Ex-ESMA

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Notes

1 The Dirty War (1976-83) involved the forced disappearance, murder, rape and torture of 30,000 so-called ‘subversives’ who threatened the military's National Security Doctrine based on conservative and Christian values. However, the phenomenon of disappearance is not unique to Argentina. The Dirty War was one of various right-wing dictatorships in the Southern Cone (that includes Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay) established under the clandestine program known as Operation Condor, a campaign of political repression and terror whose primary aim was to eradicate socialist and communist influences. Among the many scholars that have discussed the US government's direct support for such programs, Noam Chomsky has explicitly connected Operation Condor to repressive US policies in other parts of Latin America (see Chomsky 2005: viii-xviii).

2 Diana Taylor has referred to these public art interventions as a form of ‘guerrilla performance’ known as ‘escraches’ (Taylor 2003: 162). These public acts of shaming were undertaken in collaboration by G.A.C. and the H.I.J.O.S. ‘Escraches’ are one example of what she calls the ‘DNA of performance’ that she describes as the transmission of memory and activism from the Mothers and Grandmothers to younger generations of activists and artists such as G.A.C. and H.I.J.O.S. (Taylor 2003). For more information on the Law of National Pacification, which provided amnesty to all military officials responsible for the atrocities that took place during the Dirty War, see Rita Arditti, Searching for Life, 42-43.

3 ‘To grieve, and to make grief itself into a resource for politics, is not to be resigned to inaction, but it may be understood as the slow process by which we develop a point of identification with suffering itself’ (Butler 2003: 19).

4 See Graeme Gilloch's treatment of Walter Benjamin's “angels of history” as the “unknown, unremembered dead who must be redeemed by the historical materialist” (Gilloch 2002: 225).

5 I am using flesh here in the Merleau-Pontian sense of perception, as that space between our bodies and everything we perceive - the element of being that constitutes everything. In this essay, I have chosen phenomenology by way of ‘performative writing’ to present my embodied research on phenomena that demand a more encompassing perceptual approach. This gesture of ‘performative writing’ functions as a solicitation of affect and as an invitation for you to accompany me on this personal, transformative journey. On flesh, see Merleau-Ponty (2007: 393-413). For an explanation of ‘performative writing’, see Phelan (1997: 12).

6 Approximately five hundred babies were born in captivity in the former clandestine centres of detention and torture during the Dirty War. These babies were illegally given up for adoption, in some cases to military officials directly connected to the disappearance and murder of their biological parents. A little more than one hundred of them, now adults (my age), have recovered their identities as a direct result of the tireless efforts of human rights organizations such as the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo who were established in 1977 to find their sons, daughters and grandchildren, since they knew their daughters were pregnant at the time of disappearance. For a detailed account of the Grandmothers' work, see Arditti (1999). Since I visited the site in November of 2011, the silhouettes installed on the fence in front of Ex-ESMA (of which there existed approximately twelve) have been taken down. The silhouettes were first installed in 2004, the same year that President Nestor Kirchner recuperated the ESMA campus from the military (see Schindel 2008).

7 Ex-ESMA has been under the jurisdiction of the Space of Memory Institute (Instituto Espacio para la Memoria) established in November of 2007. The Space of Memory Institute, also located on the Ex-ESMA campus, oversees the reclamation of six out of the thirty-five buildings located on the campus. These six buildings were directly implicated in the junta's repressive activities and currently function as memory sites in various stages of restoration. See the Space of Memory Institute, accessed 13 April 2013, http://www.institutomemoria.org.ar/.

8 The Campo Argentino de Polo (the ‘Cathedral of Polo’ as it is popularly known) is just minutes away on the same street as Ex-ESMA, Avenida Libertador, and is a multipurpose stadium, famous for hosting international polo events.

9 My use of implicated micro-sites in this essay is akin to Andrea Dooley's discussion of implicated geographies in the context of the Rwandan Genocide; however, my example differs in that I am describing a contained site in urban space (see Dooley 2011).

10 Some argue that the World Cup was strategically planned to divert attention from the state-sponsored terrorism occurring in Argentina and to bolster national pride (see Taylor 1997: 112.)

11 The death flights were a form of forced disappearance practised by the military during the dictatorship. Detainees at torture centres such as ESMA were heavily sedated, packed into trucks and transported to the nearby military airport. They were stripped naked, packed into planes and dropped into the Rio de la Plata (estuary, South America) or Atlantic Ocean to drown. In 1994, former naval officer Adolfo Scilingo confessed about his involvement in these flights. He provided testimony to investigative journalist Horacio Verbitsky who published the account in the Argentine best-seller The Flight: Confessions of an Argentine dirty warrior (1995). In November 2012, the most significant Dirty War trial to date began. It involves 800 cases of human rights abuses that took place at ESMA, including the death flights (see Associated Press 2012).

12 I performed this piece entitled Embodying Spaces at California College of the Arts, San Francisco, in April 2011. The performance is comprised of three vignettes. In ‘Lost Love’, I represent disappearance via the tension between presence and absence in my attempt to convey the overwhelming sadness and extreme loss a person would feel due to a loved one who has been disappeared. ‘Memory Walls’ speaks to the power of the building as a witness, in this case, a former torture centre. In ‘Entwined with Mother’, I embodied a baby being born in captivity. In my corporeal re-telling of the heart-breaking phenomenon of the detained pregnant women, I chose to represent birth over torture and death.

13 ‘Perhaps mourning has to do with agreeing to undergo a transformation (perhaps one should say submitting to a transformation) the full result of which one cannot know in advance’ (Butler 2003: 11). Although Butler suggests that this transformation is one of grief into political action, in retrospect, I consider my own transformative process one of grief into creative action, as in this document I present to you.

14 ‘For if I am confounded by you, then you are already of me, and I am nowhere without you. I cannot muster the “we” except by finding the way in which I am tied to “you,” by trying to translate but finding that my own language must break up and yield if I am to know you’ (Butler 2003: 36).

15 Young engages with Saul Friedlander's distinction between ‘common memory’, which attempts to offer coherence and closure, and ‘deep memory’, which remains unable to be articulated and resolved (Young 2000: 12).

16 Cathy Caruth revisits Freud's literary example of the voice of the crying wound as an illustration of his theory of ‘traumatic neurosis’ - the repetitive re-enactment of trauma. She suggests that his literary example perhaps exceeds his theory of trauma, and instead approaches this voice of the crying wound as one that both defies and demands witness. When there is a response to this voice, she proposes the possibility for a double telling of history of both the crises of life and death, which can lead to intersubjective encounters and new modes of listening and reading. Thus, I imagine this return to my becoming (my crisis of life) that occurred simultaneously with the torture and murder of the detained pregnant women (their crisis of death), as one such possible intersubjective encounter (see Caruth 1996).