Arqueología de la ausencia de Lucila Quieto. Un viaje hacia la imagen imposible = Archaeology of absence of Lucila Quieto: a trip to the impossible image

Abstract

From the nineties on many artists work on the recovery of «small memories», the most personal memory, related to the revisitation of traumatic moments. Their works of art, which have been created in a past that continues to lack closure, act in the present of the spectators as a collective mourning mechanism, as well as an effective weapon for political action. Thus, the art moves and makes you move. This study analyses those movements and the starting point is the Archaeology of Absence by the Argentine artist Lucila Quieto, created with family pictures of the «desaparecidos» during the Argentina’s dictatorship. So, I will use the metaphor of the journey: a journey that starts in the private sphere with the desire to recuperate an absence in the family album, continues to create the image able to supply this absence in an impossible place and space and ends with the return that affects the spectator as an object of the esthetic experience in his present and as a instrument of political action in the future.