The archives had recently moved to a colder building, where the temperature could be attributed to the atrocities that occured on the famous Ex-ESMA (Naval School or Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada) premises only a few decades ago. The new location, in far-off Nuñez neighborhood, was chosen to house several organizations dedicated to recovering the memory of Argentina's last military dictator Videla and to organizing to struggle for increased democracy and accountability today.
I spent many days reading testimonies from the Juicios por la Verdad, trying to understand the extent and character of the relationship between the car industry, its spatial exigencies and the free-market dictatorship. In the room next to the archives the exhibited posters from the different organizations that have worked against the dictator and for "human rights," an admittedly problematic discourse, for its focus on individual rights and erasure of community trauma, trust and other collective and systematic concerns.
The images are meant to leave impressions: blood drops next to chairs in empty rooms, maps of Buenos Aires showing where the torturers from the regime currently live. I am inspired by these images, by their usefulness in performing escraches, and by their courage to resist.
The half of the image above that says "Juicio y castigo" (Trial and Punishment) is from the group H.I.J.O.S., whose goal is to recover identities of children who were stolen from murdered mothers during the dictatorship. I created the other half in its image, which shows a bankers suit in reference to the more recent crimes of the banking elite in the United States. In juxtaposing the two images and historical processes with the phrase "La Lucha es Una Sola" (The Struggle is One), I am connecting the U.S. and Europe-nacked massacres of the anti-left dictator, with the economic inequality and restructuring taking place after the current manufactured crisis. Although the experiences differ widely, they belong to the same system of violently-enforced economic exploitation.
La Lucha es Una Sola. La Revolucion sera femenista o no sera.
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