Memory Works in Argentina 1976‐2006

GRISELDA POLLOCK; LAURA MALOSETTI COSTA

Concentrationary Memories

Centre CATH - University of Leeds

Lugar: Leeds; Año: 2011;

In this wide ranging but still close‐read analysis, a leading art and cultural historian reviews the complex ways in which the legacies of Argentina's dirty war is being negotiated through various modes of memory work. The dictatorship in Argentina 1976‐ 1983 was as seven‐year campaign by the military junta against political dissidents who were arrested and tortured in the notorious ESMA ‐ a naval school that became the regime's most atrocious camp, before they were murdered in a form of disappearance. Many of the political dissidents were drugged and then, still alive, dropped from planes into the Rio de la Plato to drown. Rather than the piles of bodies that visually marked the discovery of the German concentration camps, it is the absence of bodies, the endless openness of disappearance that haunts Argentinian society from the work of the Madres del Plaza de Mayo to recent uses of photography, performance and attemtps at the creation of a memory park and sculptural complex. In addition to the disappearance of a generation of 20‐30 year olds, the regime stole their children delivering them to adoption by supporters of the regime, disordering families and creating other sites of disappearance and remembrance. Laura Malosetti Costa writes of the specificity of the Argentinian experience of a political 'genocide' and its concentrationary terror with knowledge of the major critical debates that have emerged out of the European concentrationary universe but also with acute awareness of the most recent developments in the politics of memory and memorialisation.