Lucila Quieto, Archeology of Absence, 1999-2001
The last dictatorship in Argentina (1976-1983) was marked by repression, terror and censorship. Approximately 30,000 men, women and children were systematically abducted, tortured in clandestine detention centres and thrown drugged but alive into the River Plate or buried in anonymous graves. Around 400 children – of whom only 130 have been traced to date thanks to the work of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo – were illegally adopted, sometimes even raised by the murderers of their parents or their accomplices, who never told the children about their true origins.
The phenomenon of forced disappearance challenges our very understanding of what ‘being human’ is. If both vitality and mortality make us all human, the disappeared are, strictly speaking, neither dead nor alive; they live a ghostly existence, both in the past and the present, wandering among us like errant shadows and testing our experience of time and space. It is this uncertain death – the bodies were never found and the final days and whereabouts of the victims can never be completely reconstructed – that makes disappearance an ongoing crime: someone is (even today) disappeared.
During and after the dictatorship photography became a privileged resource for referring to state terrorism and disappearance. Even as early as 1977, for example, portraits of the victims were exhibited as part of demonstrations carried out by the relatives of the victims and human rights organisations. The language of photography has long been an ally of memory struggles in Argentina.
More recently, photographers of the post-dictatorship generations, many of them children of disappeared parents, have used collage, montage, transfer and digital technologies to produce imaginary encounters between generations and create the missing picture in the family album.
That is precisely the motivation behind Lucila Quieto’s pioneering photographic montages. Carlos Alberto Quieto disappeared five months before the birth of Lucila. In the images of this series, Quieto combines fiction and biography, performance and photography, extending this practice to other children of disappeared parents who responded to an advertisement she put in a branch of HIJOS (Hijos por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio) that made a tempting offer: ‘Now you can have the picture you always wanted’. Quieto remembers: ‘I asked every son or daughter to look for a photograph of their parents and I then reproduced the images as slides. I projected them on the wall and asked the children to insert themselves between the camera and the image’. The experiment resulted in 35 black-and-white photographs that show a playful and fictional family scene re-made to the backdrop of the fatal destinies of those families.
The images of Arqueología de la ausencia are answers to a disturbing question: what might have happened had the disappeared survived? Quieto’s montages speak of a time that is neither in the past nor in the present but in what she calls ‘a third time’, an invented, dream-like temporality, an anachronistic dimension where everything, even the impossible, seems plausible.
By intervening in a situation from which they were originally excluded, the children of the disappeared create autofictional images and demand a memory and a time violently stolen from them. Thus we witness private scenes of everyday family life: a celebration, a furtive kiss in the street, and a lively and loving conversation between a couple. The figures of the parents appear projected on the skin of their children, on walls, everywhere. The use of light and shadow creates ghostly scenes: faces, bodies, times and spaces become confused and raise a perplexing question for the spectator: which are the parents and which the children? In addition, the choice of personal photographs for this intervention also reaffirms the importance of everyday life at a time when everything, even the family, was subjugated to politics.
Curiously, given the increasingly digitalized world and virtual realities in which we live, instead of using the digital manipulation of images to produce a complete simulacrum, Quieto self-consciously makes visible the handmade composition of the scenes, the materiality of the old pictures (irregular borders, breakages, folds) and the frames. This gesture stresses the artificiality of the generational encounters, suggesting that something has been broken and the efforts to fix it are, ultimately, in vain.
Jordana Blejmar- Natalia Fortuny