benjamin, or
nostalgia’, nostalgic longing can also be a powerful source of inspiration to the extent
that it embraces a historicizing perspective, one that situates the emergence of past
collective identities in the historical situation that made that emergence possible.4 He
writes ‘there is no reason why a nostalgia conscious of itself, a lucid and remorseless
dissatisfaction with the present on the grounds of some remembered plenitude,
cannot furnish as adequate a revolutionary stimulus as any other: the example of
Benjamin is there to prove it’ (1971: 82).
In his more recent work Archaeologies of the Future, Jameson investigates utopist
thought in a post-Communist age and examines the functions of imagined ‘alternative
social and economic forms’ (2005: xiv). What nostalgic desire and utopian thinking
have in common is a vision of ideal integrity of systems and individuals. Here,
Jameson suggests:
Indeed, a whole new generation of the post-globalization Left – one which subsumes
remnants of the old Left and the New Left, along with those of a radical wing of social
democracy, and of First World cultural minorities and Third World proletarianized
peasants and landless or structurally unemployable masses – has more and more
frequently been willing to adopt this (utopist) slogan, in a situation in which the
discrediting of communist and socialist parties alike, and the skepticism about the
traditional conceptions of revolution, have cleared the discursive field. (2005: xii)
Jameson is not exclusively speaking about utopian futures, but about the utopian
dimensions of nostalgia since pieces of the past inevitably interpolate our imaginations
of the future. Jameson’s assertion, which I would like to develop in this essay, suggests
that the cumulative effects of neoliberal capitalism in the late twentieth century and
the violence produced in its defence have engendered patterns of community and
claims for solidarity. Such claims have the potential to acknowledge longings to
salvage remnants of the revolutionary goals of the 1960s and 1970s ‘while remaining
critical of a politics of identity and nation’ (Hirsch and Miller 2011: 4). Writing in
Rites of Return: Diaspora Poetics and the Politics of Memory, Marianne Hirsch and
Nancy K. Miller make the case that nostalgia can have a ‘dual vision’, one that ‘can
combine the desire for “home”, and for the concreteness and materiality of place and
connection, with a concomitant, ethical commitment to carefully contextualized and
differentiated practices of witness, restoration of rights, and acts of repair’ (2011: 5).
Boym calls this type of nostalgia ‘reflective nostalgia’: ‘Reflective nostalgia does not
follow a single plot but explores ways of inhabiting many places at once’ (2001: xvii).
I agree with these critics that nostalgia can be nuanced and productive insofar as the
desire to reconstruct real or imagined bonds combines with an attempt to historicize
and excavate the fractured and heterogeneous nature of memories, as well as their
difficult articulation in the present.5
Staging loss and longing in Mi vida con Carlos

At this point, I will return to the documentary film Mi vida con Carlos in order to
substantiate these claims and illustrate how technical and narrative strategies involving
audiovisual material, such as voiceover, dialogue, montage, musical score and framing,
may be used to raise new questions about nostalgia and its relationship to the
construction of postmemory counter-narratives and collective identities in the wake
of state-sponsored violence in Chile. The focus on the textual construction of the film
and the analysis of the cinematography, mise-en-scène, sound and editing as distinct
systems is therefore essential to my study of the filmmaker’s thematic choices.
The documentary opens at the site of the crime, the Atacama Desert, a desolate
landscape where the filmmaker’s father’s remains were secretly dumped. The low-
intensity natural light suggests dusk or dawn, the ending of a life and the beginning
of a search. If the lighting, framing and setting bring to the fore the clandestine nature
of the regime’s practices of politicide, then the cinematographic strategy of the low-
angle shot panning the dry earth further invites viewers to reflect upon the desire to
unearth that which remains below the surface. The soundtrack is also significant,
reproducing the hollow sound of the wind, which at once evokes the idea of a
haunting and the passage of time. This opening image of absence filmed in the present
is juxtaposed with an archival clip in Super 8 of the filmmaker’s father diving into the
ocean. The image is overlaid with an epistolary narrative read by Berger-Hertz that
points to the relationship between memory and identity: ‘I was one when they killed
you and you were thirty. When I turned thirty, I realized how young you were, and
how much life you still had ahead of you. I wanted to know who you had been’. This
narrative points to the links between memory, moments of transition, and calls for
continuity of identity. It also serves as a sound bridge that connects images from the
pre-coup setting to a symbolic site in the present renowned as a bastion of resistance:
the Vicaría de la Solidaridad. A tracking close-up captures an image of the filmmaker
locating his father’s file and withdrawing his black-and-white portrait. The image
then cuts to the fourth scene, opening with the same photograph, this time in an
antique frame on the dressing table where the filmmaker’s mother examines her own
reflection. The photo and mirror constitute two props in the iconography of memory
works, symbolizing the tensions between mortality and immortality, reflection and
identification. The extreme close-up of Carmen Hertz is followed by the final phrase
of this segment: ‘My mother was twenty seven when she became your widow. From
then on the family was just her and I, and between us, your ghost, your heroic figure’.
What ensues is a dialogue between mother and son as they view photographs of the
missing father. The filmmaker asks what Carlos provided her with as a partner and
why she fell in love with him. Significantly, Hertz’s narrative of love and loss
highlights key political issues, focusing specifically on Carlos’s commitment to the
struggle for both class and gender equality:
Por una parte el que fuera comunista como lo era, que era un joven ejemplar por así
decirlo. Eso me fascinaba que fuera un joven comunista ejemplar. Después el buen
humor que tenía, porque era muy divertido, era muy cómico, era comiquísimo. Nos
reíamos, le daban ataques de risa y se caía de la silla literalmente, riéndose y golpeando
con una cuchara. Y él era muy presente. No era una persona ausente. Compartíamos
en una generación en que todavía había bastante machismo y sin ponernos nada de
acuerdo, no había nada teórico detrás sino que había una actitud.
[First, he was an exemplary communist young man, to say it that way. And that
fascinated me, that he was an exemplary communist. Then his sense of humour. He
was very funny, he was extremely comical. We laughed a lot. He could literally fall off a
chair laughing while banging a spoon. He was also very present. He was not an absent
person. We were both part of a generation that was still male chauvinistic and without
necessarily having to discuss it, and without having a theory behind it, there was just
an attitude.]
This montage, in effect, is an audiovisual representation of nostalgia. Carlos Berger

becomes a larger than life figure for the Left – self-sacrificing, progressive, intelligent
– a true humanitarian whose story incites the public to envision practices of resistance
to the class and gender structures that the Pinochet regime violently upheld. The
nostalgic memories recounted here could be characterized as ‘restorative’ if, as Boym
contends, this type of nostalgia ‘builds on the sense of loss of community and cohesion
and offers a comforting script for individual longing’ (2001: 42). At variance with
other more critical postmemory documentaries (Los rubios, Papa Iván), the portrait
of Leftist militancy in this interview is overtly romanticized. Whereas the probing
nature of those contrasting films allows viewers to gain an appreciation of the
complexities and contradictions of the historical moment and the imperfect process
of memory, an arguably one-dimensional form of celebratory rhetoric restricts this
scene. Yet the failure to recognize the import or broader social implications of this
form of nostalgia would be shortsighted since Hertz’s narrative extends far beyond
the domain of personal suffering to contribute to a shared cause. Her vindication of
past activism and collective responsibility reveals the dual function of nostalgia as a
tool to grapple with the painful effects of personal loss and as an emotional resource
in the ongoing reconstruction of a broader collective identity injured by dictatorial
violence and threatened by dislocation. By arranging archival television footage of
Hertz making the case against impunity in the ‘Caravan of Death’ trial as a lawyer
and plaintiff with interviews that emphasize her admiration of Carlos’s ‘unshakable
faith’, ‘joy of living’ and ability to make ‘noble and unselfish decisions’, the film
suggests that nostalgia has played a role in the forum that demands recognition of
injustice and redress.6 What is more, the filmmaker effectively adds depth and
complexity to this portrait by including additional perspectives that emphasize the
ethical challenges posed by state violence and contribute to polychromatic visions of
the socio-historical moment.
Two interviews best illustrate how the nostalgic impulse may stand at the
crossroads in the larger cinematic imaginary with an attempt to explore fraught
memories of crisis, vulnerability and remorse in the aftermath of dictatorship. The
first interview that makes a critical demand on viewers to relinquish visions of
uncompromising moral clarity is with Ricardo Berger, the filmmaker’s paternal uncle
who stayed in Pinochet’s Chile. Filmed at the paper mill where he became a manager
during the regime, Ricardo admits that after the coup he abandoned his commitment
to socialism and made choices that contradicted his political principles: ‘I had to
negotiate with the union, but I was on the evil side’. Through the arrangement of this
interview with the nostalgic remembrance featured in the opening segment, the
director focuses our attention on the variation between modes of remembrance,
positive and negative, nostalgic and traumatic (Horowitz 2010: 47). The second
account, adding another layer to the nostalgic narrative, involves Carlos’s second
brother, Eduardo, who foregrounds his own experience of geographical and emotional
separation. Diagnosed with cancer and given one year to live, he journeys with the
filmmaker from Ottawa to Santiago for the first time since the coup to join in a
discussion about the impact of rupture. The first segment upon arrival in Chile shows
Eduardo, Ricardo and Carmen viewing a Super 8 motion picture of the Berger family
in the 1960s. A tight low-angle close-up allows viewers to zoom in on the affective
experience of longing evoked by the images of childhood. By capturing this scene of
laughter and reminiscence the director imbues the image with a nostalgic tone. This
recedes in a later scene shot at the detention centre, where the filmmaker listens to his
uncle convey admiration for his brother’s courage and regret for his own inability to
save him. This testimony challenges categorical understandings of nostalgic, traumatic

