Research Paper (July): Art for the People

Art for the People:

 

How can lessons from

 

 

be applied to subvert inequality and elitism in

 

 

the contemporary art world –

 

 

promoting a ‘bottom up’ approach?

 

 

Rivkah Hetherington – July 2011 – MA Fine Art – 7,000 words

 

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

 

I should like to give a very big thank you to:

The Fundación Gentes de Yilania

for organising my research trip to Argentina in April 2011

 The Archive: Espacio para la Memoria – Buenos Aires

who gave me access to their material on ‘Tucumán Arde’

The Parque de la Memoria – Buenos Aires

Los Espacios para la Memoria de Córdoba: El Archivo, La Perla, La Rivera

 El Asociación Ex-Presos Políticos de Córdoba

and

Augustin Cetrangolo, Manuel Américo Nieva, Antonio Alcazar Fidel, Cecilio Manuel Salguero, Ovidio Ramón Ferreyra, Jorge Luis Argañaraz, Rodolfo Novillo, Emilio Pihen, Jesica Rosencovick, Sara Liliana Waitman, Rosa Ester Cabral, Carlos Manuel Avila, Ana Maria Mohaded, Emily, Juan Miguel Oro, Marcela Oliva, Maria Cristina Olivarez, Diana Beatriz Tello

and

 Viviana Lombardi

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FOREWARD

This essay is my attempt to apply a teaching methodology outlined by Chandra Mohanty in her book ‘Feminism without borders – decolonizing theory, practicing solidarity’ that she calls ‘Feminist solidarity or Comparative Feminist Studies’. She advocates not defining the local or the global according to physical geography or territory and says that ‘by doing this kind of comparative teaching that is attentive to power, each historical experience illuminates the experiences of the others.’  Thus, I have sought to look at the position of British community art today from the perspective of social and political art in Argentina – not because I believe there are any universal similarities or differences. But because I believe in the invisibility of what Pierre Bourdieu termed ‘symbolic violence’ and I agree with Shari Stone-Mediatore that there is no such thing as an objective perspective – ‘bias’ is often equivalent to ‘not mainstream’. Thus, the only way to approach a genuine understanding of any phenomenon is to view it from as many perspectives as possible, which is inconvenient because it results in infinite contradictions, and challenging because it means overthrowing preconceived ideas. For this reason, my work is embedded in the practice of interviewing and I am deeply interested in the development of oral history and its social, academic and political implications. I believe in the need of a ‘voice from below’ – in the art world as much as in society. The simple act of listening can become a radical subversion of hierarchies and power. This brings me back to Mohanty’s methodology that unites these different strands in its ‘attention to power’ and insistence in comparing ‘experiences’.

I have not been able to discuss the connection between oral history, the implications of listening in terms of power or the implications of a transnational approach within the essay itself because of the need to create a coherent argument and the restrictions of time and length. However, because they have been fundamental to shaping my approach to the subject matter, I have included material concerning this (that was used for my previous essay in March 2011) in the bibliography.

 

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CONTENTS:

Introduction

 

Chapter 1  –  A case study of Tucumán Arde

 

Chapter 2  –  El Siluetazo: a case study from social and political art in Argentina post-Tucumán Arde

 

Chapter 3  –  Tucumán Arde and El Siluetazo in relation to the contemporary art world in Britain

 

Conclusion

 

Bibliography

 

Appendix A – Tucumán Arde

 

Appendix B – El Siluetazo

 

Appendix C – Extracts from my interview with Diana Tello

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Introduction

 

In 1970, the upcoming Argentinean artist Jorge Carballa was invited to exhibit at the show ‘Information’ at the MOMA New York. His piece ‘Night of tigers – Night of panthers – America is crying’ was hung next to Andy Warhol’s. However, on arriving at the private view, he was so shocked by what he encountered that he removed the piece and left the exhibition. He recalls that when his wife came back from the toilet neither he nor his work was there.

