Lucila Quieto, Sargento Kirk at the Cordobazo, 2007

This series of collages pay tribute to the 1969 popular uprising against the 1966-1970 dictatorship of Juan Carlos Onganía in Argentina, in which workers and students confronted the military. This year, 2019, marks the 40^th anniversary of the Cordobazo. Sargento Kirk (1953) was the first strip that Lucila Quieto read by the disappeared comic-strip writer and Montonero militant H.G. Oesterheld. The character Kirk was a deserter from the US militias who, disgusted by the killing of the Indians in which he himself had played a part, abandons his troops and joins the indigenous tribes, making a blood pact with one of them. Quieto saw in this story an echo of Oesterheld’s own militancy and solidarity with the suffering of the people in Argentina. She thus juxtaposed images of the Cordobazo with photographs of dreamy deserted landscapes by the French photographer Eugène Atget and with vignettes from the comic strip. She then printed those collages as if they were photographs on silver paper and tinted them on the computer to give them a feel typical of old pictures.

Oesterheld had borrowed the story of Kirk from the US folk canon to refer, implicitly, to the killing of the Indigenous people in Argentina during the nineteenth century, part of the so-called “Campaign of the Desert” organised by General Julio Argentino Roca. In the strip’s beginnings Sergeant Kirk was going to be a sort of Martín Fierro, a soldier roaming the borders of the city of Buenos Aires, a renegade from the army and friend of the indigenous populations. In a double act of translation, Lucila Quieto re-contextualises the plot in Argentina to remember an event, the Cordobazo, now widely considered to be landmark in the emergence of popular movements of resistance in Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s.