CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

According to some commentators, we live in a time of an excess of images, where everything can and has to be made visible. If prior visual regimes worked through censorship or subtraction, digital visual culture operates through hyper-abundance or excess. This shift is reconfiguring the relationship between the visible and the invisible, and images lose their quality as records of memory and become ephemeral, disposable goods ? as can be seen, for example, in the rapid succession of social media posts.How, then, can images still work as carriers of memory in our digital times? How can images of the past be made visible in this ocean of pictures and go against the tide of oblivion and historical amnesia? I want to address these questions through an analysis of the work of the Argentinean visual artist Gabriel Orge, whose interventions in public space bring into the open images of the disappeared and the marginalized in Latin America. He calls these interventions apparitions, playing on and referring to the desaparacidos (disappeared people and bodies) during several South American dictatorships. Through these apparitions, or appearances, in urban or rural landscapes, Orge points to the need to stop and look at images of the disappeared so that they continue to live. His apparitions constitute a public pedagogy that plays with light and pictures to produce new memories.In the first section of this chapter, I will briefly outline the context of the struggles for memory in the Southern Cone as well as some theoretical assumptions about pictures and visibilities, drawing mostly on the work of French theorist Roland Barthes. In the second and third sections, I will present some examples of the work done by Orge in Argentina and other South American countries and discuss how images can become acts of memory and nurture collective claims for justice.

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