She found me on the edge of the pavement, hugging the remains of my work and crying. The sensation I had was that no emotion could get through to those people. You could go so far as taking your own blood to communicate (and some people have done so) but this would just be art. […] My work will be better off tomorrow morning when the dustman collects it than inside there with those people.[1]

I believe that exhibiting at the MOMA was – and still is – one of the highest success symbols most artists aspire to.  At the very moment of receiving this indisputable sign, Carballa came face to face with the reality of an art-world that so disgusted him, he would rather sacrifice both recognition and career than remain a part of it. And he has maintained his vow to this day, refusing a much later invitation to the Sao Paolo Biennial.[2] I admire him incredibly for two reasons: the first, because he had the sensitivity to see beyond the veil of luxury and glory presented to him; and secondly, because he had the courage to stand by his convictions. ‘Every man has his price’ but Carballa proved that he did not.[3]

Carballa was part of a group of over thirty artists from Buenos Aires, Rosario and Sante Fe who created ‘The 1968 Itinerary’ – a series of artistic actions that culminated in the artwork ‘Tucumán Arde’ (Tucumán is burning). Largely overlooked until the 1990s,[4] it has now become something of a legend in Argentina on two accounts: the first because it is considered ‘one of the most radicalized aesthetic manifestations of the Argentine artistic field […] which has changed the manner of making political declarations through art’[5] and the second because when the group officially disbanded each of the artists promised never again ‘to participate in any bourgeois institution, art-prize, funding, exhibition or commercial gallery’.[6] The majority of the artists all kept their promise.[7]

And so ‘Tucumán Arde’ has left the art world with an enigma that has continued to fascinate and baffle: over thirty successful artists risked their own freedom in order to prove that art could have a social and political purpose;^[8]  they created a revolutionary piece that pre-dates activist art movements and community projects in the U.S.A. by almost ten years;[9] they left the piece unfinished and rejected art.[10] This is the myth. But like many myths that have grown out of real circumstances, it does not reflect the complexities or subtleties of how the event was lived by the individuals involved. I would like to examine how this enigma can become a series of understandable and logical consequences when we listen to the individual artists’ stories. For this, I am indebted to the research of Longoni and Mestman and the interviews they made between 1992 and 1999 and admit and excuse myself for proposing my ideas without having been able to talk to the artists myself. I will go on to offer an example of how the issues thrown up by ‘Tucumán Arde’ have affected future art projects in Argentina and how art has come to play a central role in the fight for ‘Memory, Truth and Justice’ that has culminated in the re-opening of the trials and the conversion of some of the ex-camps into ‘Spaces for Memory’. What can be gained when these principles are applied to the art world and in connection with the off-centre position of community art in Britain? Or, as Guillermo Fantoni says with regards contemporary heritage of the Argentinean avant-garde of the ‘60s:

‘it’s not simply a question of emulating the styles of the avant-garde. On the other hand, it’s about finding a reserve of feeling there that can contribute to a critique of the present and help the construction of a future. In other words, a world that’s more liveable and understandable.’[11]

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[1] Carballa in interviews in August & September 1999: Longoni & Mestman (2008) p 405

[2] Carballa in Ibid: p 406

[3] Opening line from Robert Bolt’s ‘A Man for All Seasons’

[4] see Longoni & Mestman (2008) pp 291-301 for an overview of articles and writings on ‘Tucumán Arde’ from the 1970s to the 1990s.

[5] Tucumán Arde (1999) DVD – my translation

[6] Noemí Escandell in an interview on 28^th June 1993 published in Longoni & Mestman (2008) p 337

[7] It is worth noting that Carballa was one of the first dissidents. He admitted to being the only artist in the group not to have destroyed their artwork after Experiencias (May 1968) – unbeknown to the others he secretly hid his piece in a friend’s shop in order to save it. He continued to work within the mainstream for a further year, exhibiting at the Paris Biennial in 1969 and accepting the invitation to the MOMA in 1970. [For details of the other artists and a summary of their relationships with the art world post Tucumán Arde see Chapter 1 of this essay, Longoni & Mestman (2008) pp 251-2 and also selected artist’s biographies in Katzenstein, I. (2004)]

[8] This was under Onganía’s dictatorship. That same year, following events surrounding Premio Braque, July 1968, six of the Tucumán artists had been arrested and detained in prison: Margarita Paksa, Pablo Suárez, Roberto Jacoby, Ricardo Carreira, Eduardo Ruano and Eduardo Favario. (Longoni & Mestman p 129)

[9] Felshin (1995) p 9 cites activist and community art as initiating in the mid 1970s

[10] This is the common perception. I will go on to discuss how they did not actually reject art but art institutions.