and melancholic memory, showing instead the interrelations between them.
These first-generation experiences are juxtaposed with those of the second
generation, which are communicated in family dialogues that expose frictions and
disconnections between age cohorts and subvert uniform understandings of
transgenerational transmission. Whereas the filmmaker, like his mother, shows a
dedication to memorial practices, the other Berger children express degrees of
incomprehension or detachment, thereby pointing to the potential use of nostalgia to
stimulate the re-humanization of the victims and their ideologies.
Another component in the cinematic construction of a historicized postmemory
discourse of loss and longing is the voiceover, which here takes the form of a letter.
Written in collaboration with Chilean novelist Roberto Brodsky and Joaquim Jordá,
this epistolary narrative transgresses the traditional voiceover device by addressing the
dead directly and conveying the impact of their absence. The epistolary mode creates
a sense of intimacy, making viewers feel the presence of the disappeared and shedding
light on the interworkings of melancholia and nostalgia. Insofar as melancholia, in
the context of Chile, has become a form of ongoing sorrow in part resulting from the
lack of redress, I read the epistolary voiceover as a deliberate attempt to acknowledge
and ‘work through’ (LaCapra 2001: 143–144) loss without inserting a easy framework
of repair. This ‘working through’ not only involves confronting memories of
execution, but also confirming the family’s entire political genealogy, which spans
two generations. The filmmaker places his father’s murder within a web of injustice,
contextualizing his family’s Jewish roots and forced exile from Eastern Europe. In
doing so, the film acknowledges the anxieties produced by diaspora and the related
need for belonging while remaining distant from a patriotic discourse of homeland
(Hirsch and Miller 2011: 4).
The filmmaker foregrounds the complexity of roots in a montage of archival
footage overlaid by a voiceover that situates the images within a historical framework.
Viewers learn that the filmmaker’s paternal grandparents found asylum in the
Southern Cone in the 1930s after escaping anti-Semitic persecution in Hungary and
Russia. Archival footage of war-torn Europe then cuts to idyllic images of Carlos’s
childhood in Chile where the family carved out a space where they could deepen their
political commitments. The narrative wistfully imagines Carlos’s relationship with his
mother, from whom he learned what it meant to be a communist: ‘She inspired your
public calling. From her you inherited the enormous responsibility to change the
world’. These nostalgic images of a utopian childhood are suddenly interrupted by
warped images of still black-and-white photographs floating asymmetrically under
water. The voice off-screen then brings into relief the tragedy that followed Carlos’s
execution in 1973: both of his parents committed suicide. This montage enables
viewers to consider the larger search for belonging within the context of ethnic,
political and religious intolerance in the twentieth century – a search framed not in
terms of a homogeneous collective reality, but rather as heterogeneous and contingent
upon the elaborate construction of identities and the intersections of race, class and
gender in their development. The filmmaker’s homeland, Chile, is not a simple site
of origins to be reclaimed by the returnee, but rather a place intertwined with others
in a matrix of migration caused by injustice (Hirsch and Miller 2011: 3–4). The film
dramatizes Hirsch and Miller’s notion that ‘the legacies of the past, transmitted
powerfully from parent to child within the family, are always already inflected by
broader public and generational stories, images, artifacts, and understandings that
together shape identity and identification’ (2011: 4).
If the voiceover narrative articulates the interrelations between the private and the
global, the nostalgic and melancholic, then the visual material attempts to convey the
incalculable measure of trauma. Family photographs are displayed submerged
underwater in an oblique composition, while the corresponding sound effects
reproduce the sound of engulfment. This audiovisual metaphor symbolizes the
suffocating and destabilizing impact of the military coup – so unspeakable that it
exceeds conventional forms of representation. By challenging traditional approaches
to documentary filmmaking that, as Stella Bruzzi suggests, seek to ‘represent an
uncomplicated, descriptive relationship between subject and text’ (2006: 187),
Berger-Hertz more effectively foregrounds the relationship between loss and longing
and magnifies the fractured nature of memories and their uneasy narration in the
present. The unmooring of the photographs also functions to mobilize otherwise still
images, taking them out of what Barthes has conceptualized as a ‘flat death’ or ‘the
realm of stasis, immobility, mortification’ (cited in Hirsch 1997: 4). Moving the
photograph from the restricted space of the album to the stylized underwater site
allows the trope to be transformed into a trigger that evokes an emotive response from
viewers and an empathetic relationship with the viewed. Their stories of rootlessness
and disintegration, also visually conveyed through the presentation of the photos
adrift, come to life with the narrative text in what Barthes articulates as ‘prose pictures’
(cited in Hirsch 1997: 4). The transformation of the album bespeaks the film’s larger
transfiguration of nostalgia to a probing form that has the potential to disrupt what
Hirsch calls ‘a familiar narrative about family life and its representations, breaking the
hold of a conventional and monolithic gaze’ (Hirsch 1997: 8).7
In the final scene, the filmmaker returns to the site of his abandoned beginning:
the Atacama Desert. The camera once again pans across the barren landscape, but this
time it is scattered by women with shovels in their hands, raking through the caked
earth for the remains of their disappeared. This image renders visible the larger
struggle in Chile, thereby moving beyond the realm of the personal. In the same
deathscape where Carlos Berger’s eyes were ripped out, his son gathers in a circle of
life with his uncles and produces tears – water in the desert – symbolizing new growth
through memory work. This image can be read as the repetition of the original act in
reverse, subverting not only the violence of the dictatorship, but also its rigid gendered
underpinnings.8 There, Berger-Hertz reads a letter to his dead father that emphasizes
the ‘vital force’ of his ‘pure gaze’ and ‘ideals’. A poignant musical score composed by
Miranda and Tobar overlays the ensuing panoramic shot of the filmmaker walking
alongside his uncles into the horizon.9 By creating an intimate space on screen for the
painful but unifying process of mourning, the filmmaker not only initiates a
transformative development for the survivors, but also allows viewers to visualize a
constructive model of dealing with loss and grief. The emblematic frame of the line
separating earth from sky finally cuts to the last scene that foregrounds a portrait of
the filmmaker as a toddler propped alongside his father’s: “Do you know who that
is?”, the filmmaker asks his daughter in the voiceover. “That is Carlos,” she responds,
“Your father.” This affectively charged culmination illustrates how the documentary
genre can effectively convey the significance of trangenerational transmission of
memory in the wake of state-sponsored violence and its relationship to a type of
forward-thinking nostalgia that recognizes the complexity of roots and the need for
inheritance of identities and continuity of kinship.
The final scene’s act of reattachment stresses the message embedded within the
entire cinematic structure, which strategically places the story of schism and death
alongside a parallel narrative about continuity, love, solidarity and hope. Interspersed
throughout the film, and functioning as a counterpoint to the interviews about
execution, are film sequences featuring the filmmaker’s daughters overlaid only with
the musical score. Hand-held camera work, lighting effects and colour enhancement
applied to new film footage give a 1970s aesthetic, creating an illusion and serving to
blur generational differences. The editorial cutting and transitions between archival
and new footage magnify this effect. Recently filmed images of the filmmaker’s family
become composites of the past, thus reinforcing the interwoven connection between
past, present and future. The theme of children therefore goes beyond the image of
innocence to allow viewers to envision new emotional bonds and agency strengthened
and informed by the pre-existing dreams and legacies of political activism. Ultimately,
in its attention to the relationship between nostalgia, intergenerational affiliation and
identity and how these may contribute to ethical discourses of redress as well as the
task of mourning, Mi vida con Carlos constitutes an important contribution to the
field of memory studies in the Southern Cone. The film widens the scope to advance
discussions about the intersecting intimate and intercontinental dimensions of
dictatorial violence, and about how to embrace the memories and legacies of resistance
in the aftermath without being immobilized by them.
Acknowledgements
The title of this essay comes from a Latin American Studies Association Conference
panel entitled ‘Visual Archives: Histories of Resistance in Documentary Film and
Photography from the Sixties to the Present’ (May 2013). My thanks go out to my
fellow panelists Moira Fradinger, Pedro García-Caro and Tomás Crowder-
Taraborrelli. I would also like to thank Roberto Brodsky, Chilean novelist and co-
script writer of Mi vida con Carlos, for introducing me to the film and for sharing his
reflections on the issues treated in this essay. A special thank you goes as well to
Jordana Blejmar and Natalia Fortuny for inviting me to contribute to this special
issue and for raising pointed questions that helped me to sharpen my argument.
Finally, I wish to thank Carlos Vicente and Jacquelyn Button for offering support and
valuable comments.
Notes
1. This number refers specifically to the ‘Caravan of Death’ case. See also Verdugo (2001)
Chile, Pinochet, and the Caravan of Death. This text offers a groundbreaking historical
reconstruction of the Caravan of Death operation through the testimony of ex-military
officers. It is a translation of Caso Arellano: Los Zarpazos del Puma (1989), which had a
significant impact on politics in Chile as it was published between the 1988 referendum
and the election of Patricio Aylwin in December 1989. Verdugo, whose father was also
a victim of the regime, published numerous books on human rights during and after the
regime that played a role the investigation of the perpetrators. It should also be noted
that the total number of executed or disappeared is estimated at 3,200, although these
numbers are still the focus of an ongoing debate as human rights groups calculate higher
numbers.
2. Established by the Catholic Church in Santiago, the Vicariate of Solidarity assisted the
victims of the military dictatorship and archived human rights abuses.
3. See also Ana Ros (2012), Gabriella Nouzeilles (2005) and Elizabeth Jelin (2003) for a
thoughtful discussion of the questions surrounding postmemory in the Southern Cone.
4. See also Jameson (1985a) for a detailed discussion of the need to historicize the
revolutionary struggles in 1968 (128).
5. See also Lazzara (2009) for an illuminating analysis of nostalgia in Patricio Guzman’s
film Allende (2004). More broadly, Michael Lazzara has been a key interlocutor who has
generously offered me valuable insights on memory, politics and representation in Chile.
6. On the fortieth anniversary of the military coup, the miniseries “Ecos del desierto”
premiered on Chilevisión (September 9-11, 2013). Directed by Andrés Wood, the four-
part drama tells the story of the Berger-Hertz family, with a specific focus on the emotional
and legal experience of Carmen Hertz. A comparative analysis of Wood’s representation
is perhaps the subject of another article.
7. This scene evokes a powerful film sequence in Patricio Guzman’s film Chile, La memoria
obstinada (1997) that involves an interview with the father of Jorge Müller Silva, a Jewish
cameraman disappeared by Pinochet’s forces in the early days of the coup.
8. I would like to thank Pedro García-Caro for an insightful conversation about the
symbolism in the film and its relationship to memory politics in Chile.
9. These Chilean composers created the musical score for the feature film Machuca (2004)
by Andrés Wood as well as Violeta se fue a los cielos (2011), also directed by Wood.
Works cited
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Boym, Svetlana (2011) ‘Off-modern homecoming in art and theory’, in Rites of Return:
Diaspora Poetics and the Politics of Memory, ed. Marianne Hirsch and Nancy K. Miller
(New York: Columbia University Press), 151–165.
Bruzzi, Stella (2006) New Documentary (London: Routledge).
Davis, Fred (1979) Yearning for Yesterday (London: Collier Macmillan Publishers).
Frazier, Lessie Jo (2007) Salt in the Sand: Memory, Violence and the Nation-State, in Chile,
1890-Present (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).
Gundermann, Christian (2008) Actos melancólicos (Argentina: Beatriz Viterbo).
Hirsch, Marianne (1997) Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press).
Hirsch, Marianne (2012) The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the
Hirsch, Marianne and Nancy K. Miller (eds) (2011) Rites of Return: Diaspora Poetics and the
Politics of Memory (New York: Columbia University Press).
Horowitz, Sara (2010) ‘Nostalgia and the Holocaust’, in After Representation? The Holocaust,
Literature, and Culture, ed. Clifton Spargo and Robert Ehrenreich (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press), 41–58.
Jameson, Fredric (1971) ‘Walter Benjamin; or, nostalgia’, in Marxism and Form: Twentieth
Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 60–83.
Jameson, Fredric (1985a) ‘Periodising the sixties’, in Postmodernism: A Reader, ed. Patricia
Waugh (London: Edward Arnold), 125–152.
Jameson, Fredric (1985b) ‘Postmodernism and consumer society’, in Postmodern Culture, ed.
Hal Foster (London: Pluto Press), 111–125.
Jameson, Fredric (2003) ‘Nostalgia for the present’, in Close Reading, ed. Frank Lentricchia
and Andrew Dubois (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 226–242.
Jameson, Fredric (2005) Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science
Fictions (London: Verso).
Jelin, Elizabeth (2003) State Repression and the Labors of Memory (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press).
LaCapra, Dominick (2001) Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press).
Lazzara, Michael (2009) ‘Guzmán’s Allende’, Chasqui 38, 47–62.
Lowenthal, David (1989) ‘Nostalgia tells it like it like it wasn’t’, in The Imagined Past, ed.
Christopher Shaw and Malcolm Chase (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 18–32.
Nouzeilles, Gabriela (2005) ‘Postmemory cinema and the future of the past in Carri’s Los
rubios’, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 14.3, 263–278.
Ros, Ana (2012) The Post-Dictatorship Generation in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay: Collective
Memory and Cultural Production (New York: Palgrave Macmillan).
Shaw, Christopher and Malcolm Chase (eds) (1989) The Imagined Past (Manchester:
Manchester University Press).
Tannock, Stuart (1995) ‘Nostalgia critique’, Cultural Studies 9.3, 453–464.
Verdugo, Patricia. (2001) Chile, Pinochet, and the Caravan of Death (Miami: University of
Miami North South Center Press).
Humour and the descendants of the disappeared:
Countersigning bloodline affiliations in post-dictatorial
Argentina
Cecilia Sosa
Abstract
While it has been argued that the concept of postmemory does not accurately fit the
specific situation of a new generation of local survivors in post-dictatorial Argentina,
I contend that a critical engagement with postmemorial ruminations can still be
productive to an understanding of the affective transmission of trauma beyond those
who have been directly touched by violence. To explore this, this article focuses on the
power of humour – often overlooked by classical studies on postmemory – to produce
alternative forms of remembrance, which can circulate beyond bloodline affiliations.
First, I show how the dark sense of the comical that permeated HIJOS, the organization
founded by the Children of the Disappeared during the late 1990s, worked for the
descendants as a collective strategy to cope with loss when legal justice was exempt
from the political arena. Secondly, I draw upon Los topos (2008), a queer and insurgent
novella written by Félix Bruzzone, to explore how its dark and bitter style ‘countersigns’
(in Derrida’s terms) bloodline ties while suggesting a more fluid entanglement among
kinship, loss and political heritage. Ultimately, I contend that humour has not only
provided a creative means of political empowerment for those who have been persistently
constructed into victimizing narratives. Rather, it has become the surface and medium
of an experience of iteration, displacement and contagion across expanded audiences.
Keywords: humour; HIJOS; postmemory; Los topos; Argentina
Bringing ‘postmemory’ back home

Many scholars have argued that in the aftermath of experiences of mass-scale suffering
and loss the effects of trauma can be ‘paralysing’ for the descendants and survivors of
those traumatic pasts. Marianne Hirsch, a daughter of Holocaust survivors, has
coined the term ‘postmemory’ to acknowledge the ways in which new generations
recreate and connect with past experiences they have not directly experienced
themselves. In particular, she has contended that second-generation witnesses connect
so deeply with the previous generation’s remembrances that these experiences seem
to constitute memories in their own right (Hirsch 1998: 106). Hirsch states that for
the descendants of those who have suffered traumatic events – and in this they differ
from contemporary witnesses of such events – the past is ‘not actually mediated by
recall but by imaginative investment, projection and creation’ (1998: 107). She has
also warned that the main risk involved in this affective structure of transmission is

76 Cecilia Sosa
that descendants may have ‘their own stories and experiences displaced and even
evacuated by those of a previous generation’ (1998: 107).
Bearing in mind the need to ‘bring memory home’, as Susannah Radstone has
recently highlighted (2012: 351–357), I would like to explore the precise mechanisms
through which postmemorial affiliations can be productively explored in contemporary
Argentina, where most of the descendants of the disappeared have been contemporary
witnesses of traumatic events (Sosa 2012: 221–233).1 Drawing upon this, I will argue
that Argentina’s resonances of trauma can help to enlighten two crucial dimensions
that have recently become of central importance within postmemorial preoccupations:
the extent to which conventional family ties can be displaced, reversed and even
‘countersigned’; and the way in which the particular features of the new generation’s
production can generate alternative engagements among expanded audiences, which
have not been directly affected by loss. Ultimately, I will contend that humour has
become a critical medium to propitiate this encounter.
A broken family romance

As many scholars have noticed, the figure of the family has been a recursive cultural
and political trope in the wake of Argentina’s last dictatorship. The network of
associations created by the relatives of the victims took the form of what I refer to as
a ‘wounded family’ (Sosa 2011: 64). Madres [Mothers], Abuelas [Grandmothers],
familiares [Relatives], hijos [children], and hermanos [siblings] of the disappeared have
all evoked their biological ties to the missing to make their claims for justice. This
‘wounded family’ has commanded the process of national mourning. In so doing,
memory has risked being reduced to a matter of blood.
However, in recent years the country has witnessed the advent of a new scenario.
In the period initiated in 2003 the national trauma was officialized. For the first time
a government embraced the demands of the victims to adopt mourning as a national
concern. During his inaugural speech, the then president Néstor Kirchner congratulated
the relatives’ associations on their fight and declared: ‘Somos los hijos e hijas de las
Madres y Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo’ [‘We are the sons and daughters of the Mothers
and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo’].2 By including himself within the cast of the
‘wounded family’, the President showed how the heritages of trauma not only concern
bloodline sons or daughters, but can be also adopted by more ‘illegitimate’ witnesses.
This was one of the promises endorsed by the Kirchnerist administrations, which
continues today in the person of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.3
Since 2006 numerous important trials have taken place and are still ongoing in the
country. In 2005, the Supreme Court declared the nullity of the laws of impunity,
and prosecutions of those responsible for human rights violations were allowed once
again.4 In this context, HIJOS became a prosecutor in court.5 At the same time, the
country has also witnessed the emergence of alternative voices seeking to undermine
the duty of memory. These new interventions have brought to light new vocabularies
and images that contributed to reveal the process of transformation undergone by the
wider society. Within the artistic and intellectual production carried out principally
by the descendants of the disappeared, the figure of the ‘wounded family’ has
Humour and the descendants of the disappeared 77
remained pervasively present.6 Yet, kinship ties have re-emerged strangely displaced
and even queered. As I will try to show here, the new generation familial inscriptions
have become a form of ‘countersignature’. Here, I use the word ‘countersignature’
according to Jacques Derrida’s interpretation of the term. As he argues, ‘You receive
an old name from the past, but a name as such remains of a name-to-come; and the
only way to sign with a name-to-come is, or should be a countersignature’ (Derrida
1999: 220–221). Drawing on this, I suggest that Argentina’s postmemorial
production can be understood as a strange form of fidelity to the parental loss that at
the same time seeks to create a differential space in present time.7
Hirsch herself has become increasingly interested in thinking of other modes of
transmission that go beyond the family. In her latest work, postmemory becomes a
critical tool to explore embodied forms of transmission of trauma and living experience
that exceed bloodline ties and become available to other contemporaries. This is what
she calls ‘affiliative postmemory’ (Hirsch 2012: 36). She has also argued that the ‘post’
not only appears as a location in an aftermath, but rather, drawing upon Rosalind
Morries’ work, she states that this ‘post’ might be thought of as a post-it, which
adheres to the surfaces of texts and concepts, acquiring the form of a ‘Derridean
supplement’ (2012: 5).
The possibility of combining the layering and belatedness of a ‘post-temporality’
with the performative and ultimately unexpected outcomes of iterability produces an
extremely fruitful way to consider the transmission of trauma in contemporary
Argentina. In particular, the engagement of new generations with humour has
managed to add something new to the experience of loss. Humour has not only
provided a means of political empowerment for those who have been persistently
constructed into victimizing categories. Rather, it has become the surface and medium
of an experience of iteration, displacement and contagion. While subverting and
mocking traditional bloodline scripts, humour has propitiated a process of transference
across wider audiences. In so doing, the expansive and embodied resonances of the
comical have showed how traumatic memories can also be adopted by others.
In order to test this, I will focus on two different cases. First, I will show how the
dark sense of the comical that permeated HIJOS, the organization of the children of
the disappeared, functioned during the 1990s as a form of compensation to cope with
loss.8 Then, I will discuss the contemporary reverberations of this playful spirit via a
curious incident that took place when the same-sex marriage law was about to be
passed in the country in 2010. Second, I will focus on Los topos (2008) [The Moles],
a novella written by Félix Bruzzone, whose parents were murdered during the
dictatorship. Although the fictional autobiography seems to continue the tradition
that stipulates that only those who were ‘directly affected’ are entitled to the privileges
of remembering, I will make the case that the novella works as a subversive
performance, which countersigns the idea of the ‘wounded family’ as the only victim
of violence. Ultimately, I will argue that Los topos provides a queer and insurgent
version of postmemorial ruminations that suggests a more fluid entanglement among
kinship, loss and political heritage.
78 Cecilia Sosa
Flirting with death

While interviewing HIJOS members, I was surprised by the use of humour that the
descendants applied to recall painful experiences. It was not regular humour but a
particular spirit of the comical, a mix of affects always flirting with death. A founder
member gave a clue to the peculiar atmosphere that surrounded the organization
when their members were in their late teens: ‘Siempre hacemos chistes en relación a
la muerte. Están siempre relacionados a no tener a nuestros seres queridos con
nosotros, jugamos con eso todo el tiempo’ [‘Our jokes were always related to the
experience of not having our loved ones next to us’]. During the late 1990s, this
appeal to the tragic worked as a sort of viscous substance to engage with similar
experiences of pain and suffering shared by the descendants.9 Something that would
not be perceived as comical taken in isolation functioned within the group as a form
of reworking memory and also as the reversal of previous experiences of injury.
In his important work on laughter, Henri Bergson argues that we should not
imprison the comic spirit with a definition but rather try to understand it in its
natural environment, the specific community in which it arises (2008: 10). For
HIJOS’s members, humour worked as a way of coping with the everyday effects of
loss, enabling the descendants to negotiate the haunting presence of their absent
parents at the same time that it reinvigorated a broken family romance with new
hopes and desires. In those early days, this non-normative sense of humour was
animated by a restrictive idea of ‘us’. As became clear during my fieldwork, the
descendants were the only ones allowed to laugh about their orphaned condition. In
this way, humour encouraged certain feelings of possession and exclusivity among
those who shared in trauma. In fact, Sigmund Freud argues that there is a sense of
superiority and invincibility attached to humour: ‘If it is really the super-ego which,
in humour, speaks such kindly words of comfort to the intimidated ego, this will
teach us that we have still a great deal to learn about the nature of the super ego’
(Freud 1974: 166). During the 1990s humour provided the descendants’ ‘intimidated
egos’ with a form of comfort to mourn their missing parents. At the same time, it
tended to reproduce an internal logic of privilege. ‘Because we suffered, we are entitled
to laugh’ was the unspoken code that circulated within the group. In some oblique
way, humour confirmed the ‘privilege’ of the victims; it delineated a peculiar form of
community elitism among the descendants.
By 2010, however, something had changed. In the last decade, the reverberating
properties of joy propitiated new forms of encounter. The self-deprecating style of the
descendants also worked as a way of generating new lines of identification and
empathy among wider audiences. To show this I would like to focus on a flag spotted
on 15 July 2010, when same-sex marriage became legal in Argentina.10 The night
before the law was passed a big demonstration took place in front of the Congress.
The association of the children of the disappeared came to show their support. They
brought a flag with them: ‘Queremos mamá y papá’ [‘We want mum and dad’] was
written on it. At first sight, the flag seemed to be almost a joke, a dark joke. In an
ironic way, the seemingly naïve tag-line echoed the claim made by the conservatives
in previous demonstrations that a child needs to have both parental figures in order
to grow up in a safe environment.11
HIJOS’s flag echoed the conservative demand but this time to subvert it. By
publicly making fun of their orphaned condition, the descendants showed how the
regressive appellation of the ‘normal’ family also hid a dark and disfigured face. As the
descendants could not recover their missing parents, ‘the Mum-and-Dad family’
demanded by the conservatives was no longer possible. The flag showed how the
global – and sometimes also normative – discussions around equal marriage could not
be isolated to LGBT groups but had to be discussed in a society in which traditional
kinship ties had been ruptured. At a deeper level, the flag also denounced the way in
which, in the Church’s eyes, only some families seemed to be worthy of life. Violence
had marked the entire society, even at its most unexpected borders.
At the same time, the ‘Mum-and-Dad’ flag endorsed a process of transference in
contemporary Argentina. If by the mid-1990s, humour worked as an exclusive
platform of survival for the children of the missing, by contrast, the night that the
same-sex marriage law was about to be passed, this power was transferred to those in
the streets. Laughter emerged as an expanded form of political empowerment, which
was also made available to others. In this respect, the ‘Mum-and-Dad’ flag could be
thought of as a gift to the wider society. To some extent, that night we were all
children of the disappeared.
A new sequence of the comical

