Beyond Suffering

Abstract

The vexed question of how to represent atrocity and the effects of that representation takes a turn in Lucila Quieto's photographic account of the politically disappeared of the last dictatorship in Argentina (1976-83), which offers some innovative attempts to resolve aesthetic issues and atrocious absence. Quieto was born after her father Carlos Alberto Quieto was kidnapped by military forces on August 20, 1976. She has been a member of the Hijos e Hijas por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio (HIJOS, Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice Against Oblivion and Silence). Her photography series Arqueologia de la Ausencia (Archaeology of Absence, 1999-2001) is a collection of thirty-five constructed photographs in which the adult children of the disappeared were invited to create the photograph they never had: a portrait with their missing parent. What began as a personal exercise in postmemory for Quieto and her friends has moved into the Museo de Arte y Memoria, La Plata, as part of Argentina's uneasy commitment to memorialize the state-sponsored atrocity of the last dictatorship. Quieto describes her work as a search to heal the absence of those who and says she was inspired by her own need to have photographs of herself with her father. (1) The photography series was created by asking each of the participants to select a photograph of their disappeared parents from their family album. Quieto projected the image onto a wall, asked the adult child to join their parents in the projected image, and recorded their interactions in a new photograph. Quieto is not trying to show absence, but rather the search for healing from that absence, and the possibility of finding an encounter with the absent parent. Quieto's intention appears to be a personal search for resolution, but her work may also be considered using Jacques Ranciere's concept of the political potential of art to recast the distribution of the sensible, a reconfiguration of the given perceptual forms. (2) Quieto has created an experience in opposition to the accepted order of what can be seen, and who can speak about state atrocity. In Argentina, attempts to bring visibility to those who were disappeared by the state during the last dictatorship are continual. Ana Longoni recently examined the aesthetic strategies of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo (Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo) in their fight to restore visibility to the disappeared. (3) Every week during and since the dictatorship, the Madres walk in a procession around the Plaza de Mayo, wearing photographs of the disappeared or holding them aloft. In doing so, they came to realize that being seen as mothers offered a different reality than that presented by the dictatorship. They continue to bring the hidden atrocity into public view and into the context of the family. Through disappearances, the military dictatorship prescribed ways of seeing, ways of saying, and ways of being. Like the early aesthetic interventions of the Madres, Quieto's photographs challenge that hegemonic perception of reality both by restoring visibility and individual identity to the disappeared, and developing the individual and the community identities of the HIJOS. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] This process of disappearing can be understood as an extreme example of Ranciere's notion of the police order, controlling what can be seen and therefore said about it. (4) From 1976 until 1983, political opponents of the dictatorship literally disappeared as their bodies were dropped from helicopters into the River Plate. Official traces of their identities were often erased and their apartments were emptied of their belongings, leaving nothing of them to be seen. Along with invisibility came an attempt to rewrite their histories. To explain the disappearances, the dictatorship suggested the victims had probably gone to Cuba or had killed themselves. …