[11] Fantoni in Longoni & Mestman (2008) p 458

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Visitor stepping over the names of those involved in the closing of the sugar refineries in the entrance to the ‘Tucumán Arde’ exhibition in Rosario

Photograph probably from the archive of Graciela Carnevale

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Chapter 1:  A case study of Tucumán Arde

 

Much has been written in Latin America about ‘Tucumán Arde’, about its relationship to conceptual art, about whether its revolution was ‘aesthetic’ or ‘political’, about whether or not it did indeed achieve this revolution and whether or not it was too political to be art or too artistic to be politics. What interests me is the artists’ vow to abandon the ‘art world’ linked to the fact that although people’s voices and questions of agency form a key part of the work itself this aspect has been little discussed. The artwork hinged around communication, around dispelling the lies that the Government and the Press were spreading about the results of their economic experiment ‘Operation Tucumán’ and as such it pivoted around interviews, photographs, video material and other documentation collected by the artists from the citizens themselves of Tucumán.[12] I want to show how an analysis of the artwork based solely on the artists’ words changes the way in which we look at it and the kind of questions we ask about it.

The first thing that becomes obvious on reading the interviews is that they contradict each other. We are faced with a collection of subjective and rather colloquial material. In academic terms we could dismiss them as unreliable because they are biased, emotional, disagree on facts that newspaper or magazine articles could be used to corroborate and… where is the intellectual criticism or academic distance in ‘Fuck! It was amazing!’?[13] However, I wish to argue that it is precisely their emotional content, precisely their subjective bias and precisely their spontaneous ‘this is my gut reaction and what I honestly think’ that makes them such valuable material. In her essay ‘Challenging Academic Norms’, Shari Stone-Mediatore makes a solid and substantiated claim not only for doing away with the ‘myth of objectivity’ (‘the idea that universal, bias-free knowledge can be attained by cleansing our knowledge practices of all emotional, social and cultural factors’) but also how ‘the valorization of traits associated with objectivity can have real – and dangerous – historical effects. […] When we confuse absolute emotional and geographic distance from one’s subject matter with ‘objectivity’, we forget that such distance is itself a social location, namely, one of isolation from social problems’.[14] This can be seen in the history of ‘Tucumán Arde’ in how critics have tried to insert it within a history of conceptual art and reduce it (in my view) to a debate on artistic aesthetics and art’s boundaries. This treatment can (or maybe is intended to?) drain the work of its political intentions and power, belittling the passionate drive that lay behind the involvement of many of the artists. This is made clear by Juan Renzi – one of the artists:

‘What is the fashion now is conceptual art […] and it would result (at least for some critics such as Lucy Lippard and Jorge Glusberg) that I am one of those responsible for initiating this new phenomenon (together with my comrades and ex-group of revolutionary artists from Rosario and Buenos Aires in the years ’67-’68). This affirmation is wrong. Just as is also wrong any intention to connect us with such aesthetic speculation. Bourgeois culture has always tried to remove content from every act of artistic creation and today’s conceptual art is nothing more than a version without content (and without sentiment) of our efforts to communicate political messages.’[15]

These artists were not intellectuals discussing abstract concepts around a table. They were passionate, self-defined revolutionaries – their declaration at the Rosario exhibition dedicates five paragraphs to defining what ‘Revolutionary art is’.[16] They were living a very specific historical moment between the 1968 Paris Riots and 1969 Cordobazo and genuinely believed they were beginning a revolution and genuinely believed that this could happen. In his 1992 interview, artist Roberto Jacoby says, ‘We were crazy. We had no doubt there was going to be a revolution. And we used to speak about the art that would come afterwards.’ [17] Jacoby’s words ‘we were crazy’ have a double value. Not only do they explain the particular moment these artists were living but they also draw attention to the social attitudes today we are so immersed in that we take for granted: this so-called ‘neutral – objectivity’ that can never actually exist.[18] From today’s bias viewpoint, lulled into the acceptance that capitalism is unchallengeable, these artists seem naïve and even ‘crazy’. These are not neutral observations. They are subjective judgements.