I would like to explore what happens when this process of iteration-subversion and
transference is approached from a fictional angle, in this case, through Bruzzone’s
novella. As Beatriz Sarlo remarked, Los topos signposts a new period in the literature
of the disappeared. Its comical perspective and its surreal drift help it to move away
from what she calls the ‘bienpensantismo’ [the politically correct]. In so doing, Los
topos announces the right to talk about the missing parents ‘in any way’; ‘this is the
right of literature itself’ (Sarlo 2008).12
As with the author’s other works, Los topos draws from Bruzzone’s personal
experience. The central character has also lost both parents during the repression and
lives with his grandparents in the suburbs of Buenos Aires. However, he does not
seem to identify with the figure of the ‘son’ and follows with scepticism his
grandmother’s anxieties around his parents’ disappearance. The elder matriarch,
named ‘Lela’ (which reads as silly in Spanish), is somehow convinced that her missing
daughter gave birth to a second child while she was held captive at ESMA, the main
clandestine detention centre during the dictatorship where around 5,000 leftist
activists were murdered. When her husband dies, Lela moves opposite the detention
centre to undertake a daily search for her supposed second grandchild. An odd feeling
of humour pervades this preliminary scene. Since the novella seems to take place
during the 1990s, Lela’s shouts in front of ESMA appear as an eccentric performance,
which also supports an irreverent recitation of Abuelas’s search for the babies stolen
during the dictatorship.13
80 Cecilia Sosa
Eventually, the protagonist starts dating Romina, a sweet young woman who joins
the organization of the children of the disappeared as a devoted gesture of commitment
towards the narrator’s painful past. The woman endlessly tries to talk him into
following her in this decision but he remains unconvinced. Not only does he argue
that there were no real victims in Romina’s family, but he also reflects with scorn that
her mother would not like to see her daughter becoming an activist in an organization
‘of people without parents’ (Bruzzone 2008: 21).14 Los topos is fully embedded in this
malicious mood. As a cynical double agent, the protagonist highlights the apparent
contradiction of being part of HIJOS without bearing the status of the victim.
If during the late 1990s HIJOS was proud of defining itself as a horizontal group,
unspoken distinctions and positions of status nevertheless cut across the group. These
hierarchies were mostly related to the extent to which each member had been affected
by state violence. During their childhoods the descendants may have been afraid or
ashamed of confessing their condition, but under the protection of the group the
status of victim qualified as a plus. Personal status tended to increase in the cases of
well-known disappeared parents. Within this furtive logic, members of the group who
had many relatives disappeared were known as the ones who had sangre azul [blue
blood]. These hierarchies were acknowledged by the organization’s slang: they called
it ‘a question of pedigree’. Thus, the reverberations of the traumatic past had created
a secret version of royal ranks inside the group, which mischievously (and also
dramatically) defined loss in relation to blood.
Throughout his novella, however, Bruzzone laughs at the idea of ‘pedigree’. When
referring to a young female member of HIJOS, whose aunt was kidnapped, the
protagonist suggests that she could join Romina to found SOBRINOS [Nephews and
Nieces] and NUERAS [Daughters-in-Law] of the disappeared (Bruzzone 2008: 18).15
By proposing a vicarious expansion within the branches of victims, the author teases
the obsession with kinship ties that lies at the core of the descendants. His novella also
pokes fun at the feelings of property of the ‘wounded family’, which comes to be
caricaturized as a ‘self-help club’ of victims. Thereby, HIJOS’s recursive dark humour
is iterated and countersigned as a corrosive method, which Bruzzone satirically turns
back on its ‘creators’. Ultimately, as the author suggest, the ‘wounded family’ should
include not only the relatives of those missing but also more expanded postmemorial
affiliations.
In the name of the (queer) son

When the relationship between the protagonist and Romina comes to an end, he
starts looking for sex in the red light district of Buenos Aires. Eventually, he meets
Maira, a transvestite sex worker.16 The encounter eventually leads to the ‘más grande
y hermoso amor’ (Bruzzone 2008: 34) [the greatest and most beautiful love].17
Following on from this, Los topos plays its most defiant card: it suggests that Maira,
the new girlfriend, could be the protagonist’s biological brother. As uncanny as it
sounds, his brand new transsexual partner could be his missing sibling, the latchkey
baby stolen from ESMA that his grandmother was looking for at the beginning.
When I first read Los topos, I was curious about the inclusion of Maira in Bruzzone’s
novella. Her character fascinated me, not only because she was the first queer figure
in the author’s work, but also because, to my knowledge, it was the first time that a
queer reference was explicitly applied to address the dictatorship’s heritage. As Emilio
Bernini (2010) has also argued, Los topos ‘es una novela de un hijo de desaparecidos
y es también una novela queer’ [‘is a novella authored by a son of missing parents and
also a queer novella’]. When I interviewed Bruzzone in 2009, he told me: ‘Nunca
pensé esta historia como algo para hablar de travestismos sino para hablar de
desaparecidos’ [‘I never thought of this story as a way of talking about transvestites
but as a means to talk about the disappeared’].18 The displacement in Bruzzone’s
words was revealing. The queer turn that underpinned his story was less related to a
gender disposition than to a methodological way of subverting a problem: Maira’s
character appeared as a subversive iteration to unseat the trajectory of the offspring of
the disappeared. The operation appeared particularly provocative given that the
Kirchner administrations had adopted the position of the victims as their own
political lineage.
My argument is twofold. By proposing a love story between a transvestite sex
worker and a son of the disappeared, Bruzzone’s fiction addresses a multidirectional
entanglement between the contested subjectivities constituted in the aftermath of
violence: the anxieties raised by the trans communities occupying the public space,
and the opacity of the figure of the abducted son. They are both injured and repudiated
characters; they have both been victimized and recently politically vindicated.19 More
than this, Los topos suggests that both figures could be siblings. While inviting us to
read the descendants’ drama alongside the figure of the transvestites, Bruzzone also
touches on the problem of falsified identities. The drama of growing up under faked
names and sharing home-spaces with their appropriators (who are usually accomplices
in the murder of their parents) already installs a queer notion of kinship within the
offspring of the missing. In this fantastic turn, Los topos countersigns the descendants’
traumatic pasts while envisioning postmemorial affiliations emerging in the aftermath
of violence.
At the same time, Maira’s figure also brings us back to the issue of the officialization
of grief that has taken place during the Kirchnerist period: it suggests that the current
politics of mourning might have failed to address the expanded anxieties raised by
loss. Since 2006 those responsible for human rights violations have been tried in
court, and yet Los topos shows how the effects of trauma cannot be reduced to trials.
Thus, Maira emerges as an impertinent response to the attempts to sanctify the figure
of the descendants, so often smothered beneath the duty of memory. When former
HIJOS members ‘transitioned’ into public servants, became enthusiastic state
supporters or prosecutors in court, the novella guffaws with delight and mocks the
moral arrangements prescribed by the so-called most progressive human rights
politics, which has also been ironically depicted by Mariana Eva Pérez, another
brilliant mind of the post-generation, as the Disneyland des Droits de l’Homme ((Pérez
2012: 126) [the Disneyland of human rights].20
82 Cecilia Sosa
Within this context, Maira’s figure speaks of a process of mourning that is not easy
to overcome. As Bernini argues, Bruzzone draws upon the anti-social, misfit tradition
of the transvestite to enhance the scandal (2010). Still, for him, the parodic effect of
the novella lies not in its mutant transgender characters but rather on its way of
conceiving identity politics. Maira brings to light a new constellation of desires that
‘transvestize’ the heteronormative image of the ‘wounded family’, now sacralized by
the state. More than that, Maira emerges as the troublemaker at the table of victims,
the killjoy of their moments of state comfort. After all, she is the one for whom there
are no clear affiliations; she is the queer one in the family of victims. In this movement,
the reader is invited to embrace Maira as her own adopted relative.
Breaking the spell

By the end of the book, Maira has been kidnapped. In an ironic displacement of the
dark fate of the missing, she is depicted as a ‘neo-disappeared’, an intriguing condition
for the democratic period, which seems to recall the fate of Julio López.21 Conversely,
the protagonist becomes involved with El Alemán [The German], a serial killer who
might have murdered Maira, and maybe also his parents. In a remorseful tribute to
his neo-disappeared girlfriend, the narrator undergoes a plastic surgery procedure and
also embraces a transgender identity. How to make sense of this abject ending? Los
topos seems to suggest that past and present share a common destiny, as if Maira, the
missing parents, and the father-perpetrator had grotesquely become one. As Hirsch
once argued, the fantasy of having one’s own experiences ‘evacuated’ by previous
generations (2008: 107) seems to be at the heart of this transitioning. Still, in
Bruzzone’s drama of inverted filiations these frightening fantasies of evacuation
become subverted and countersigned by laughter.
Far from being some kind of whim, Bruzzone’s fiction stages this fatal ending in
order to break the spell. It deploys a displaced postmemorial technology in which the
experience of a broken generation is transformed into an astonishing, scornful and
terrifying family romance. After all, the novella does what human rights discourses
cannot: it demonstrates how humour can queer traditional repertoires of memory and
shows to what extent the legitimacy of blood cannot be taken for granted.
In fact, the progressive mutation of Los topos’ characters also signposts how grief
inevitably implies a process of becoming other. As Judith Butler reminds us, mourning
has to do ‘with agreeing to undergo a transformation, (perhaps one should say
submitting to a transformation) the full result of which cannot be known in advance’
(2004: 21).22 Los topos takes this ‘submission’ to a fantastic, wild extreme. Through
successive forms of gender transitioning, Bruzzone’s never-ending parody queers the
fantasies of ‘blue blood’, making room for broader affiliative encounters.
Against the tradition of the innocent heroization of parental figures, Los topos dares
to imagine the character of the father as the main traitor (Bernini 2010). The novel
signposts a displaced micro-politics of survival, which also gives room to new potential
futures. In so doing, Los topos invites its readers to negotiate the unconventional forms
of intimacy that emerged in the aftermath of violence. While highlighting the
production of new subjectivities in the wake of trauma, Lisa Blackman contends that
certain forms of affective becoming could be grasped as ‘queer performancing’ (2011:

195). In a similar vein, the autobiographical fiction created by an ‘orphan’ also enacts
a queer performancing of blood which suggests new forms of belonging and becoming.
While stressing unconventional intersections between perpetrators and victims,
descendants and transvestites, it proposes that the process of transitioning involved
in grief can assist not only extreme but also joyful opportunities.
To some extent, Los topos, in line with other cultural productions of the period,
invents a new sense of humour for post-dictatorship Argentina: one that displays
sardonic teeth to spitefully mock narratives of victimization. The breast enhancements
gained by the narrator metonymically contest the status of the Madres [Mothers] of
Plaza de Mayo as the exclusive female heroines of the aftermath of violence. Thus,
Bruzzone brings to light new trans-heroes for the period.
Conclusion
If ‘postmemory’ has recently become an umbrella term in the global academy, in these
pages I have suggested how this approach might ‘transition’ while intersecting with
the resonances of trauma in Argentina. I have explored the productivity of the
‘postmemorial’ perspective not only to address the creative ways in which second
generations deal with traumatic memories but also to highlight the possibility of
adopting trauma as a lived experience, which has been opened for second-degree
witnesses.23 Against fantasies of ‘evacuation’ that haunt second generations, the
descendants of the disappeared have explored legacies of trauma and grief without
renouncing their own languages and creating new ones. In so doing, they have showed
how it is still possible to expand the vocabularies available for loss.
Decades ago, Stuart Hall accepted that national heroes and heroines could be
necessary myths of our times, yet he argued ‘that heroization is the fantasy construction,
by sons and daughters, of the mothers and fathers they wish they had but they hadn’t’
(Hall 1996: 117). In post-dictatorial Argentina, this family romance has been
overshadowed by loss. The persistent nature of the local grief has made the recurring
presence of absent mothers and fathers especially resilient and resistant. The ‘orphaned’
children have been at the forefront of a process of reinventing these often-idealized
characters. Their production has not only continued a family romance but it has also
countersigned it. Other contemporaries, not ‘directly affected’ by violence, have also
followed on this path. The cross-dressing characters of Mi vida después (2009) [My Life
After], directed by Lola Arias (with no relatives disappeared), stand as a gripping
example of a still fragile series created by the ‘non-affected’ (Sosa 2012: 221–233).24
While many of these postmemorial artefacts still found themselves haunted by the
incestuous fantasy of an endogamic family, the new series also manages to test other
forms of lived experience, which can replace, substitute and even overturn affective
forms of transmission beyond bloodline ties. In many ways, humour has emerged as
a corrosive medium to mobilize this displacement. While the ‘injured’ card is still at
stake, a dark sense of the comical stands as the affective medium that holds new
audiences in the work of mourning.
84 Cecilia Sosa
‘Our laughter is always the laughter of a group’, writes Bergson (2008: 11). During
the 1990s, HIJOS offered an eloquent case-study to explore the sense of commonality
attached to humour. Since most their members had gone through similar experiences,
to some extent those experiences became interchangeable. However, the recent
production of this generation has witnessed a new turn in this cycle. Within a growing
collection of artworks and interventions, a form of self-reflective humour becomes
extended, enabling a broader net of circulation.25 In Freud’s terms, what once
produced the atmosphere in which the yield of pleasure fell back on HIJOS’s members
(1974: 161) now helps to create expanded affiliations that move beyond the exclusive
boundaries of the victims. Unrelated participants, readers and listeners can also be
affected. Pleasure therefore becomes expansive and expandable. As Los topos shows,
the fooling, bitter style, once exclusively owned by a group, is transferred to an
expanded community of orphans by adoption.
For the new generation, then, this form of humour does not work as a form of
light entertainment. Rather, it becomes a strategy and even a platform of resistance,
refusal and creation. Dark humour sticks. Its porous character contributes to the
breaking of boundaries, disturbing hierarchies and status of infliction. Thus, it
emerges as a form of doing, a form of connection, submission and getting undone by
grief. Far from leaving the past behind, dark humour works as a form of recovery and
even of conversion. It not only appears as a medium for addressing vulnerability and
loss, but also a way of engaging with new audiences across lines of differences.
Anticipating the postmemorial turn, Hall has argued that contemporary narratives
‘are post-heroic, or post-utopian because they are writing, so to speak, from the other
side – the dark side – of heroism, idealization and identification’ (1996: 117). The
way in which the broken family romance has been countersigned in Argentina also
reveals this ‘other side’ of grief. In this sense, dark humour appears as a way of
‘countersigning’ past heroes and bringing to the foreground new characters for the
future. This contested atmosphere has been exquisitely brought to life in Los topos.
Like Maira, the characters of the aftermath do not respond to the purity of blood.
They are infused by contested hopes and desires. They are post-heroic; they are trans-
heroes, quite literally, in that they enact a form of transitioning.
Issues of legitimacy, authority and ownership are still under discussion in
contemporary Argentina, maybe now more than ever. However, the expansive
reverberations of the comical turned out to be instrumental in the generation of new
affiliative links among those that have not been directly affected by trauma. As the
cases explored here reveal, the experience of loss has also managed to bring to light
new forms of becoming and queer subjectivities. New characters are still struggling to
emerge: they are the inheritors, the trans-heroes of an expanded generation of
orphans. Their labour contractions invite the beholders to move back and forth
through the resonances of grief. In this movement, they also illuminate the unexpected
pleasures that have emerged from loss.
Notes
1. In fact, the categories of ‘second generation’ or ‘second witnesses’, as first formulated by
Hirsch, are not completely accurate in acknowledging the experience of the children of
the disappeared. Although their recollections might be fragmentary, many of them were
present at the moment of their parents’ kidnapping, were kidnapped with them, or were
born in captivity at clandestine detention centres (Sosa 2012: 221–233).
2. Kirchner’s inaugural speech to the United Nations took place on 25 September 2003.
3. Néstor Kirchner held the presidency from December 2003 to December 2007 when
his wife, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the current president, replaced him. Néstor
Kirchner died in October 2010.
4. In 1985 the leaders of the Military Junta were condemned in an historic trial. However,
in 1986 and 1987 the ‘Full Stop’ and ‘Due Obedience’ – the so-called ‘laws of impunity’
– put an end to most prosecutions. In 1990, supposedly in the name of ‘national
reconciliation’, President Carlos Menem ‘forgave’ most of the military that had already
been condemned. The so-called indulto [pardon] was given in spite of strong resistance
on the part of most of Argentine civil society. During Néstor Kirchner administration the
‘laws of impunity’ were repealed by the National Congress, and then definitely labelled as
unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of Justice on 14 June 2005.
5. Unlike the 1980s trials that condemned the Military Junta, the new series of trials featured
querellantes (plaintiffs). Therefore, the accusations are not only made by the state, but also
by individuals and civil organizations, including HIJOS.
6. Among others, it is possible to include within this category the collective exhibition
Familias Q’Heridas [Beloved-Wounded Families] (2011), which gathers together artwork
produced by Jorgelina Molina Planas, Ana Adjiman, María Guiffra and Victoria Grigera,
all daughters of the disappeared; the exhibition Huachos [Orpans] (2011), produced by
an artistic branch of HIJOS, who described themselves as ‘orphans scientifically produced
by state genocide acts’; and Filiacion [Filiations] (2013), Lucila Quieto’s photographic
collection recently exhibited at the former ESMA.
7. I have analysed Albertina Carri’s film Los rubios (2003), a turning-point within the local
postmemorial series. See Sosa 2011: 77.
8. The group was founded in 1995. Its name, which means hijos (children) in Spanish, is an
acronym that combines the generational position with a political strategy: ‘HIJOS por la
Igualdad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio’ [Children for Equality and Justice,
against Forgetting and Silence].
9. Within HIJOS, jokes were especially popular during birthdays or family celebrations
in which the parental absence became unavoidable. For instance, it was an internal
agreement that the best place to celebrate Fathers’ or Mothers’ days was next to the Rio
de la Plata, where most of the disappeared had been thrown alive.
10. On 15 July 2010 the National Parliament established equal rights to marry for all couples,
regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity. The law also gave the same rights
with regard to the adoption of children. Argentina became the first Latin American
country to legislate on this issue.
11. The conservative demonstrations were led by Jorge Bergoglio, then Archbishop of Buenos
Aires and since elected as pope. On that occasion, Bergoglio described same-sex marriage
as an initiative ‘inspired by the Devil’, and called for a ‘war for God’ to safeguard against
a ‘serious injury against the family’. See Vertsbisky (2010).
12. In the original quotation: ‘Los topos se afirma en el derecho de hablar de cualquier modo
sobre la ausencia de padres desaparecidos; es el derecho de la literatura’.
13. Up to the present day, Abuelas has managed to recover 109 grandchildren who were
given falsified identities. In 2004, ESMA was transformed into a ‘space of memory’ and
is progressively becoming a ‘Human Rights City’.
14. In the original: ‘Una organización de personas sin padres’ (my translation).
86 Cecilia Sosa
15. The capitalization belongs to Bruzzone.

