Urban photography as counter-monument in Urruzola's Miradas ausentes (en la calle)

Abstract

In 2008, photographer Juan Angel Urruzola pasted sixty gigantic black-and-white photo-murals of Uruguay’s detenidos-desaparecidos on the walls around the centre of Montevideo. If the inauguration of the Memorial en Recordacion de los Detenidos Desaparecidos in 2001 had symbolized an end to the politics of silence characterizing Uruguay’s post-dictatorship ‘transition’ to neoliberal consumerism, Urruzola’s street art reflected the now flourishing national culture of memory which gradually emerged over the decade of the 2000s. Yet, while Urruzola’s alternative cartography of remembrance complemented the precedent set by such official sites of memory, the public’s often hostile response to the photo-murals suggested a memorial experience more reminiscent of that associated with the German ‘counter-monument’. Indeed, just as the reaction to Urruzola’s images demonstrated the continued polarization of Uruguayan society with regard to how the authoritarian past should be addressed, it also demonstrated how such...