The interviews are therefore important because they reveal the general cultural and social situation in which the artists were living (and which ‘Tucumán Arde’ was a reaction to) as well as offering a window into the individual way each artist experienced this together with the process of creating the work and its subsequent evaluation within this reality. The most important political factor was the military coup of 1966 and General Onganía’s subsequent dictatorship that, as Aldo Bortolotti reminds us in his interview, was ‘severe, terrible. It was the harshest coup for intellectuals and the university that we had known up till then’.^[19]  This was prior to the 24^th March 1976 coup, the death-camps and desaparecidos[20] and Jacoby emphasises how outside of the universities, people still felt able to react and retaliate. The atrocities of the reign of terror to come were completely unforeseen and there was popular support and feeling for the revolutionary movements that were growing in Argentina in the late 1960s. These feelings ranged from Socialism to Communism, from Marxism to Peronism, from belief in an armed revolution to desiring to help the country’s poor, from anarchy to discontent with the military regime and state corruption.[21] This diversity of feelings and views are present in the artists’ interviews and it becomes clear that discrepancies between them became one of the key factors leading to the group’s disbanding after ‘Tucumán Arde’. If there had been ambivalence when ‘The 1968 Itinerary’ had begun as to its aesthetic-political weighting, the interviews show that its political content became increasingly important and thus their differences in this area increasingly problematic. Jacoby recalls feeling sceptical about their collaboration with the Trade-Unions[22] seeing them as ‘just another braid in the system’s fabric, nothing more’[23] while Margarita Paksa speaks in no uncertain terms against some of the artists’ connections with FATRAC.[24] ‘I didn’t see why I should join my name to the activities of a political group with which I had no desire nor would ever have any desire to have anything to do with.’[25] However, beyond the unpleasantries of these disagreements, the interviews reveal the personal reward for many of these artists for having ventured into new territories. Escandell explains the group’s collapse in the following terms, ‘With the passing of time I now realise that the ideological investigations that each of us made were so profound that we each became someone different. The group that began Tucumán Arde, while made up of the same members, thus became a different entity where we no longer knew each other.’[26] Thus, the group’s collapse, that when viewed from outside as an objective fact appears negative and rings of failure, when seen on an individual level actually becomes the sign of positive transformation and personal growth.

Another important aspect evident in the interviews and often absent from academic or critical analysis is the question of ethics. This is a consistent and governing principal throughout the ‘1968 Itinerary’ and without which ‘Tucumán Arde’ is uninterpretable because questions of ethics form the basis of both its content and its form. The work’s manifesto reads:

‘The recognition of this new concept (the need for an artwork capable of bringing about political change) has led a group of artists to present the act of aesthetic creation as a violent, collective act that destroys the bourgeois myth of the artist’s individuality and the traditionally passive role assigned to art.’ [27]

The work defended the artists’ belief that ‘revolutionary art […] fights economic dependency and class oppression: as such it is a social art.’[28] Regardless of how the artists’ political positions have changed (in particular Jacoby’s), the interviews in the 1990s maintain this sense of a moral decision. ‘The artist cannot remain enclosed in front of his easel and canvas without any contact with the other, who is suffering this reality. This was the fundament of Tucumán Arde. […] “How many must die in this very moment to allow the act of making this brush-stroke?”’^{[29] [30]}   Here we see how the situation in Tucumán was doubly appropriate for the artists’ message: the outbreak of unemployment there triggered by the sudden closing of the sugar refineries was paralleled by a boom in ‘high’ culture that was promoted by the government as proof of the success of their economic experiment. When the artists arrived to interview the local inhabitants they found that 5 million pesos had just been spent on an opera festival while a whole portion of the city’s inhabitants lived in shacks with no bathrooms or running water – the only showers were open pipes on street corners so that women had to wash naked in front of the whole community.^{[31] [32]} Thus ‘Tucumán Arde’ was more than a demonstration of how art could be used for social and political change. It highlighted how ‘high’ art was actually being used to disguise social deprivation and questioned the ethics behind such expenditure.

Therefore, the interviews show how the artists’ decision to have nothing more to do with the mainstream art world is the logical and coherent consequence of a moral stance and an ethical refusal of inconsistency between their beliefs and their actions. First and foremost, the interviews dispel any idea of embittered artists, angry at institutions that have refused them recognition. It was the artists themselves who began refusing invitations to exhibit at the Di Tella Institute[33] and if ‘money talks’ both Carnevale and Naranjo confirm returning funds to Di Tella’s director that he had given them two months earlier for the Cycle of Experimental Art (1968).[34] The ‘Declaration of the Argentine Artists’ Committee’ shows their understanding of how the institutions themselves neutralised the political potential within artworks,

