Since Argentina’s Dirty War, artists and activists have taken bold steps to reclaim memory and public space, proving that to remember is to resist, and to resist is to remember. This persistent connection between bodies and space over the last 35 years has enabled a resistant sensory politics of the “disappeared” to thrive in contemporary art and memorials. This essay applies a phenomenological and visual analysis to the Monument to the Victims of State Terror at Memory Park in Buenos Aires. I employ “performative writing” to present my embodied research and to enact the affective force of the Monument.

I wrote this essay a few weeks after I returned from my research trip to Buenos Aires, funded by my department, last November. An expanded version appears in my master’s thesis, “Embodying Spaces: Memory and Resistance in the Aftermath of Argentina’s Dirty War,” which is about memory, corporeality and the politics of space. Parts of this essay will appear in my symposium presentation on April 28th, 2012. Other segments will appear in “Sightlines,” a journal produced by my department, which will be available online and in print this summer. Audience: artists, human rights activists, visual and critical theorists, Latin Americanists.

I was in born in 1976—the year during which the repression of Argentina’s Dirty War (1976-1983) was most severe. When I learned about the complex phenomena surrounding the war, I experienced a shock and a broken heart. This shock traveled throughout my body, disrupting my sense of time and space, awakening me to memories from a horrific past, and inspiring the development of a performance. This preliminary embodied research compelled me to learn more and re-tell the stories about the sites, the ongoing human rights movement and the visual culture that has come out of the war.

As a graduate student, my writing has been the result of a year of rigorous research, which began in San Francisco; thus, accurate sources, fact checking and citations according to the Chicago Manual of Style are standard requirements for my degree. My research continued to intensify when I went to Buenos Aires in November of 2011, to explore these many complex phenomena about which I had already began to write and create performance, from a distant location. My creative practice in the form of embodied research is intimately connected to empathy—the ability to identify with or vicariously experience the feelings or thoughts of another. Hence, more significant than all of the theory that brought me to this project is the basic human tenet of empathy. My growing empathy allowed me to connect to a time and space distant from this very moment in time and space in which I find myself. I have come closer to Latin America, to Argentina, to the mothers, grandmothers, lovers, brothers and sisters of the disappeared in Argentina and in other parts of the world that have suffered a similar fate. And yet, I also recognize that I am not one of them and cannot speak for them. I remember and honor them while acknowledging the safe, privileged life I live in the U.S. As an artist-scholar in the U.S. writing about one example of memory intertwined with the visual and political culture of Latin America, I remain critical of my privileged location.

In the context of Latin America over the last few decades, hundreds of thousands of people have undergone the psychological torture of not knowing the status and location of their disappeared loved ones. The violence that continues to intensify in Mexico due to the drug trade fueled by U.S. demand can be contextualized by the progression of events in Latin America’s recent past. Without critical memory and knowledge of our past atrocious entanglements including U.S. involvement in the Dirty War and other dictatorships in the Southern Cone around the same time, how can we move forward toward a more humane entanglement based on social justice? As stories of the Dirty War continue to unravel, artists and visual critics like me who have been moved by these stories of persistence, justice and memory preservation will retell them. Stories like those of the disappeared have likewise been disappeared. It is our responsibility as researchers and artists to reappear these stories, or to make them appear for the first time for those who are unaware. In the U.S., catastrophic stories about Latin America have been hidden from view, precisely because of the ways in which U.S. interests have been at stake in these conflicts. It is quite possible that a majority of the North American public would opt for amnesia. Nevertheless, I am hopeful that another portion of the public is committed to cultivating awareness, memory, deep thought, and deep feeling, as means to prevent further social injustices.