16. Following the de-criminalization of sex work in 1998, the figure of the transvestite was
at the centre of Buenos Aires’ anxieties. The red-light district, first located in Palermo, a
trendy area in the city, made visible as never before alternative forms of non-normative
sexuality to the eyes of the beholder. For further discussion on this issue, see Sabsay (2011:
213–229).
17. My translation.
18. My interview with the author was conducted in April 2009.
19. In the Argentine context, ‘transvestite’ refers either to transsexual or transgender people
– passing from male to female. Although within the local culture the expression works
as a pejorative term, it has also been appropriated by trans communities. The term
‘transgender’ has begun to be incorporated in Argentina since 2000. See Sabsay (2011).
20. In French in the original. In her Diario de Princesa Montonera. 110 % Verdad, Mariana
Eva Pérez explores the world of the ‘hijis’ [the children of the disappeared] from the
ironic and critical perspective of a daughter of the disappeared who was expelled from the
Abuelas organization.
21. Julio López was a retired bricklayer who disappeared after testifying at the trial against the
perpetrator Miguel Etchecolatz in September 2006.
22. Butler’s emphasis.
23. Jens Andermann has also worked on this question (2012: 76–98).
24. For a more in-depth analysis of Mi vida despues, see Sosa (2012: 221–233). Cómo enterrar
a un padre desaparecido (2012), a fictional memoir written by Sebastian Hacher, shows an
interesting hybridization between the figure of a daughter who seeks to deface her missing
father and a ‘non-affected’ author who adopts her voice.
25. Pérez’s Diario de una Princesa Montonera also explores the displacement and expansion
of the self-deprecating humour that was part of HIJOS. This incestuous background
is also addressed in 23 pares (2012), a local TV series directed by Albertina Carri and
Marta Dillon, both descendants of missing parents. The soap opera also proposes a playful
intersection between heritage, identity and gender through disparate cases that come to
be tested at a genetic institute inherited by the siblings and his autistic brother who is
obsessed with royal casts.
Works cited
Andermann, Jens (2012) ‘Returning to the site of horror: the recovery of clandestine
concentration camps in Argentina’, Theory, Culture and Society 29.1, 76–98.
Bergson, Henri (2008) Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (London: Manor).
Bernini, Emilio (2010) ‘Una deriva queer de la pérdida. A propósito de Los topos’, No retornable
(Buenos Aires), vol. 5, April, http://www.no-retornable.com.ar/v6/dossier (no pages).
Blackman, Lisa (2011) ‘Affect, performance and queer subjectivities’, Cultural Studies 25.2,
183–199.
Bruzzone, Félix, (2008) Los topos (Buenos Aires: Mondadori).
Butler, Judith (2004) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New
York: Verso).
Derrida, Jacques (1999) ‘As if I were dead: an interview with Jacques Derrida’, in Applying: To
Derrida, ed. John Brannigan, Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys (London: Macmillan),
212–226.
Freud, Sigmund (1974) ‘Humour’, in The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and its Discontents,
and Other Works, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud, Vol. XXI (1927–1931), trans. James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud,
assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (London: Hogarth Press), 159–166.
Hall, Stuart (1996) ‘Who dares, fails’, Soundings 3, 116–118.
Hacher, Sebastián (2012) Cómo enterrar a un padre desaparecido (Buenos Aires: Marea).
Hirsch, Marianne (2008) ‘The generation of post-memory’, Poetics Today 29.1, 103–128.
Hirsch, Marianne (2012) The Generation of Postmemory. Writing and Visual Culture after the
Pérez, Mariana Eva (2012) Diario de una Princesa Montonera. 110% Verdad (Buenos Aires:
Marea).
Radstone, Susannah (2012) ‘Afterword: bringing memory home: location, theory, hybridity’,
Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 21.2, 351–357.
Sabsay, Leticia (2011) ‘The limits of democracy: transgender sex work and citizenship’,
Cultural Studies 25.2, 213–229.
Sarlo, Beatriz (2008) ‘Una condición de búsqueda’, Diario Perfil (7 December).
Sosa, Cecilia (2011) ‘Queering acts of mourning in the aftermath of Argentina’s dictatorship:
the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo and Los Rubios (2003)’, in The Memory of State Terrorism
in the Southern Cone: Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, eds V. Druliolle and F. Lessa (New
York: Palgrave), 63–85.
Sosa, Cecilia (2012) ‘Queering kinship. Performance of blood and the attires of memory’,
Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 21.2, 221–233.
Vertsbisky, Horacio (2010) ‘La Inquisición’, Página 12 (11 July), http://www.pagina12.com.
ar/diario/elpais/1-149246-2010-07-11.html [accessed 25 November 2012].
Ekphrastic anxiety and the technological mediation of
memory in post-dictatorship narratives from Brazil
Edward King
Abstract
This article explores the tensions between text and image in three literary narratives
concerned with a reassertion of memory in the face of the ‘política de esquecimento’ that
has prevailed during the post-dictatorship period. It argues that this tension between
text and image, which manifests itself as a prevarication between what I call (following
W.J.T. Mitchell) ‘ekphrasic hope’ and ‘ekphrastic fear’, expresses an anxiety in relation
to the reconfiguration of the borders between individual and collective identities that is
catalysed by the increasing mediation of memory by the communications technologies
of the information age.
Keywords: Brazil; dictatorship; truth commission; post-dictatorship memory; prosthetic
memory; virtuality; information age; ekphrasis; photography
The focus of this article is the tensions between text and image evident in the recent
literary narratives produced in Brazil, which engage with memories of the military
dictatorship that came to power in March 1964. I argue that these tensions are
expressive of wider cultural anxieties accompanying the increasing mediation of
memory by the communications technologies of the information age and the
attendant blurring of the boundaries between individual and collective memory, key
processes of the phenomenon that has been described by Marianne Hirsch as
‘postmemory’ and by Alison Landsberg as ‘prosthetic memory’. In discussing these
tensions, I borrow the term ‘ekphrastic anxiety’ from W.J.T. Mitchell’s essay on the
political implications of the ‘hopes’ and ‘fears’ surrounding verbal representations of
visual representations. Textual ekphrastic representations of images, he argues, swing
between ‘ekphrastic hope’ and ‘ekphrastic fear’. The former is expressive of a desire
that the ‘estrangement’ between image and text will be overcome and ‘a sutured,
synthetic form, a verbal icon or imagetext’ will appear in its place (Mitchell 1994:
154). The latter, meanwhile, polices the boundaries between image and text and ‘tries
to regulate the borders with firm distinctions between the senses, modes of
representation, and the objects proper to each’ (155). He goes on to argue that
ekphrastic hope encodes a desire to ‘overcome otherness’ since, ‘like the masses, the
colonized, the powerless and voiceless everywhere, visual representation cannot
represent itself; it must be represented by discourse’ (157). Ekphrastic fear, meanwhile,
encodes a desire to reinforce boundaries between the self and the other. Mitchell’s
categories provide a useful frame through which to examine the tensions between text

Ekphrastic anxiety and technological mediation of memory in Brazil 89
and image in contemporary narratives from Brazil that concern themselves with a
recuperation or reassertion of memory in the face of the ‘política de esquecimento’
[‘politics of forgetting’] that has prevailed during the post-dictatorship period, a
powerful consensus that has only finally begun to be shaken under the Dilma Rousseff
administration and the establishment of the truth commission in 2011.1 Prevarications
between these two modes in literary texts express a desire, on the one hand, to explore
the possibilities opened up by the blurring of individual memory narratives and those
distributed by the mass media and, on the other, to police these divisions and reassert
the primacy of individual experience. Although this prevarication is expressed
differently in relation to different types of images, the anxieties manifested in the texts
coalesce around a common set of hopes and fears in relation to the connection
between technology and memory.
A close look at how the tensions between text and image play out in these narratives
from Brazil provides a different angle on the relation between affective memory and
the re-articulation of the boundaries between individual and collective memory
according to Hirsch’s account of ‘postmemory’, her term for processes through which
the memory of traumatic events is transmitted across generational divides. In her
discussion of the role played by photography in paradigmatic postmemory texts such
as Maus by Art Spiegelman, Hirsch argues that family photographs help to ground
the publicly circulating memories of traumatic events in familial – and, thereby,
affective and embodied individualized – memory. ‘The key role that photographic
images – and family photographs in particular – play as media of postmemory clarifies
the connection between familial and affiliative postmemory, and the mechanisms by
which public archives and institutions have been able both to re-embody and to re-
individualize the more distant structures of cultural memory’ (Hirsch 2012: 36).2
Photographs inserted into texts, therefore, echo this wider process of how collective
cultural memory becomes embodied and individualized. My analysis, on the other
hand, will focus on the anxiety attendant on the way in which the insertion of images
into the texts produced in Brazil opens up affective memory, further unbinding it
from the individual. It is useful to develop Hirsch’s use of the notion of ‘affective
memory’ by drawing on the definition of ‘affect’ elaborated by cultural critics such as
Brian Massumi and Steven Shaviro who have borrowed Gilles Deleuze’s Spinozan
definition of affect as a ‘prepersonal intensity’ (Massumi 2011: xvii) that works to
trouble the boundaries between bodies and individuals.3 While Hirsch uses affect as
synonymous with emotion, these critics conceive of affect as the raw ‘intensity’ that
is then formulated into emotional narratives. It is the confrontation with these
unnarrativized, prepersonal affective intensities that lies at the heart of these texts’
ekphrastic anxiety.
In discussing this aspect of Hirsch’s study of postmemory texts, I hope to
illuminate a different aspect of the tensions between image and text from Andreas
Huyssen’s study of what he takes to be the paradigmatic post-traumatic ‘image-texts’
Maus and Maus II. Huyssen takes Spiegelman’s graphic novels to be indicative of a
second-generation ‘postmemory’ work that reacts against the ‘Holocaust theology’
associated with Theodor Adorno’s prohibition of images of the death camps. Huyssen
90 Edward King
interprets the image-text’s mixing of ‘modernist techniques of estrangement’ with

‘affective mimesis’ as an answer to the question of how to ‘represent that which one
knows only through representations and from an ever growing historical distance’
(Huyssen 2000: 81–82). While I agree with Huyssen that the ambiguous use of
images in these texts is expressive of anxieties connected to the increasing technological
mediation of the memories of traumatic events by mass cultural representation, I go
a step further and look at how these image-texts produce a vertiginous unbinding of
affective intensities from the individual. My analysis focuses on three literary texts:
the novel K. written by Bernardo Kucinski and published in 2012; the novella Mãe
judia, 1964 by Moacyr Scliar, which was published in 2004 to mark the fortieth
anniversary of the coup; and História natural da ditadura, part fiction and part essay
collection, by Teixeira Coelho and published in 2006. The first two narratives share
an obvious concern with the influence of a Jewish tradition of post-Holocaust
memorializing practices, and the anxiety this provokes clearly informs the ekphrastic
anxiety evident in the texts. However, I find it useful to examine them alongside
Coelho’s book which, although belonging to a different genre due to its mixing of
fiction and essay forms, shares with Kucinski and Scliar’s narratives an exploration of
the affective unbinding that is a consequence of the increased mediation of memory
by mass cultural tropes. Furthermore, Coelho’s book, with its formal and thematic
engagement with internet technologies, makes explicit a technological milieu (the
information age) that provides the determining context for all three narratives.
K. recounts the story of an old man’s search for his daughter, a lecturer at the
Universidade de São Paulo (USP) who, along with her husband, was ‘disappeared’ by
the military police during the most repressive years of the dictatorship in Brazil. The
book is a fictionalized account of the author’s search for his sister, who was also a
lecturer at USP and was also kidnapped and presumably killed by the military police.
In fragmentary, episodic chapters that resist a linear chronology, the novel recounts
the narrator’s mounting desperation in his futile search for his daughter, and his
frustrated desire, once reconciled with the probability of her death, of giving her a
proper burial. In the absence of a body and following his failure to persuade the rabbis
to allow him to mark her death with a tombstone, the narrator, referred to simply as
K., sees the book itself as a form of matzevah (tombstone): ‘Desolado pela falta da
matzeivá, ocorreu então a K. a ideia de compor um pequeno livrinho em memória da
filha e do genro. Uma lápide na forma de livro. Um livro in memoriam’ (Kucinski
2012: 83) [‘Devastated by the lack of a matzevah, it occurred to K. to compose a little
book in memory of his daughter and son-in-law. A tombstone in the shape of a book.
A book in memoriam’].4 K. weaves into his narrative a meditation on the differences
between word and image in the process of memorialization. Having previously been
a confirmed bibliophile and, he regrets, more interested in Yiddish poetry than in
spending time with his family, his struggle to construct his textual tombstone
engenders a crisis of faith in literature’s capacity to communicate affective memory
and an accompanying fascination with the photographic image.
This unease with the written word culminates with a sequence in which K. is
overcome with emotion while leafing through old photographs of his daughter, which
he describes as ‘vestígios preciosos, pedaços da vida da filha’ [‘precious vestiges, pieces