‘Artists allow themselves to live with the illusion that they can create radical artworks: they will be received with indifference and even with pleasure. They will be bought and sold and their hostility turned into just one more product on a market that buys and sells prestige value. How can the system appropriate and absorb even the most audacious and innovative works of art? It can do this because these works are inscribed in the cultural frame of a society that works in such a manner that the only messages that get through to the people are those that cement their oppression.’ [35]

In May 2010, I was asked by the wife of the president of one of Africa’s diamond mines if I would accompany her to The William Kentridge exhibition at the MOMA, New York, because she would like to buy one of his works for her husband. What happens to the artist’s message when their work is financed by the people they would be protesting against? In the light of such experiences, it is easy to see why those amongst the artists who did take up their artistic practices eight to fifteen years later live with an entrenched sense of guilt. ‘Tucumán Arde’ paralysed us for many years […] Many of us thought that art had no purpose […] to take it up again was treason.’[36] However, it should be emphasised that while the artists ceased to operate within mainstream art institutions, as people who had defied the boundaries between politics, art and life the majority of them continued with what could be defined as their art practice in some form or another. [37]

So was ‘Tucumán Arde’ a success or a failure? This very much depends on the criteria used to evaluate it – are we to measure the work’s success in political terms, in aesthetic terms or in ethical terms? The interviews offer evaluations in light of the first two of these aspects: politically, concerning the artwork’s primary purpose that was to create ‘un hecho sobreinformacional’ – a saturation of news revealing the real situation in Tucumán; and aesthetically, concerning the format of the exhibitions themselves. The artists’ evaluation of ‘Tucumán Arde’ in terms of the former is varied. Escandell considers it a failure in terms of their expectations at the time. She remembers bitterly how a heart-transplant took the press by storm in the way they had hoped to and not managed.[38] She believes that it did receive this coverage over time both within Argentina and abroad but that this was in its quality as an innovative aesthetic experience and had little to do with the work’s political purpose in terms of Tucumán. In contrast, Jacoby considers the work a success in terms of its publicity, ‘The militancy of the people in Rosario got amazing results. This notion of our activity in Tucumán being clandestine is a lie – we were all over the papers. […] Lift a finger and they find out everything.’[39] Suárez evaluates the work as a failure but his observation would actually seem to indicate considerable success,

‘The day the exhibition was presented could have had repercussions because the press immediately got stuck into thousands of things concerning the Tucumán situation that it hadn’t drawn attention to before […] they threw light on a lot of harsh things – things that were a lot more meatier than what we had known about.’[40]

There is similar disagreement amongst the artists concerning the exhibitions’ aesthetic success. Many of them are derogatory. Suárez describes them as ‘lots of panels with photographs and texts […] nothing more’.[41] The most scathing is Jacoby who refers to them as ‘a load of crap’, ‘without any artistic quality’. ‘The photo of a poor boy chewing sugar became a symbol because it was the only one that was more or less a decent photo. […] It was like the university faculty at the time of the elections.’[42] He explains that at the time he didn’t mind so much because all that mattered was its use: art as a tool. Beatriz Balvé confirms that ‘the quality of the product for us had passed into second place. What mattered was the message – the product, for want of a better word, became what accompanied it’.[43] However, Naranjo’s evaluation is very positive indeed:

It was an exhibition of testimonies. It was exceptional. […] It was anti-traditional. Anti-gallery. […] If you want to saturate people with information, you should be selective. But here we weren’t.  None of the texts had been edited. […] Letters from schoolteachers that hadn’t been meant for exhibition were there just the same. […] ‘My child doesn’t go to school anymore because he hasn’t got any shoes.’ […] All this material shown in this way has nothing to do with the mass media and the press that are clean […] with only the right little words. “Tucumán Arde” wasn’t any of that: it was an excess of information. We held back nothing. […] When we finished putting it up the day before, the effect was so powerful we said: “Fuck! It’s amazing!”[44]

Reading between the lines, we see that their descriptions of the exhibition do actually coincide on a factual level. Their subjective evaluations however are as varied as the artists themselves. This underlines the fact that there is no ‘one’ artwork. It was made by over thirty different people and as such over thirty different artworks exist. Each artist took part for different reasons, with different ideas and expectations and made a different contribution. Each has gone away with different feelings and different memories. How we evaluate the artwork and how we assess it qualitatively entirely depends on our subjective perspective, on what we considered the artwork’s purpose to be, what our own personal (and changing) expectations are and how far the work fulfils them.

