Interrupting commemoration: thinking with art, thinking through the strictures of Argentina's Espacio para lamemoria

Abstract

Recently, a few buildings within the Espacio para la memoria in Buenos Aires have been designated as a UNESCO Centre where, amongst other educational activities, evidentiary materials of the past repression are to be stored and displayed. Another building in the complex houses a Community Centre operated by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, where the mandate is to learn about and continue the revolutionary ideals of those disappeared during the repression. Amid these commemorative projects, designating a space for exhibiting art presents a significant opportunity for posing difficult questions, which go beyond the terms of information and idealization. Through a close reading of Diana Dowek's art exhibit, ‘A Long March’, the paper invites us to consider how art can draw out a particular haunting temporality that holds the present open to provocative questions that are difficult to pose and sustain amid the strictures of this commemorative site.

Keywords:

• commemorative pedagogy
• art and historical trauma
• ethics
• Diana Dowek
• Jacques Derrida
• Roger Simon

Acknowledgement

The Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada provided support for work on this paper.

Notes

1. Translation: Space for memory.

2. The sentiment of wanting to leave this site ‘empty’, or more precisely, of wanting to clear the way, as it were, so that buildings within ESMA can ‘speak for themselves’, is aptly conveyed in a conversation between the Argentine cultural critic Beatriz Sarlo and the German memorial artist Horst Hoheisel, in the magazine Punto de Vista. Speaking about his disappointing visit to ESMA, Hoheisel (in Hoheisel, Sarlo, & Sivestri, 2005) tells how there was too much interference from the provisional objects and educational props conveying testimonies and information associated with this site. He goes on, ‘These spaces where torture and murder took place are symbolically loaded and sufficiently evocative. The historical explanations need to be almost invisible … Likewise there is no need for sculptures or art objects here. While someone like Marcelo Brodsky … wants to add art in these spaces, my sense is that these spaces are sufficient in themselves. As one visits the Casino one senses the limits of what art could possibly add to this space’ (2005, p. 22).

3. In 2004, at the height of the debates regarding what to do within ESMA, the Argentine art journal Ramona published a series of correspondences between various artists, curators and cultural critics grappling with the potential role that art could play within ESMA. In this issue Nicolás Guagnini recounts his difficult visit to a Nazi concentration camp in Mauthausen, Austria (2004, pp. 57–58). His musings are particularly intriguing since they crystallize the attempt, by some artists, to think of ESMA beyond the conventional concentration camp topography and didactics. He tells us that his visit to Mauthausen was necessary but extremely arduous, and that he personally will never again visit Mauthausen or another Nazi concentration camp. Once is enough, he claims, since the overwhelming horror encountered there was sufficiently exemplary. Guagnini notes that the memorial space being proposed for ESMA has a chance to undertake a different pedagogical trajectory than the one employed at Mauthausen, inviting an ongoing engagement and more nuanced pedagogy (2004, p. 57). According to Guagnini, certain parts of the premises – like the Casino de Oficiales (where torture was mainly carried out) – should be preserved through a museum-like treatment of the space. However, the Casino should not be the only or main way of bringing people to or through ESMA, since the encounter with death and torture would overwhelm everything and eventually exhaust our ability to think, let alone our desire to return to this site once more. Concerned with guarding the futurity of this site, Guagnini speaks about the task of curation, of the possibility of thoughtfully arranging art objects, study, and cultural exhibitions. Consequently, attentive and nuanced curatorial endeavours have a chance of marking this place with a trans-generational passageway and possibility – hence ensuring ESMA's future (2004, p. 58). The implication here is ‘neither towards a traditional model of the museum nor towards the morbid reconstruction of extermination camps’ (Brodsky, 2005, p. 44), but towards arranging a multifaceted site for ongoing interpretation, communication and engagement.

4. In a significant study published directly after the dictatorship, Jorge Schvarez (1983) describes the disastrous economic policies purposely pursed by the military during its reign. In his analysis Schvarez demonstrates how the military embarked on ‘a massive wave of speculation that siphoned productive assets into exchange and short-term interest markets. During this era … money was made through borrowing rather than through productive investment, so that the capital infrastructure of the country was left to languish‘ (in Buchanan, 1990, p. 183). The ruinous consequences of these policies would extend beyond the military's rule, as it had the concrete effect of ‘de-industrializing’ Argentina, racking up a huge international debt for the first time, and thrusting millions of working-class Argentines into perpetual destitution. Many Argentines often make the connection between the post-dictatorship 2001 financial crash and the past policies of the military regime. Elizabeth Jelin tells us that, ‘in 2002, in the midst of a major economic and financial crisis, the commemorative rally of 24 March [marking the date of the military's overthrow of democratic rule in 1976] was especially significant. Besides the historical core of the human rights movement and the variety of social groups claiming rights, there were two new messages: one clearly rejecting the threat of military intervention in politics (a strong reaffirmation of Nunca Más); the other linking the policies of [the] dictatorship with current poverty, unemployment and economic crisis’ (2003, p. 68, n. 13).