of his daughter’s life’]. Whereas previously only the poetry of Pushkin and Sholem
Aleichem could evoke such emotion, K. is overwhelmed by the photographs: ‘Parecem
captar a alma da filha. Sentiu um quê de fantasmagoria nas fotografias da filha já
morta, um estremecimento’ (Kucinski 2012: 113–114) [‘They seem to capture his
daughter’s soul. These photographs of his dead daughter evoked a shuddering sense
of the phantasmagorical’]. In this way, the text draws attention to its own limitations
in relation to the testimonial potential of the photographic image. It also attempts to
efface the boundaries between itself as text and the image-memory of the lost
daughter. The ekphrastic hope of a merging of text and image in what Mitchell calls
an ‘image-text’ is expressive of the impossible hope that his daughter will return from
the dead. The merging of image and text is accompanied by a sense of haunting, a
‘fantasmagoria’ that troubles the borders between life and death.5
However, during the course of the book, the narrator expresses a growing sense of
anxiety about what Hirsch describes, in reference to photographic images of the
holocaust, as a process of ‘iconization’, a stabilization or routinization of these
formerly troubling images (2001). In one chapter, K. describes how he became
‘immune’ to state repression. As a result of his attempts to publicize his struggle to
elicit information about the fate of this daughter, the narrator becomes too visible a
figure for himself to become another victim of state violence. As a result, he finds
himself becoming a media representative for the families of the disappeared. At one
stage, while catching sight of himself in a shop window, K. describes this experience
as being drawn into the process of ‘iconization’: ‘Ele não é mais ele, o escritor, o poeta,
o professor de iídiche, não é mais um indivíduo, virou um símbolo, o ícone do pai de
uma desaparecida política’ (Kucinski 2012: 90) [‘He is no longer himself, the writer,
poet, and professor of Yiddish, he is no longer an individual. He has become a symbol,
the icon of the father of a “desaparecida”’]. His horror at this glimpse of himself as
icon is expressed as a moment of ‘ekphrastic fear’ when the narrator recoils in horror
at the uncertainty of this merging of text and image. The iconization of the images of
the ‘desaparecidos’ is accompanied by a reassertion of the borders and limits between
individual identities. The affective contamination set in motion by the contemplation
of the images of his daughter is resisted and blocked.
The book’s prevarication between these two modes – the desire to merge text and
image, encoding the desire to dissolve the borders of individual memory, and the
horror at the instability induced by this merge – is echoed in Mãe judia, 1964 by
Moacyr Scliar. Like Kucinksi’s novel, Scliar’s novella thematizes the anxieties
surrounding the iconization of images of the victims of political repression. However,
unlike K., Scliar’s novella focuses on the role of technology in this process and explores
the potentialities opened up by the circulation of the depersonalized affect surrounding
these iconic images of frustrated mourning. The narrative is presented as the memoir
of a doctor who worked in a psychiatric hospital during the first years of the military
regime that came to power in 1964. The narrator begins his story on 1 January of that
year when his girlfriend at the time unexpectedly leaves him. As part of his attempt
to recover from his sense of grief at this sudden loss, the narrator, who remains
92 Edward King
unnamed throughout the novella, finds a new job working as a therapist in a

psychiatric clinic. He takes up his new post not long after the coup on 31 March and
the resultant politically charged atmosphere is everywhere in evidence. The director
of the clinic is a contemporary called Lucrécia who is keen to avoid problems with the
new military regime by asking the narrator to assure her of his political neutrality. The
narrator and Lucrécia soon embark on an affair and the diretora reveals to her new
employee that she has set up an elaborate system of surveillance equipment in the
clinic. Despite the fact that Lucrécia claims to be recording her patients’ conversations
as part of a research project, the reader is led to believe that she is in fact colluding
with the military regime to keep an eye on some of the residents of the clinic who are
suspected of subversive activity. In a commonly used trope, the repressive atmosphere
in the clinic stands in metonymically for more widespread repression during the
military dictatorship.6 The narrator becomes fascinated with one particular patient,
an old woman whose son is known to have been ‘disappeared’ by the military regime.
The old woman was driven mad with grief and, despite the fact that she is Jewish,
spends most of her time contemplating and recounting her woes to an image of the
Virgin Mary in a small chapel in the clinic grounds. Claiming to be writing a research
paper on grief-induced mystical delusions, Lucrécia persuades the narrator to help her
conceal a microphone behind the image to record the old woman’s monologue. Years
later, Lucrécia sends the narrator a transcription of this monologue pieced together
from the fragments of speech captured by the recording device. The central section of
the novella reproduces this transcription for the reader.
The image of the Virgin Mary in the story becomes a focal point for affect, a node
in the circulation of troubling affects that are presented as being stripped of any
connection with personal narratives of grief. The mother’s contemplation of the icon
becomes a focus for her own sense of loss, as she identifies both with the Virgin’s grief
over her wounded Son, and her hope of His return and resurrection. At one stage in
her narrative, the mother provides an explanation for this attachment to the image.
She recalls her fascination with a photograph of Michaelangelo’s Pietà that she found
in a library book and it becomes clear that her fascination with this image of motherly
love and mourning is later revived through her attachment to the icon in the clinic
chapel: ‘Aquilo me impressionou, a mãe com o filho morto no colo, uma imagem que
eu não podia esquecer e que via até em sonhos’ (Scliar 2004: 27) [‘It affected me
deeply, a mother with her dead son on her lap, an image that I could not forget and
which I saw even in my dreams’]. The passage expresses a view of the image as in a
way ‘living’, which echoes K.’s sense of the photograph as being a living ‘pedaço’ of
his absent daughter. However, it also emphasizes the depersonalized nature of this
emotional attachment to the image by pointing to an affective continuity before and
after the disappearance of her son. Lucrécia is presented as entering into an affective
network which centres around the image that precedes her. The connection between
Christian iconography and electronic surveillance technology also highlights the way
in which these writers are marshalling the representational tropes and conventions
concerning the aestheticization of grief drawn from classical and Judeo-Christian
traditions to engage with the distribution of affective memory through network

technologies.
It is also clear that Lucrécia, as representative of the psychiatric institution and, by
extension, the authoritarian regime, considers this attachment to the image to be
dangerous and threatening. The fact that this suspicion and fascination with the
mother’s attachment to the image contains an element of ekphrastic fear is underlined
by the focus of the narrative on a turn away from the verbal to the visual. Much like
that of K., the mother’s trajectory of grief is characterized by an abandonment of the
literary in favour of a fixation on the visual. The reader learns that, following the
disappearance of her son, she abandoned her habit of reading. Like K. she finds herself
merging with the image as she becomes the grieving mother of the Pietà that inspired
her obsession. The surveillance system set up by the diretora with the help of the
narrator is a reaction to this ekphrastic fear, a measure intended to contain this threat.
She is recording the mother’s words spoken in dedication to the image not only, the
reader suspects, to scour them for information about the subversive activity her son
was involved in, but also to transcribe them, re-affirm the borders and the hierarchy
between image and text that they threatened. In the framing section, the narrator
describes the mother’s address to the image as being at times incomprehensible:
‘Falava ininteruptamente; uma história que repetia sem cessar, fora às vezes
compreensível às vezes não’ (Scliar 2004: 16–17) [‘She talked continuously; a
narrative that repeatedly itself endlessly, and was at times comprehensible, at other
times not’]. In the mother’s narrative the merging of words with images is described
as a form of madness: ‘Loucas falam com imagens’ (20) [‘Mad people talk with
images’]. Since this is a transcription of the mother’s speech it is not clear whether it
is echoing a wider cultural ekphrastic fear, internalized by the mother, or whether it
is Lucrécia who is attempting to contain the threat posed by the patient by labelling
her speech as ‘mad’. Clearly, part of the process of containing the threat posed by the
mother’s address is to render it comprehensible.
Furthermore, this ekphrastic fear is presented as a counterpart to the narrator’s
reluctance to re-visit the past. In the sections of the novella that frame the transcription
of the mother’s narrative, the narrator is presented as the embodiment of the
consensus politics of ‘esquecimento’ [forgetting]. The abrupt appearance of the
transcription after so many years disturbs the narrator’s desire to forget this period in
his life and his unwitting complicity in repression (his collusion with the surveillance
system is indicative of his collusion with the authoritarian regime more generally).
The disruption of his desire to forget the past is accompanied by a disruption of the
boundaries between his affective life and the depersonalized affective charges
circulating around the image. It is here where the doubleness of the role of technology
in the novella becomes clear. On the one hand, the recording equipment is set up as
part of Lucrécia’s system of surveillance and as such stands in metonymically for the
dictatorship’s machinery of repression. On the other hand, it sets in motion the
circulation of depersonalized affective intensities, enabling the disruption of the very
boundaries (between identities; between word and image; between individual and
collective memory) that it was constructed to police. The recording device hidden
94 Edward King
behind the image of the Virgin connects the mother’s words to other networks of
affect and meaning, including psychoanalytic discourse (Lucrécia claims to be using
the narrative as a basis for a paper on the psychology of religious mysticism) and the
narrator’s personal memoir. The process of connection and distribution, enabled by
the recording device, sparks a process of transformation in which affective boundaries
merge. The grief of the mother becomes confused with the narrator’s grief over the
loss of his girlfriend, the event with which he opens the narrative. The protagonist’s
anxiety, his phobic fascination with the mother’s attachment to the image, becomes
an expression of a more diffuse anxiety that accompanies the transformations
connected to the increasing technological mediation and subsequent depersonalization
of individual memory.
The concealment of the recording device behind the image opens it up to
deterritorializing networks of information, just as the photographic image cuts
through K.’s textual tombstone. In his analysis of the tensions between the
monumentalization of memory and the ‘deterritorializing forces’ that ‘work against
monumental emplacement’ in memorializing practices in Latin America, Jens
Andermann focuses on moments of medial overlap, whether they be the tension
between landscape and sculpture in ‘memory parks’ in Chile and Uruguay or the
tension between the static photographic image and the moving cinematic image in
post-dictatorship films from Argentina. He argues, for instance, that ‘the cinematic
chronotope is the very dimension that mobilizes and itinerates a melancholy caught
up in monumental immobility, be it of a photographic, architectonic or discursive
kind’ (Andermann 2012: 178).7 In these Brazilian texts, the highly self-conscious
focus on this medial overlap, between text and image, is expressive of wider anxieties
about the breakdown of boundaries between individual and collective narratives of
memory and the affective contagion that this entails.
The crossing of generic boundaries and the tensions between word and image are
also central features of História natural da ditadura (2006) by Teixeira Coelho. The
book takes the form of a series of meditations on the themes of dictatorship and
memory that are united by a fictionalized narrating consciousness and interwoven by
a set of fictional characters who feature prominently in the memory and musings of
this consciousness. In a manner reminiscent of W.G. Sebald’s novels, the book
contains a series of images placed within the text while the text itself frequently
concerns itself with the relationship between text and image as a metaphor for the
relationship between discourse and memory. These concerns come to the foreground
in a chapter entitled ‘30’ which centres on the narrator’s memories of a friend called
Renato who took up the armed struggle against the military dictatorship in Brazil,
was kidnapped and tortured by the military police and eventually killed himself. The
technological mediation of memory is a central concern of the book. In the opening
pages of the chapter, the narrator expresses a concern with the control of public
memory of the dictatorship as it is stored and transmitted on the internet. This series
of musings is sparked by the contemplation of a photograph of a march that took
place in protest against President João ‘Jango’ Goulart’s proposed series of reforms
known as the ‘reformas de base’ in São Paulo just months before the coup. The
contemplation of the image provokes the narrator to search for information on the
internet, a search which triggers a series of musings about the control of the memory
of the 1964 coup through the control of the imagery surviving from that time.
The chapter is characterized by an acute anxiety about the relationship between
text and image that expresses itself through the manner in which the form of the text
at once affirms and undermines the narrator’s ekphrastic hope. The observation about
the way the photograph of the anti-Goulart demonstration is framed and
circumscribed by the highly tendentious explanation on a government-funded website
leads to related observations about the dominance of the discourse of art history over
our relationship with artistic images. As with Scliar, these thoughts are organized
around an account of the contemplation of religious iconography. The narrator
describes his experience of seeing Tintoretto’s A descoberta do corpo de São Marcos in
the Pinacoteca de Brera, first without and then with the explanatory textual frame
provided by the gallery. The narrator describes the confusion surrounding his attempts
to impose a narrative on the various figures and movements that populate the image.
The initial prevailing sensation is that the image is ‘cheio de cadáveres’ [‘full of dead
bodies’]. Just as the image of the virgin in Mão Judia, 1964 became a screen on which
to project the memory of a disappeared son, the narrator’s sense of confusion in the
face of Tintoretto’s painting becomes a metaphor for his relationship with his
memories of the first years of the dictatorship. His memories of that time are
fragmentary and uneven: ‘Há um vazio em minha memória, por exemplo, no dia 31
de março de 1964’ (Coelho 2006: 145) [‘There is a gap in my memory, for example,
on 31 March 1964’]. His confused contemplation of A descoberta do corpo de São
Marcos is presented as a counterpart to his fragmentary memory of this troubled time,
a memory that is haunted by the later death of his friend Renato. Both the image and
his memory resist a narrative framework: ‘Estou a punto de partir – porque isso é o
que se faz com as imagens obsessivas: vê-se-as outra vez, mais uma vez, e em seguida
diante de seu absoluto vazio de algum significado maior, além daquele significado
concedido pelo enfrentamento momentâneo da imagem, vai-se embora’ (159) [‘I am
on the point of leaving – because that is what you do with obsessive images: they
appear again and again, and then, in the face of the absolute lack of any overarching
meaning, beyond the meaning granted by the fleeting confrontation with the image,
one walks away’]. This is what could be described as the ekphrastic dream of the
narrator: to create a text that can efface itself in relation to the memory-image to the
extent that the ‘enfrentamento momentâneo da imagem’ is in a sense reproduced for
the reader.
It is in relation to this dream that the text explores, not on an explicit level but
through its form, the possibilities afforded by the way in which information is stored
and circulated on the internet. Despite the fact that the images which are inserted into
the text of História natural da ditadura are referential to the content, the manner in
which they are inserted exacerbates and draws attention to the tensions between text
and image discussed by the narrator. For instance, the photograph of Tintoretto’s A
descoberta do corpo de São Marcos is placed early in the discussion of the painting,
reproducing for the reader the sense of confusion that the narrator describes as having
96 Edward King
experienced when he first approached the painting without the gallery’s insertion of
the image into a history of art discourse. The reader flicks back to the image repeatedly
when the narrator provides new information. The abrupt appearance of the image
within the body of the text is part of the way the book reproduces for the reader the
disjointed connecting logic of hypertext links. The narrator’s thoughts leap from topic
to topic like an internet searcher moving from page to page. This connection between
the structure of the text and the logic of an internet search is reinforced by the
narrator’s reference to his own exploration of the website. At times the connections
follow the direction of a carefully planned argument. The move from a discussion of
fragmentary memory to ‘imagens fragmentárias’, for instance, fulfils part of the book’s
wider agenda of exploring the potentiality in the circulation of memory-images in the
virtual space of the internet. At other times, however, the connections are looser, and
aleatory; in his more paranoid moments, the narrator considers these connections as
evidence of some obscure cosmic scheme. For example, the narrator connects the fact
that an Italian Operaio radical confessed to setting fire to the house of a prominent
right-wing politician thirty years after the crime with the fact that the director Louis
Malle was thirty years old when he made the film Le Feu Follet (a film about a group
of characters turning thirty).
This formal approximation to the connections and flows of information and
images online is a way of exploring how the borders between individual and collective
affective memories are continually reconfigured through the mediation of network
technologies. At one stage, the narrator muses on how images and videos of torture
circulated online ‘passam a formar parte do imaginário coletivo muito mais que
qualquer obra de arte’ (177) [‘become part of the collective imaginary to a greater
degree than any work of art’]. This observation points to the manner in which the
wider chapter explores how this ‘imaginário coletivo’ has conditioned and affected his
memory of his friend Renato and the embodied memory he insists upon at different
stages of the narrative. The narrative repeatedly returns to moments of overlap
between individual and collective affective narratives. For instance, the narrator
obsesses over the question of whether watching Le Feu Follet contributed to Renato’s
decision to kill himself. The narrator positions his text in what he identifies as a
moment of technological transition in which genres, medias and the affective
connections that they produce and regulate reconfigure themselves. He argues that
the differences between Le Feu Follet and the novel it was based on by Pierre Drieu la
Rochelle are evidence of how ‘a passagem de uma tecnologia para outra (…) altera o
suposto sentido das coisas ou atribui às coisas uma outra aura’ (185) [‘the passage
from one technology to another (…) changes the supposed meaning of things or
grants to things a different aura’]. In this highly suggestive aside, the narrative voice
argues that the online circulation of images produces a reconfigured sense of ‘aura’,
the quality that Benjamin famously argued was erased in the mechanical reproducibility
of the work of art. It is clear that what the narrator understands by this ‘aura’ is the
‘enfrentamento momentâneo da imagem’ that exists in tension with explanatory
discursive frames, both invoking and interrupting them. The tension between word
and image that the narrator reflects upon and that structures the text itself, the text’s
ekphrastic anxiety, is expressive of the exploration of the affective reconfiguration