Thus, while the emphasis given to the artwork’s evaluation from an aesthetic perspective – which translates into an assessment of the exhibitions themselves – is unsurprising on the one hand given the context of the interviews within a book an avant-garde art, it is worth remembering that according to the artwork’s original plan these exhibitions formed only one of its four components and thus could be said to account for only one quarter of the piece.[45] The complex implications of the artists’ trips to Tucumán, their methodologies and means of gathering information are barely touched upon. Thus, there is a political, an aesthetic but not an ethical evaluation of the work, even though as I have shown, ethics was a fundamental issue throughout.

I believe that an evaluation in ethical terms can hold the key to understanding how the artwork has managed to create an icon for itself despite its disputed failure in both political and aesthetic terms. The free distribution of all the material following the Buenos Aires exhibition’s closure,[46] the artists’ insistence on the official anonymity of the artwork and their vow to abandon their artistic careers in line with their principles has created a rare example of integrity. ‘We took everything with a militant stance that almost became religious in the sense that it had to do with ethical conduct in your own life. You couldn’t allow yourself certain things. You had to live in line with what you thought.’[47]

An ethical evaluation also opens up the door for aspects that may explain the ‘void’ felt by the artists in its wake. Did ‘Tucumán Arde’ make a difference to the people of Tucumán? This is my own subjective approach to the work and the question was never asked in the interviews so I cannot be sure of the answer. What is clear from Escandell’s interview is that her shock as a middle-class woman witnessing such extreme conditions of poverty marked her for life. ‘I didn’t just make Tucumán Arde, it made me.’[48] However, the interviewee’s reactions to her presence are not mentioned. The artists exposed injustice but did they find a way of re-addressing the balance of power? Did their interviews effectively provide a voice and a means of agency for these people? Or were their voices being exploited for the artists’ purposes? Given the choice, would these people have preferred new showers to be built and shoes donated for their children with the money rather than exhibitions of their photographs and interviews in Rosario and Buenos Aires? Sarah Hoagland in her book ‘Lesbian Ethics’ clearly distinguishes between the Patriarchal understanding of power as ‘power over’ and the alternative self-empowering ‘power from within’.[49] I believe that having addressed and challenged the status quo of power, finding a solution would have been the logical step forward. I find it strange that the question is not touched upon in the interviews for it is however reflected in many of the artists’ art practices that developed in this direction. For example, Paksa is still working today with people in the slums, painting murals and creating theatre productions that help people assert their rights and allow their voices to be heard.[50] Carballa accepted a friend’s request to give painting classes to a group of Montoneros who met up in an abandoned house in the country.[51] They covered the walls in murals in homage to Eva Perón. Not long after, the police raided the villa and most of the boys were killed. Carballa recalls returning to the site to see one painted flower of the mural remaining ‘like an altar’.[52]

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[12] Please see Appendix A for the artists’ description of the artwork

[13] Rubén Naranjo in interview, 20^th December 1993 Ibid p 366

[14] Stone-Mediatore (2007) p 57

[15] Juan Pablo Renzi: Pamphlet No. 3 – The New Fashion published in Longoni & Mestman (2008) p 277

[16] see the artists’ declaration published in Ibid pp 233-235

[17] Roberto Jacoby in interview on 25^th June 1994: Longoni & Mestman (2008) p. 356

[18] I would like to draw attention here to Stone-Mediatore (2007) p 60 where she demonstrates how ‘due to the cultural contingency of what counts as the ‘centre’, authors from culturally dominant groups tend to seem neutral while writers whose identities deviate from the culturally constituted norm are considered bias’. In an experiment where she gave students in the USA texts to compare they concluded that ‘Galeano is biased because he is Latin-American’. The same students did not attribute any bias to the other book’s two authors, despite their North American education and identities.

[19] Bortolotti in a joint interview with Graciela Carnevale on 20^th September 1993, Longman & Mestman (2008) p 323

[20] The planning and implementation of the camps and disappearances had begun from 1974 prior to the coup under the Presidency of Isabel Perón

[21] I have corroborated this range of feelings myself in a series of unpublished interviews with ex-political prisoners, camp survivors and relatives of the disappeared – made in Buenos Aires, Córdoba and San Juan, April 2011.