enabled by the blurring of individual and collective memory as both are increasingly
mediated through technology.
In his analysis of the treatment of the theme of memories in the short story ‘Os
sobreviventes’ [‘The Survivors’] (1982) by Caio Fernando Abreu, Jaime Ginzburg
argues that the confrontation with the dictatorship is expressed as ‘uma vontade de
ser outro’ [‘the desire to be another’]: ‘Uma busca de alteridade, sentido individual,
com uma vontade de viver diferente, sentir e pensar diferente. E no sentido colectivo,
com uma expectativa de ser parte de outro Brasil, de outra sociedade’ (Ginzburg
2007: 46) [‘A search for alterity in the individual sense of a desire to live differently,
to feel and think differently. And in the collective sense of a hope of being part of
another Brazil, of another society’]. This search for ‘another Brazil’, Ginzburg implies,
is imagined as a product of the attempt to reassert a sense of political tension and
antagonism into the post-dictatorship climate of consensus around the ‘política de
esquecimento’. In this article, I have argued that the confrontation with memories of
the dictatorship in these texts published since the fortieth anniversary of the 1964
coup and in the run-up to the establishment of the truth commission entails a
confrontation with the otherness of affective memory as it circulates in an increasingly
mediated world. The desire for otherness in this sense, expressed as what I described
as a form of ekphrastic hope, is a desire to explore affective unbindings and
reconfigurations rather than the process of re-individualization described by Hirsch.
The anxiety attendant on this hope is clearly not restricted to narratives concerning
memories of this turbulent period in Brazil’s recent history.8 However, the resurgence
of narratives exploring memories of the dictatorship period in Brazil has coincided
with a moment in which technological shifts are forcing writers and artists to rethink
individual and collective identities. The narratives and debates about memory become
a highly contested discursive arena in which these wider shifts are played out.
Notes
1. Edson Luís de Almeida Tela provides a useful discussion of the politics of consensus
during the post-dictatorship period in Brazil (de Almeida Tela 2007).
2. Despite the fact that Landsberg describes prosthetic memory as a process that unsettles
the ‘naturalization’ of connection between memories and identities, she ultimately argues
that ‘in the case of prosthetic memories, politics as well as identities become grounded in
individual bodies’ (Landsberg 2004: 148).
3. For a fuller discussion of these terms, see King (2013).
4. All translations from the Portuguese are my own.
5. Here K. echoes Roland Barthes’ account of the photographic punctum, the manner in
which the indexicality of the photograph unsettles the distinction between past and
present (Barthes 1982).
6. In the film Hombre mirando al sudeste (1986), directed by Eliseo Subiela, and the novel
La ciudad ausente (1992) by Ricardo Piglia, psychiatric hospitals are also used as allegories
for authoritarian regimes.
7. David Rojinsky, in his analysis of photo-essays produced in Argentina on the theme
of the memory of ‘desaparecidos’, has pointed out that ‘one of the defining features
of international memory art is the crossing of boundaries between artistic practices’
(Rojinsky 2010).
98 Edward King
8. It is useful to draw a comparison with the role of the photographic image in Mário de
Andrade’s Turista aprendiz, the account of his ethnographic excursions into the Amazon
during the 1920s, in which the uneasy relationship between the photographs and the
text become an expression of how de Andrade was rethinking the ways in which Brazil’s
internal cultural others were being incorporated into a national imaginary.
Works cited
de Almeida Tela, Edson Luís (2007) ‘Brasil e África do Sul: os paradoxos da democracia:
Memória política em democracias com herança autoritária’. Submitted as a thesis at the
Universidade de São Paulo.
Andermann, Jens (2012) ‘Expanded fields: postdictatorship and the landscape’, Journal of
Latin American Cultural Studies 21.2, 165–187.
Barthes, Roland (1982) [1980] Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill
and Wang).
Coelho, Teixeira (2006) História natural da ditadura (São Paulo: Editora Ilumunuras).
Ginzburg, Jaime (2007) ‘Memória da Ditadura em Caio Fernando Abreu e Luís Fernando
Veríssimo’, O eixo e a roda 15, 43–54.
Hirsch, Marianne (2001) ‘Surviving images: Holocaust photographs and the work of
postmemory’, in Visual Culture and the Holocaust, ed. Barbie Zelizer (New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press), 215–246.
Hirsch, Marianne (2012) The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the
Holocaust (New York: Colombia University Press).
Huyssen, Andreas (2000) ‘Of mice and mimesis: reading Spiegelman with Adorno’, New
German Critique 81, 65–68.
King, Edward (2013) Science Fiction and Digital Technologies in Argentine and Brazilian
Culture (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan).
Kucinski, B. (2012) K. (São Paulo: Editora Expressão Popular).
Landsberg, Alison (2004) Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in
the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press).
Massumi, Brian (2011) ‘Notes on the translation and acknowledgements’, in A Thousand
Plateaus (London: Continuum), ix–xix.
Mitchell, W.J.T. (1994) Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago
and London: The University of Chicago Press).
Rojinsky, David (2010) ‘Mourning the image: vernacular photographies in Argentinean
memory art of the 2000s’, delivered as a lecture at the Institute for the Study of the
Americas, University of London.
Scliar, Moacyr (2004) Mão judia, 1964 (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras).
Shaviro, Steven (2010) Post-Cinematic Affect (Winchester: Zero Books).
Glances in the landscape: Photography and memory in
the work of Guadalupe Gaona
Natalia Fortuny
Abstract
This article is framed within the discussion about the ways in which aesthetic artefacts
build up memories of traumatic social episodes. I will focus on one of the many
photographic memories of the sons and daughters of the victims of the last Argentinean
dictatorship. The book Pozo de aire [Well of Air] by Guadalupe Gaona (2009) presents
old images of her family album – among which we find the only photograph of the
author and her father – mixed together with her own photography and poetry. This
combination of images and words allows her to find her father within the landscape and
facilitate an impossible reunion with him.
Keywords: Argentinean photography; postmemory; post-dictatorship
What made me uneasy (…) was the idea that this cast-iron column,
which with its scaly surface seemed almost to approach the nature of
a living being, might remember me and was, if I may so put it, said
Austerlitz, a witness to what I could no longer recollect for myself.
Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald
Families are at the core of culture transmission and identity building. They are the
first sphere of which we form part, and it is through them that we build our
subjectivity and also absorb and inherit silences, shame and secrets. Family
photography plays a key role in the building of the identity of the group and each of
its members. The albums form a visual narration from well-learned rituals which are
reproduced into each family. On the one hand, they carry and simultaneously hide
family secrets over time, linking private and intimate time to one that is historical.
They are the evidence of the passing of time as a family. On the other hand, although
visual memories of each family appear to be unique because they refer to moments
shared only by a few, there is nothing more stereotyped than a photo album. Each
photograph is regulated by standards that dictate angles, frames, events ‘worth
photographing’, people photographed and, fundamentally, poses and gestures of the
subjects (smiles, embraces, glances into the camera).1 Family images – which offer
diversity within stereotype – register, present and represent good family moments.
According to Marianne Hirsch (1997), photographs are precisely located in the space
of contradiction between the myth of the ideal family and the reality lived by them
(they show what the family is expected to be and, simultaneously, that which the
family is not). Following the same direction, family photographs are the place where

100 Natalia Fortuny
public and private/personal history intersect, right in between individual or group

memories and social history. In this way, the album collaborates by establishing a
common past, which is built and which is dynamic – we can add and remove
photographs from the album.
However, there are occasions when history intrudes upon family life in an extreme
way. What happens when family photos are used to expose a social breakdown? When
they serve the purpose of, for example, evoking the absence of the desaparecidos of the
last military dictatorship? Hirsch, in her analysis of photographs as visual narratives
of the generations that came after the Holocaust, examines ‘the idea of “family” in
contemporary discourse and its power to negotiate and mediate some of the traumatic
shifts that have shaped postmodern mentalities, and to serve as an alibi for their
violence’ (Hirsch 1997: 13). One of the tools that families have is photography,
situated between social and personal memories. Our memory is not truly ‘ours’, nor
are the photographs immediate representations of our past: by looking at them we
‘build’ a past and we also study the traces of possible different versions of that time
gone by. Family photography mediates between family memory and postmemory,
because of its ‘emotional power’ (Hirsch 1997).
In regard to the memories of the sons and daughters of the victims of the last
Argentinean dictatorship, Beatriz Sarlo (2005) discusses and resignifies not only the
traditional concept of ‘memory’ but also that of ‘postmemory’. She does so in an
attempt to think about the memory of the generation which followed that of the
witnesses and victims of genocide and other traumatic events. Sarlo discusses the
concept of ‘post’ and maintains that it is simply a different memory, marked by a
strong subjectivity. Moreover, she believes that the memories of the sons and
daughters relate more to the private and to reconstruction than to that which is
public. This concept of reconstruction sheds light on the photographic resources of
the family members of the desaparecidos and the forms of memory they build. They
are key to the processes of (re)construction of individual and collective identities in
societies which emerge from periods of violence and trauma (Jelin 2002: 5). However,
it is necessary to move further away from Sarlo’s idea that the memory of the second
generation is at odds with the public realm. It is my belief that, on the contrary, these
photographic memories mix together the public and private spheres, from the
moment that they circulate within the public sphere images of an intimate world. The
majority of these works thematize precisely this tension between public and private.
They make evident that the horizon of each one of the family memories is constituted
by the events of a collective traumatic past.
HIJOS (Sons and Daughters of the Enforced Disappeared Persons) emerged as a
group in the Argentinean political arena in 1994. Since its early stages, its members
have accompanied their political claims with photographs, something already done by
Madres (Mothers of desaparecidos) and Abuelas (Grandmothers of sons and daughters
of desaparecidos) since the dictatorship years (da Silva Catela 1999). However, from the
movement’s very inception, the sons and daughters have added to their claims an
expressive and aesthetic strength which characterizes their artistic productions.
Through the use of photography, performances and visual arts they developed a new
Photography and memory in the work of Guadalupe Gaona 101
way of claiming justice: more creative and artistic in their political claims if compared
with previous methods of demonstrating. Their escraches (public condemnation of
members of the dictatorship), for example, tend to have a festive spirit linked to
theatrical representations, circus and carnival (Bonaldi 2006). The way they protest
appears to be linked more to happiness and celebration than to melancholy or sadness.
Ana Amado claims that the members of HIJOS ‘belong to a generation that in current
culture favours expressing itself visually’ (Amado 2004: 49) and she adds that ‘the
family members of the victims of the genocidal dictatorship, in their public
interventions, turn to creative forms of expression to combine the agitation and the
denunciations with the intimate images of suffering and mourning’ (Amado 2004: 43).
The so-called second generation builds its claims and its fictions with visual
materials to expose the family absences. It is within these bodies of visual works that
re-elaborate the painful past that we find photography, because the photographic
image is a paradigmatic medium to evoke absence and absentees. The photographs of
the sons and daughters are also placed in an ambiguous and rich sphere, between the
public and the private, among that which is artistic and popular.
The photographs that I will analyse next reflect this ambiguity. Many possible
meanings come to life when family photographs are exposed to the public. By leaving
the family album and becoming part of another series, they reveal and simultaneously
modify their original purpose. This movement denounces and exposes within the
public realm a piece of the family order which existed before being disrupted by state
violence (Longoni 2010).
In the 1970s, due to the cost of processing and developing materials, the middle
class kept photography as a small luxury for special moments: weddings, birthdays
and, especially, travels. Consequently, the images of holidays are a great legacy among
the treasures of family photographs of those years. Some artists – sons and daughters
of desaparecidos – have developed a body of work based on this sub-group of family
photographs. With the intention of rebuilding the journeys of the missing father or
mother, they search for their memory in the landscapes into which they had gazed
before disappearing.
For example, there are two interesting bodies of work by artists who are children
of desaparecidos and who also work with landscape. First, El viaje de Papá (2005) by
Pedro Camilo Pérez del Cerro: hand-made photomontages that bring together
photographs of places that the absent father visited with self-portraits of the son. Each
photo is accompanied by a handwritten caption taken from fragments of letters that
his aunt Magdalena wrote to the father, a month after he was killed by the military
dictatorship. In this series, the son appears in the background, as a ghost, as a portrait
on a wall, as another guest sitting at a table, as both main character and spectator.
Each appearance of the son – in colour – on the black-and-white photographs of the
father is, simultaneously, strange and natural, as is the resemblance of the father and
son, of the same age. Secondly, in Como miran tus ojos (2007) María Soledad Nívoli
tries to find her father within the landscapes of Patagonia, in the south of Argentina.
These places had been photographed by him during a field trip years before being
kidnapped (Blejmar and Fortuny 2011). Here, as in Gaona’s work analysed above,
102 Natalia Fortuny
the images are not portraits of the father but represent his way of seeing the world
around him, his glance. It is because of this that Nívoli tries to find her father by
going to the same places and matching the framing of similar objects: a flower, a
street, a mountain. Her photographs are a reunion of times, places and glances,
wounded by the impossibility of the absence.
The book Pozo de aire [Well of Air] by Guadalupe Gaona (2009) presents old
images from her family album – some taken before her father went missing in 1977
– alongside her pictures and poems. There are images of trees, family photographs, a
lake, mountains, two children out of focus, a Renault 4R and its victorious driver, a
big house, a girl on a boat holding her father’s hand. There are also short texts in
between the photographs, offering remembrances and vague anecdotes, in which the
voices of a girl and a woman merge, among the sounds of the forest and water. The
photographic/poetic landscapes that are part of this work generate uneasiness and
empathy. From the first pages, Gaona draws the viewer/reader into the images
through short poems that work as an elusive preface. The text makes explicit without
explaining; it describes in passing, in an elliptical manner, that which is at the origin.
Con escaso equilibrio me paro en la proa del bote, mi papá en la isla, un conquistador
en malla, me da la mano. Mi mamá corre a buscar la cámara. Clic. Esta es la única foto
que voy a tener sola con mi papá.
El invierno llega más rápido de lo esperado y se lleva todo. El 21 de marzo de 1977
desaparece mi papá. Pero esa foto queda. Y muchas fueron las veces que revisé el cajón de
la mesita de luz de mi mamá para mirarla. Es en la imagen que más confío. (Gaona 2009)2
[I stand in the bow of the boat with scant balance, my dad on the island, a conqueror
in a swimming suit, gives me his hand. My mum runs to fetch the camera. Click.
This is going to be the only picture I’m going to have of my dad and I alone. Winter
arrives quicker than was expected – and takes everything. On 21 March 1977, my dad
goes missing but that picture remains. And there were many times I went through my
mother’s sleeping table draw to look at it. It is the image I trust the most.]
This image/talisman is the only portrait of Gaona alone with her missing father.
Taken during their holidays in Patagonia, not long before his disappearance, the
photograph constitutes the heart and pillar of the entire book. There are other images
besides this one. Those other images from the past show different holidays in the
family home in Bariloche. They clearly belong to the family album, which plays a
fundamental role in the identity conformation of the group and creates a visual
narrative from learned rites, reproduced within each family. As was stated before,
photo albums hold and hide, through time, family secrets, relating intimate and
familiar time with history.
Mixed up among these old images, there are others: the ones that Gaona took
many years after, as a woman and photographer, no longer a child, when she returned
to the family holiday home. Apart from a few chromatic clues, such as the poses and
the clothes, nothing in the book shows clearly which ones are old family photos and
which are new. We can, however, guess. The ones taken recently mainly present
empty landscapes, almost without any human presence: the figure of a lonely man in
the distance; a woman sitting on a wooden bench; some silhouettes by a window.

They are sceneries of stillness and the uninhabited, which Gaona had explored in
previous works (the series Quieta [Still], from 2007, about her grandmother’s empty
home). It is irrelevant, however, to distinguish which photos are new or old, as they
can belong to any time. This dynamic allows us to have a feeling of what happened
in between these two moments, when time got stuck. Gaona apprehends the subtle
difference between the moments and highlights it with her collection of images.
Figure 1: Guadalupe Gaona – Pozo de Aire

104 Natalia Fortuny
As the daughter of a desaparecido – and like other artists in her situation – her
point of departure is a lack, a void: the absence of her father, the absence of
photographs with her father. With her camera, then, she sets off to find what she does
not have: photographs. In doing this – camera and album in hand – she goes in search
of that past happiness, the ray of light of the past that always escapes her. In his fifth
Thesis on the Philosophy of History, Walter Benjamin maintains that ‘the true picture
of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the
instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again’ (Benjamin 2007: 25).
Gaona photographs to find and rebuild a little bit of that image of the boat, a little
bit of that ray of light coming from an elusive happy moment. She searches for marks
in the grass, traces of those holidays and those photos. Considering the theory of
Benjamin, ‘to articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it “the way
it really was”’ (Benjamin 2007: 25) but to take over a flash in its instantaneity. It is
precisely in the always incomplete attempt to capture truth that we can place
photography. The images of empty landscapes are, therefore, attempts to reinstate –
time and time again – the backdrop where something occurred: lights coming from
a clearing in the woods, some roses or daisies, the shiny surface of a lake, cloudy
mountains.
Four images close the book. The last one is that of a clearing. Among clouds,
mountains and trees, we see a patch of dry grass, a landscape emptied by men. Some
pages before, one of the first poems anticipates this:
La familia que choca sus copas

y ríe a carcajadas apenas me arrulla.
Entre ellos y yo
hay un pozo de aire. (Gaona 2009)
[The family that crashes its glasses

and bursts out laughing barely cradles me.
In between them and me

there is a well of air.]
That last photograph could be the picture of the well of air [pozo de aire]: a gap
that evokes and at the same time distances the experience of the self from the family
memory. It is precisely this distance between Gaona and the others, between the
current experience and the past that resists coming back, between her gaze and the
external gazes, which makes this body of work so rich and risky. It is the events from
the past – the tragedy that beats in her father’s gaze – that Gaona sees through the
lens many years after. The anachronistic juxtaposition (Didi-Huberman 2008) of the
images from the past and the present creates a third time that inhabits that particular
space generated between the photographs. With regard to photography as a technique
(one that, in Benjaminian terms, has definitely lost its aura), Gaona’s photographs
subverts the concept and statute of original and copy, of past and present. This
ambiguity allows Gaona to avoid a melancholic view of the past, and at the same time
constitutes the evidence of the richness of photography as a tool of memory.
If the photographs of her father which were used to create new photographs are
not – or cannot be seen as – originals, then the ones that Gaona took herself – the
ones from the present – cannot be defined as copies. What would they be copies of?
Both create series, correspondences, dialogues in which no particular one is given a
sacred, untouchable, irreproducible value. The photographs in this work are not mere
objects of beautiful contemplation: the book is impeccable in its edition but does not
have heavyweight paper or a black background. The pictures are printed full-bleed,
completing each page, and the book itself fits in a bag, thanks to its diary size. In all
its aspects, including the design, Gaona wants her book to be a familiar book (easy to
carry, to flick through and to read, unlike most art books).
Together with the double seam of past and present presented by the photographs,
the poems create a similar effect by searching in the images of the memory to rebuild
a moment that elopes. By inserting them in between the photographs, Gaona if
presenting lived moments alongside present perceptions of those moments. The use
of family photographs is duplicated in the ‘family poems’. Are not poems, after all,
images made out of words? Poetry works with images, a feature that in this body of
work gives photographs and poems great empathy with each other.
Words highlight the contact between the two worlds, the past and the present,
proposed by the photographs. Like them, written words are unable to reinstate a sense:
A sus espaldas una frase

está por salir de la luz.
Su boca polar
le dice algo.
Pero las palabras se pierden

entre los escasos dedos de una mujer.
Los ojos de ella
se las devuelven igual
que el eco.
Limpias de significado. (Gaona 2009)
[At her back a phrase

is about to come out of the light.
Her polar mouth
says something.
But words get lost

in between the scant fingers of another woman.
Her eyes
bring them back
as the echo would.
Clear of significance.]
106 Natalia Fortuny
That which the mouth wants to say, cannot be said. Words are born free of
significance, like an echo. This impossibility denounces loss and trauma. Nevertheless,
it is an impossibility that announces itself, perhaps in the blurred image of the two
children, Gaona and her brother. The lack of focus of this image generates expectation
over them, a tension that neither the photographs nor the poems completely develop.
Next to the photograph of the entrance to the woods which shows a barely
noticeable path and burnt grass, this poem can be read:
Durante años.
Espera atrás de una línea amarilla.
Todavía no puede pasar.
Los ojos
vendados por el calor.
Una loca adentro.
Dos hijos.
Los sacude.
Suenan como cascabeles. (Gaona 2009)
[For years.
She waited behind a yellow line.
She can’t cross yet.
The eyes
bandaged because of the heat.
A crazy woman inside.
Two children.
She shakes them.
They sound like jingle bells.]
The woods offer, in the image, an entrance which will not be broached, or at least
that is what the poem anticipates. The space is transformed into an attractive yet
forbidden landscape, somewhere one cannot return to. Next to a photograph of
intertwined branches, Gaona places this poem:
El ruido
de una rama desprendiéndose.
Vuela por los aires
una cachetada.
Proviene de mi madre
y no del bosque. (Gaona 2009)
[The noise
of a branch falling off.
Flies in the air
a slap.
It comes from my mother
and not from the wood.]
The landscape-mother resonates here in the branch-slap. The voice speaking to us

knows the sound and pain of that slap. Memories are presented in Gaona’s poems
through tactile and audible perceptions, as Proustian involuntary memories of that
which has been lost. The poems begin to rebuild, together with the photographs, the
missed and frightening landscapes of the holidays prior to the absence of the father.
Both create a flow that immerses the reader in an indecisive come and go, from the
present into the past.
Gaona gives new meaning to images of everyday life: snapshots of common life,
from past days, when the moment of danger could not be anticipated. Using family
photos she attempts to rebuild the picture missing in the album. The artist makes
evident, through new photographs, the emptiness of the absence, the family
breakdown and the emotional hole left by the disappearance of her father. She turns
to the album as a reservoir of images, as the imperfect proof of a family’s past
happiness. She does not attempt to represent the horror of the desaparecidos. She is
keen to show us her personal lack, the absence she feels in her life and within her
family. Moreover, she exposes her patchy memories to move from a sphere that is
familiar and personal, to one that is public. This photographic body of work seems to
account for the ‘socialization of absence’, a characteristic trait of the sons and
daughters of the desaparecidos. They are capable of building identity within the
trauma: that place full of wounds that can be inhabited and also narrable (Gatti 2008:
113), although the narration might of course present cracks and gaps.
Gaona’s decision to bring together two timeframes in the display of the images
summons the strange apparition of a time that does not coincide exactly with the past
or with the present. This new, third time, which is anachronistic, exposes the creases
and the break-up of both familiar and collective history. The setting of two timeframes
that merge speaks of estrangement, a constant distance, an impossible reunion of two
gazes. While the more recent pictures attempt to recall elements from the old
photographs, it is the totality of the series which documents the impossibility of
achieving this. They expose the remoteness, the gaps, the hiatus between the one who
sees and the object seen. At the same time that these images attempt to close that
distance, they trouble us by showing it to us, by making evident the cracks which are
opened up by the disappearance.
Observing this series it is not clear that it is a ‘postmemory’, but rather just a
particular memory which has to do with a specific reconstruction, as Sarlo believes,
and with anachronism. However, even when departing from the personal sphere and
the family photographs, the work moves towards the public, from the very moment
it is conceived and circulated in the format of an art book. Gaona’s images become
photographic memories of the dictatorship through the rebuilding of the lack and the
fusion of two impossible times. They look for the gaze of the father within the
landscape and the objects seen, with the gaze being the last physical attribute of the
missing.3 Her work proposes regimes of truth linked to reconstruction, ‘autofiction’
(Arfuch 2008) and montage as aesthetic-political forms of building up memory.4 In
the ‘time in between’ which separates past and present photographs, in that confusion,
the new suspended time that is generated becomes the heart and soul of the series.
108 Natalia Fortuny
Necessarily impossible, this anachronistic view reassembles the loss from the little
things that remain: a few photographs, the remainders of what once was. We find
Gaona with her camera, following old traces, while producing new ones.
Notes
1. ‘I had become aware that in photography, and particularly in amateur photography,
the photographer no longer attempts to capture reality: he attempts to reproduce a pre-
existing and culturally imposed image’, Christian Boltanski (Van Alphen 1999: 47). For
further study of the relationship between photography and family, see Bourdieu (1989)
and Jonas (1996).
2. The book does not contain page numbers, hence no page numbers have been cited. All
the English translations of the poems are by Valeria Meiller and Marina Mariasch, and
have been taken from the appendix of Gaona’s book (2009).
3. As Gaona’s series allows a daughter to get closer to her father and rebuild her identity
from his traces, the recorded voice of the missing father generates a similar effect in the
play Mi vida después [My Life After] by Lola Arias, performed for the first time in 2009,
the same year that Gaona’s book was published. In the play, the voice is heard by the son
and grandson of the desaparecido.
4. Walter Benjamin studied and analysed the subversive use of montage and collage in
photography. For an excellent comparative analysis of the figures of montage and allegory
in Benjamin, see García (2010).
Works cited
Amado, Ana (2004) ‘Órdenes de la memoria y desórdenes de la ficción’, in Lazos de familia.
Herencias, cuerpos, ficciones, ed. Ana Amado and Nora Domínguez (Buenos Aires: Paidós).
Arfuch, Leonor (2008) ‘Arte, memoria, experiencia: políticas de lo real’, in Pretérito imperfecto.
Lecturas críticas del acontecer, ed. Leonor Arfuch and Gisela Catanzaro (Buenos Aires:
Prometeo).
Benjamin, Walter (2007) Sobre el concepto de historia. Tesis y fragmentos (Buenos Aires: Piedras
de Papel).
Blejmar, Jordana and Natalia Fortuny (2011) ‘Miradas de otro. El regreso a lo perdido en dos
ejercicios fotográficos de memoria’, Revista Estudios 25, 205–218.
Bonaldi, Pablo (2006) ‘Hijos de desaparecidos. Entre la construcción de la política y
la construcción de la memoria’, in El pasado en el futuro: los movimientos juveniles, ed.
Elizabeth Jelin and Diego Sempol (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI).
Bourdieu, Pierre (1989) La fotografía: un arte intermedio (México: Nueva Imagen).
Da Silva Catela, Ludmila (1999) ‘Hijos de desaparecidos, hilos de memoria para el futuro’,
Sincronía - Primavera 1999.
Didi-Huberman, Georges (2008) Ante el tiempo. Historia del arte y anacronismo de las imágenes
(Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo).
Gaona, Guadalupe (2009) Pozo de aire (Bahía Blanca: Vox Senda).
García, Luis Ignacio (2010) ‘Alegoría y montaje. El trabajo del fragmento en Walter Benjamin’,
Constelaciones - Revista de Teoría Crítica 2, 158–185.
Gatti, Gabriel (2008) El detenido-desaparecido: narrativas posibles para una catástrofe de la
identidad (Montevideo: Trilce).
Hirsch, Marianne (1997) Family Frames. Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (London:
Harvard University Press).
Jelin, Elizabeth (2002) Los trabajos de la memoria (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI).
Jonas, Irene (1996) “Mentira e verdade do álbum de fotos de familia”, in Cadernos de
Antropologia e Imagem. Vol. 1, no. 2. Rio de Janeiro.
Longoni, Ana (2010) ‘Fotos y siluetas: dos estrategias contrastantes en la representación de

los desaparecidos’, in Los Desaparecidos en la Argentina. Memorias, representaciones e ideas
(1983–2008), ed. Emilio Crenzel (Buenos Aires: Biblos), 43–64.
Sarlo, Beatriz (2005) Tiempo pasado. Cultura de la memoria y giro subjetivo. Una discusión
(Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI).
Van Alphen, Ernst (1999) ‘Nazism in the family album: Christian Boltanski’s Sans Souci’, in
The familial gaze, ed. Marianne Hirsch (Hanover: University Press of New England).
Remembering without memories
Carlos Gamerro
Translation from Spanish: James Scorer
On 24 March 2010, at the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institute in Berlin, the Argentine writer

Carlos Gamerro, together with the writers Laura Alcoba and Pablo Ramos, took part in
a panel entitled ‘The Children of Memory’, organized by COFRA (Organizing Committee
for Argentine Participation in the 2010 Frankfurt Book Fair). The text that follows is a
revised version of his presentation, also incorporating some of the conversations the author
held with Alcoba and Ramos, with his travelling companions – including the writers
Tununa Mercado and Félix Bruzzone – and with the members of the public that attended
the event.
More than an essay writer or conference delegate, I am above all a writer of fiction.
As such, I will start by outlining three discoveries I made while working on some of
my novels. When writing Las Islas [The Islands], a novel that deals, among other
things, with the Malvinas/Falklands War, I wanted to interview soldiers who had
taken part in the conflict.1 In his essay ‘Experience and Poverty’, Walter Benjamin
famously stated that during the Great War, soldiers ‘returned from the front in
silence’, adding that they were ‘not richer, but poorer in communicable experience’
(1999: 731). The returning soldiers were unable to speak of what had taken place in
the trenches because what they had lived through had never happened before. Jorge
Luis Borges reminds us, again and again, that in order to communicate, language
requires shared experiences. Words such as ‘red’, ‘green’ or ‘purple’ mean nothing to
someone who has been blind since birth; those listening to soldiers who had returned
from the trenches were both blind and deaf, taught via 3,000 years of epic literature
and oral tradition to think of war as a privileged sphere for exhibiting values such as
honour, glory or manhood. But I discovered that the soldiers who had participated
in the Malvinas conflict were not so much mute as laconic. They stared at me as if
they already knew that I would not understand, that the same words would mean
different things to each of us. Among themselves, on the other hand, they understood
each other perfectly. Each word they used, like ‘cold’, ‘foxhole’, ‘tracer bullets’, ‘naval
bombardment’, were ripe with landscapes, situations and specific, particular
experiences, infinitely rich and suggestive, terrifying, unbearably graphic. One spoke
them out loud; the others nodded, generally silent. When speaking to me, their words
seemed inadequate; communicating between themselves, words were almost
unnecessary: silence and gesture were just as good.

Afterword: Remembering without memories 111
I had approached them bashfully, almost shamefully: how was I, who had not
participated in the war, supposed to write from the point of view of a former soldier?
Weren’t those who had been there far better equipped to do so? But those meetings
with former soldiers paradoxically filled me with confidence. I had a moment of
insight, realizing they didn’t need to make that experience real through language. I,
who had not been there, who saw nothing, and who felt nothing when confronted
with those simple words in which everything they saw and lived had been distilled,
was the one who had to construct that experience through language; in the first
instance, I had to make it true for myself and, if I could achieve that, there was a good
chance I could do it for my readers; and, who knows, perhaps also make it true, in a
different way, for those who had actually been there. That was my first discovery,
obvious perhaps, but one of those truths that only means anything if you discover it
yourself: that the richness of the imagination and, above all, the work of the writer
can make up for poverty of experience; that the person who has lived an experience
will not always be the one who can recount it best; or perhaps, that the experience of
writing is, albeit in a different way, just as valid as lived experience.
This story, then, was one not entirely my own. At the same time, for me to feel
that pressing need to narrate that makes literature possible, it could not be entirely
foreign. Why, then, did I want to tell the story of the Malvinas War? As far as I was
concerned, my personal motivation was no mystery. I was born in 1962, the year
group conscripted to go to war. But I wasn’t among those selected. Malvinas, in that
sense, provided me with the feeling of a life, perhaps also a death, that was parallel,
ghostly – mine, if only I had been chosen to go to war. Fiction not only exists in
literature, it also exists in each of us, in those other possible lives that pan out alongside
the one we were chosen – or chose – to live. That was my second discovery: that
literature can be inversely autobiographical: the story not of what happened to us, but
what might have happened.
After I had written several novels, and my passion for addressing the recent past
had become routine, a reader approached me and asked: And? When are you going
to write about the crisis of 2001? I posed myself the question. The period had
undoubtedly affected me, as it had most of us. I had lived the anxieties of that
moment: my parents lost their savings; I lost my house… And yet it’s not something
that left an especially deep impression on me: it scratched my skin, it bruised my
muscles, but it didn’t churn up my insides or shake me to the core. Writing needs
those deeper roots. It feeds above all on what we cannot perceive, or understand, as
it takes place, which is why those roots so often reach down into adolescence, early
childhood, or even the period before we were born; sometimes too, of course, they
also draw on our experiences as adults, though only on those that turn us into
somebody different, that change us forever. This was my third discovery: that there
are experiences that affect us, and experiences that are the very same stuff from which
we are made. The latter are the most powerful driving force for writing.
Argentine literature that addresses the dictatorship has been through four stages,
which are more logical than chronological. The first was the body of literature
produced during the dictatorship, a period when any revelation about what was
112 Carlos Gamerro
happening was not only censored but which was also punishable by death. Typical
strategies to avoid censorship – ellipsis, displacement, allegory (sometimes more
discernible, sometimes less) – were taken to the extreme in this context of censorship
followed by death. An example of such an approach is Respiración artificial [Artificial
Respiration] by Ricardo Piglia (1980), in which the forced disappearance of people,
since it could not be spoken about directly, is introduced by making a character
disappear from the text. It was a novel so cryptic and intelligent that the military were
guaranteed not to understand it. Literature of this period that was written in (forced
or voluntary) exile and that was published abroad should have been free of such
constraints. But, to a greater or lesser degree, an indirect or metaphorical approach is
also evident in Nadie nada nunca (1980) by Juan José Saer, Cuarteles de invierno
[Winter Quarters] (1982) by Osvaldo Soriano, and La casa y el viento (1984) by
Hector Tizón: as Laura Alcoba has suggested, perhaps due to mimetic solidarity,
those in exile might have limited their own freedom of expression as a means of
mirroring the work of those who had stayed behind and were still at risk.
The next stage began with the return to democracy and was characterized by works
produced by direct participants: militants and those who had survived the
dictatorship’s concentration camps. Testimony predominated: as the events of the
dictatorship had been covered up, denied, erased, and disappeared, it was vital to
rescue history and to confront the fictions of the dictatorship with truth. Within the
world of discourse, the dictatorship and complicit journalists were above all else
creators of fictions: we were fighting the Third World War against communism; the
disappeared were alive and well in Europe; we were winning the Malvinas War
everyday. Faced with the fictions of power, literature was obliged to take the stance
of simple truth: imagination was unnecessary, almost irrelevant. Nunca más was the
keystone text of the period. Not just a report, the aim of which was to establish the
veracity of the facts, it was also a collection of stories that laid the foundations for a
discursive genre: a Decameron or Arabian Nights set in hell. This period also saw
novels that fluctuated between testimony and fiction, like Recuerdo de la muerte by
Miguel Bonasso (1984), and that other Decameron, this time dealing with the years
of militancy, La voluntad by Martín Caparrós and Eduardo Anguita (1997–1998).
Later works were Villa by Luis Gusmán (1995) and El fin de la historia by Liliana
Heker (1996), novels whose originality lay in giving a voice to and adopting the point
of view of the perpetrators, such as the doctor who works for López Rega in Gusmán’s
novel, or the militant who later collaborates with the repressors, in Heker’s.2
At the same time, another kind of literature began to develop, literature written
by those who started to write after the dictatorship and whom we might call witnesses,
though a more suitable term might be bystanders, a word that refers more to the
witness-observer than to the witness-participant: children – or at the most teenagers
– on that fateful 24 March 1976, too young to be activists and far too young to fight
for the guerrillas. Sometimes they were direct witnesses, like Laura Alcoba in La casa
de los conejos [The Rabbit House] (2008), a novel that relates, through the eyes of a
seven-year-old girl, everyday life in a house being used by the Montoneros guerrillas;
sometimes they were merely witnesses to silences, to half-truths, or even to the lies
that their elders told them. In this stage the indirect gaze and the biased, refracted
testimonies of the first stage returned, but not now out of practical necessity but
rather from aesthetic choice, as an approach seen as being best suited to the
incomplete, blocked and murky nature of the experience of the period. Novels like
Dos veces junio (2002) and Ciencias morales [School for Patriots] (2007) by Martín
Kohan are in this vein, with their emphasis on the attitudes of those who, like the
army conscript or the school supervisors, inhabit the outlying corners of the repressive
apparatus. La ley de la ferocidad by Pablo Ramos (2007) is another example, a novel
in which exterior violence is referred to metaphorically – or rather metonymically, as
it is not a game of analogies but rather mutual contaminations – via a chain of family
violence. In this work the moral order collapses when the son who is subjected to his
father’s violence is in turn delighted when the latter is held prisoner by the dictatorship
and ‘feels in the flesh the unending ferocity of an invincible system’.
And finally – for now, at least – came the literature of those who had no personal
memory; these authors know what happened during the dictatorship because they
listened to family stories, they read about it, investigated it, or imagined it. Works
written by Félix Bruzzone – 76 (2007) and Los topos (2008) – are a case in point, but
here I take the licence to also speak about film, because some of the most notable
examples of this trend are cinematic productions that in turn influenced literature:
Albertina Carri’s film Los rubios [The Blonds] (2003), Nicolas Prividera’s M (2007)
or Infancia clandestina (2011) directed by Benjamín Ávila. Paths appear to divide: in
some cases, a frenzied investigation tries to arrive at the truth, to restore what has been
disappeared or elided from memory or from family and social narratives. But that
investigation sometimes achieves nothing more than making absence present, as in
Carri’s documentary-fiction. On other occasions, the imagination frees itself from any
need for truth, filling in, even spilling over, the gaps of history, an approach that can
be seen in Los topos.
It is often said that to understand a period of history, above all a traumatic one, it
is necessary for time to pass, sometimes one or two generations (or three or four as far
as those who want to let bygones be bygones are concerned). But time does not pass
by itself, it has to be made to pass: such time does not pass by itself but as a result of
unceasing work. Distance isn’t created with silence, but by writing. If we wait thirty
years for the right moment, we will, thirty years later, still be at the start. Every writer
rests on the output of those who have come before; their work allows us to move on
to second or third stages. Literature is no different to any other social practice in this
regard. How much time has passed is irrelevant; what matters is what takes place in
that time. In the thirty-five years since the coup, Argentina has seen the trials of the
military juntas, trials that continue today with other perpetrators; the redemption and
reparation of victims (insofar as that is possible); the identification of previously
anonymous bodies; and the recovery of many children who were snatched from their
families. Had those things not happened, literature would still be tethered to the most
basic functions of testimony and denunciation. Because of its vital link to justice, the
discourse of human rights is necessarily a discourse of truth. Literature, however, is
not – at least not necessarily – and it can, if not be in opposition, do something else.
114 Carlos Gamerro
Absolutely anything else, as Beatriz Sarlo said about Los topos, a novel whose meander,
more than trajectory, carries the protagonist, a son of disappeared parents, from
reluctant ties to the group HIJOS, to a plan for personal revenge.3 That plan leads
him to become a transvestite and, eventually, to live in matrimonial bliss with
Alemán, a tender-sadist, lover-torturer of transvestites with possible ties to the
dictatorship. The protagonist, told by her own family that her father was a mole (a
double agent), in turn becomes another mole-traitor who tries to distance herself
from the impositions of official discourses, and to turn HIJOS into hijos.4
In the work of these authors, the discourses of fiction gain maximum independence
from militant or human rights discourses, which may be supportive of literature, but
which should in no way govern it. It is not that literature is superior to such discourses,
nor that it constitutes a sovereign discourse – if anything, it is located on the margins
of these discourses, or in parallel to them. But such independence from the discourses
of truth goes hand in hand with another independence, that is, from the discourses
of experience and of memory, which are subsidiary to the discourses of truth. In
contrast to the necessarily dualist vision of human rights discourse, which posits the
need to remember in opposition to the desire to forget, the construction of memory
within fiction starts from the belief that forgetting, far from being the opposite of
remembering, is its creative component. It does not take memory to be a register of
the past but simply a version of it, forever changing and always plotted with the needs
of the present in mind; and the most pressing need of all is the construction of
identity itself. There is – Beatriz Sarlo indicates in Tiempo pasado (2005) – no
fundamental difference between the way in which protagonists, witnesses, or those
who have no direct experience to remember, construct memory: each individual act
of remembering is constructed out of a fusion of personal memories, stories heard,
and the discourses of history and the mass media. Only in the work of these more
recent authors does this become clearer than ever before.
Common sense tells us that protagonists, or witnesses, are in the best position to
remember and tell history; but these young authors, who did not live through
militancy and dictatorship and who have no personal memories of the period, were
nonetheless formed by it and are made of the dictatorship. That is why they delve in
such novel and potent fashion into an era they did not live through but in whose belly
they were formed; they have every right to do what they want with it, because it
fashioned them. Being mute is not a problem for them. They are not returning from
the battlefield: they were born on it.
Notes
1. Translator’s note: English translations of novel titles are provided in square brackets only
when a published translation already exists.
2. José López Rega was a minister during the third period of Peronist rule, which began in
1973 and ended with the 1976 military coup. López Rega was influential in the setting
up and running of the paramilitary death squads that operated in Argentina prior to the
coup.
3. HIJOS is an acronym for Hijos por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio
[Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice Against Forgetting and Silence], a human
rights organization formed in 1994 by children whose parents were disappeared during
the 1976–1983 dictatorship.
4. Translator’s note: this play on words is based on transforming the acronym ‘HIJOS’ into
the word ‘hijos’, meaning sons and daughters. That is, the protagonist wishes to turn the
political identity of being a child of disappeared parents into simply a familial one.
Works cited
Benjamin, Walter (1999) [1933] ‘Poverty and experience’, in Selected Writings, Volume 2:
1927-1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith, trans. Rodeny
Levingstone et al. (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press), 731–736.
Sarlo, Beatriz (2005) Tiempo Pasado: Cultura de la memoria y giro subjetivo (Buenos Aires:
Siglo XXI).
Notes on contributors
Gonzalo Aguilar is Professor of Brazilian Literature at the Universidad de Buenos
Aires and a researcher at the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y
Técnicas (CONICET). He is the author of La poesía concreta: las vanguardias en la
encrucijada modernista (2003, translated into Portuguese), Otros mundos (Ensayo sobre
el nuevo cine argentino) (2006, translated into English and published by Palgrave
MacMillan), Episodios cosmopolitas en la cultura argentina (2009), Borges va al cine,
(2010, co-author with Emiliano Jelicié) and Por una ciencia del vestigio errático
(Ensayos sobre la antropofagia de Oswald de Andrade) (2010).
Jordana Blejmar is Lecturer in Hispanic Studies at the Institute of Modern Languages

Research, University of London. She is also a Teaching Assistant for online courses
in Education at the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO). She
is a member of the steering committee of the Centre for the Study of Cultural
Memory and an editor of the Journal of Romance Studies. A literature graduate from
the Universidad de Buenos Aires, she was awarded an MPhil and a PhD (as a Gates
Scholar) at Cambridge University with a thesis on the autofictional turn in Post-
Dictatorship Argentine culture. She is the co-editor (together with Natalia Fortuny
and Luis Ignacio Garcia) of Instantáneas de la memoria: Fotografía y dictadura en
Argentina y América Latina (2013).
Lisa Renee DiGiovanni is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Keene State College in

New Hampshire. She has also taught at Indiana State University. Her area of
specialization includes twentieth to twenty-first-century Spanish Peninsular and Latin
American literature and film from a transnational perspective, with an emphasis on
the relationship between history, literature, memory and gender. Her publications
have appeared in the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Anales de la literatura
española contemporánea, Chasqui, World Literature Today and The Volunteer.
Currently, she is writing two essays for edited volumes, as well as completing a
monograph on recent representations of twentieth-century dictatorial violence and
resistance in Spain and Chile.
Natalia Fortuny is Lecturer in Contemporary History at the Universidad Nacional

de General Sarmiento and at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. She is also a Researcher
at CONICET. She was awarded a PhD in Social Sciences at the Universidad de
Buenos Aires, a Masters Degree in History of Argentine and Latin American Art at
the IDAES-UNSAM, and a BA on Sciences of Communication at the Universidad
de Buenos Aires. She has over fifteen online and paper publications in specialized
journals and edited books. She is also a photographer (under the pseudonym Nat
Oliva) and is the author of two books of poetry: Hueso (2007) and La construcción
(2010). Her current research draws on photography and memory in Latin America.

Notes on contributors 117
Carlos Gamerro was born in Argentina and has published the novels Las Islas (1998)
(The Islands, 2012), El sueño del señor juez (2000), El secreto y las voces (2002) (An
Open Secret, 2011), La aventura de los bustos de Eva (Norma, 2004), Un yuppie en la
columna del Che Guevara (2011) and the collections of essays El nacimiento de la
literatura argentina (2006), Ulises. Claves de lectura (2008) and Ficciones barrocas
(2010).
Edward King is Research Fellow at St Catharine’s College, University of Cambridge,

and his interests centre on the connections between technology and culture in Brazil
and Argentina. His first book, Science Fiction and Digital Technologies in Argentine
and Brazilian Culture, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2013 and he is
currently working on a monograph provisionally entitled Virtual Orientalism in
Brazil.
Mariana Eva Perez graduated in Political Science from the Universidad de Buenos
Aires. She is currently writing her doctoral dissertation on post-dictatorship Argentine
theatre in the framework of the ERC research project ‘Narratives of Terror and
Disappearance’ at the Universität Konstanz. She is also a writer and a playwright. Her
theatre plays have been published and presented in Argentina and abroad. She has
won the 4th Germán Rozenmacher Prize for New Dramaturgy at the International
Festival of Buenos Aires. In 2012 she published her first novel, Diario de una princesa
montonera –110% Verdad.
David Rojinsky is Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Spanish,

Portuguese and Latin American Studies at King’s College, London. He is currently
preparing a monograph exploring the social agency of photographs in post-
dictatorship Argentina and Uruguay.
Cecilia Sosa is an Argentine cultural journalist and post-doctoral fellow at the

University of East London. She finished her PhD in Drama at Queen Mary
(University of London). Her doctoral work was awarded the 2012 most distinguished
thesis by the AHGBI and will be published by Tamesis Books. Her research on
Argentina’s aftermath of violence, memory, affect and performance has been widely
published in international journals (Memory Studies; Theory, Culture and Society;
Feminist Theory; and Cultural Studies), books, newspapers and art catalogues. She has
also co-edited a special issue on Cultural Memory for the Journal of Latin American
Cultural Studies (July 2012).
Institute of Modern Languages Research
The Institute of Modern Languages Research is a member of the School of Advanced

Study, University of London. As successor from 2013 to the Institute of Germanic
and Romance Studies, itself a merger in 2004 of the Institute of Germanic Studies
and the Institute of Romance Studies, founded in 1950 and 1989 respectively, it
provides a forum for research, at a national and international level, in the languages
and cultures of France, Germany, Italy, Portugal and Spain, and their relations with
other European and non-European cultures.
In addition to publishing the Journal of Romance Studies, the Institute organizes a

varied programme of conferences and seminars, and offers research supervision and
research training in the Germanic and Romance fields. Visiting Fellows are welcomed.
Conferences in 2012–2013 include: Family Ties: Recollection and Representation;

Family and Modernity (1880–1945); Peripheral Modernisms; Debussy: Text and
Idea; The Net as Theme, Aesthetic Paradigm and Communicative Tool in Literary
Austria; Inert Cities: Globalisation, Mobility and Interruption; Modernism and the
Beginnings of Visual Culture (1890–1938); Stefan Zweig and Britain; Memory and
Empathy; Cinema, Sexualities, Theory; Tales of Commerce and Imagination II:
Literary and Cinematic Contributions to the Department Store Debate in the Early
20th Century; Oceans: Concepts and Cultures; Motherhood, Migration, and Exile;
Memories of Conflict, Conflicts of Memory.
For information on any of the above, see the Institute’s website or contact the
Administrative Secretary, Institute of Modern Languages Research, University of
London, Senate House, Malet St, London WC1E 7HU, UK (e-mail:
modernlanguages@sas.ac.uk). Discounted back numbers of the former Journal of the
Institute of Romance Studies can be obtained from the same address; lists of contents
are sent on request.
http://www.modernlanguages.sas.ac.uk

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Journal of Romance Studies

Interdisciplinary Research in French,

Editorial Advisory Board

SPECIAL ISSUE: Revisiting postmemory: The intergenerational

FORTHCOMING SPECIAL ISSUES

Journal of Romance Studies Volume 13 Number 3, Winter 2013: 1–5

scholars such as James E. Young) deﬁne as mediated, indirect, vicarious, fragmented,

The so-called ‘second generation’ in post-dictatorship Argentina

Journal of Romance Studies Volume 13 Number 3, Winter 2013: 6–16

According to Brenda Werth, the future-oriented dimension of Mi vida después,

instigate[s] a shift from postmemory to prememory, emancipating characters from

because of enforced disappearance, is something that remains unexplained in all

[D]isappearance is a state-sponsored procedure for producing ghosts to harrowingly

Christopher Bollas to refer ‘to experiences in infancy before the acquisition of

Mi vida después as testimonial theatre

Intuíamos en la estructura misma del testimonio una clave dramatúrgica: el testimonio

Unlike in A propósito de la duda, however, in Mi vida después there is neither

contributing to the prosecution of a policeman for the abduction and substitution of

particularly illustrative of the strategy proposed by the piece: in ‘Las muertes de mi

Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas (CONADEP) (1997) [1984]. Nunca

Fiction and documentary

Journal of Romance Studies Volume 13 Number 3, Winter 2013: 17–31

If documentaries about the disappeared locate their material between a present

[Authentic photos of Benjamín Ávila’s mother whilst they listen to a dialogue in

Blindfolded eyes that see

Political passions and the power of symbolization

dimension of militancy: faith in the revolution, in what has to be protected ‘forever’,

historia [Montoneros, A Story] by Andrés di Tella and Cazadores de utopías [Hunters

Rancière, Jacques (2006) Film Fables (New York: Berg).

In 2008, photographer Juan Ángel Urruzola pasted sixty gigantic black-and-white

Journal of Romance Studies Volume 13 Number 3, Winter 2013: 32–43

groups as in other post-conﬂict Latin American countries.7 Clearly, the potency of

would seem appropriate for a generation inheriting a past haunted by silenced

Whether viewers reacted with violent indignation or with approval to Urruzola’s

Oroño, Tatiana (2008) Mirada y memoria: reconﬁguraciones materiales y simbólicas. Fotógrafo

Blog entries (2007–2013):

Journal of Romance Studies Volume 13 Number 3, Winter 2013: 44–61

Play as ‘topsy-turvy sacred’

Camp Morph’ (1994), in which he digitally transformed a barcode into a photograph

Albertina Carri’s Kampf

Toy (hi)stories and playbacks

The crime and the aftermath

Journal of Romance Studies Volume 13 Number 3, Winter 2013: 62–74

Postmemories of resistance and critical nostalgia

between the heterogeneous understandings of history, memory and representation

Staging loss and longing in Mi vida con Carlos

This montage, in eﬀect, is an audiovisual representation of nostalgia. Carlos Berger

save him. This testimony challenges categorical understandings of nostalgic, traumatic

Bringing ‘postmemory’ back home

Journal of Romance Studies Volume 13 Number 3, Winter 2013: 75–87

A broken family romance

Flirting with death

A new sequence of the comical

In the name of the (queer) son

Breaking the spell

certain forms of aﬀective becoming could be grasped as ‘queer performancing’ (2011:

15. The capitalization belongs to Bruzzone.

Journal of Romance Studies Volume 13 Number 3, Winter 2013: 88–98

interprets the image-text’s mixing of ‘modernist techniques of estrangement’ with

he describes as ‘vestígios preciosos, pedaços da vida da ﬁlha’ [‘precious vestiges, pieces

unnamed throughout the novella, ﬁnds a new job working as a therapist in a

traditions to engage with the distribution of aﬀective memory through network

ekphrastic anxiety, is expressive of the exploration of the aﬀective reconﬁguration

Journal of Romance Studies Volume 13 Number 3, Winter 2013: 99–109