[22] The exhibitions were held in the headquarters of the CGT (Confederación General del Trabajo – General Confederation of Labour) in Rosario and in the Graficós trade union in Buenos Aires

[23] Jacoby in interview: Longoni & Mestman p 362

[24] FATRAC: Frente Antiimperialista de Trabajadores de la Cultura – Anti-Imperialist Front of Workers in Culture. Suárez in his interview cites the following artists as members: Eduardo Favario, Ricardo Carreira and Eduardo Ruano. Ibid p 391

[25] Paksa in interview on 29^th November 1993 Ibid p 374

[26] Escandell in interview Ibid p 337

[27] Declaration at the Rosario exhibition. Manuscript published in ibid pp 233-235

[28] Ibid

[29] Escandell in interview Longman & Mestman (2008) p 337

[30] I would like to connect Escandell’s comment to Barbara Hammer’s 2003 film ‘Resisting Paradise’ that ‘contrasts the choices made by painters Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard, who continued to produce landscapes and portraits as the war raged around them, with the courageous actions of resisters and refugees, including Matisse’s wife and daughter and an astounding woman named Lisa Fittko, who led philosopher Walter Benjamin on his ill-fated trek over the Pyrenees’. (Taylor 2011)

[31] From ‘Informe: Viaje a Tucumán de los Artistas’ (an extract is reproduced in Appendix A and the document is published in its entirety in Longoni & Mestman (2008) pp 228-231

[32] This same tactic was used with prisoners during the subsequent dictatorship (mentioned in my interview with survivor Ana Mohaded – April 2011 – and in her audio-installation: ‘Calsonazo – the women of Buen Pastor Prison say “No!”’)

[33] as well as the interviews see the following artworks: Letter from Pablo Suárez to Jorge Romero Brest, 13^th May 1968, exhibited as an artwork in ‘Experiencias 1968’; Eduardo Ruano exhibits in the Institute Di Tella at the Institution Torcuato Di Tella; Roberto Jacoby’s Message in Di Tella.

[34]  Naranjo specifies meeting the director in Hotel Italia and returning the money in an envelope. He confirms they then accepted funding from a community-led educational-cultural organisation in Rosario where he worked: Biblioteca Vigil. Longoni & Mestman (2008) pp 331 & 363

[35] The ‘Declaration of the Argentine Artists’ Committee’ was written to present the 2^nd exhibition in Buenos Aires. The document is published in ibid p 236

[36] Emilio Ghilioni in an interview published in La Muestra Tucumán Arde fue un hecho inédito en el país La Maga magazine, 24^th February 1993, cited in Longoni & Mestman (2008) p 256

[37] Rubén Naranjo joined the human rights movement in which he is still working today; Noemí Escandell joined The People’s Group of Rosario and organised clandestine cultural-political events; León Ferrari took part in group actions of political art and works for Human Rights organisations; Roberto Jacoby and Beatriz Balvé organised a group called ‘Agitation and Propaganda’. Carballa continued making artworks outside of any institutional context.

[38] Escandell in interview: Longoni & Mestman (2008) p 335

[39] Jacoby in interview: Ibid p 359

[40] Suárez in interview: Ibid p 394

[41] Suárez in interview: Ibid p 394

[42] Jacoby in interview: Ibid p 360

[43] Balvé in interview October 1992: Ibid p 399

[44] Naranjo in interview: Ibid p 366

[45] see the artists’ definition of the artwork in ‘Informe’ – Appendix A

[46] see Naranjo’s interview: Longman & Mestman (2008) p 368

[47] Carnevale in interview: Ibid p 321

[48] Escandell was the artist responsible for interviewing the families in the slums Ibid p 280

[49] Hoagland (1988)

[50] Ibid p 211

[51] The Montoneros were a guerrilla organisation – see pp 48-50 (Appendix C) for my interview with one of their members Diana Tello and her personal explanation of the organisation’s history

[52] Carballa in interview in Ibid p 234 (Carballa uses the word ‘muchacho’ – literally boy or kid. My guess is they were anything between 15 and 25 years old.)

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 Police guarding the silhouettes – September 1983

Photograph by Eduardo Gil

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Chapter 2: El Siluetazo – a case study from

social and political art in Argentina

post-Tucumán Arde

The artists of ‘Tucumán Arde’ have often been attributed as the ‘founders’ of a growing movement of collective art for social and political purposes and it is wonderful to see how this legacy has maintained the artists’ values while adding agency to the people collaborating. In 1983, during the death-throws of the Videla-Massera dictatorship, an art-work proposed by three artists turned into a mass collective event where people spontaneously left their houses and offices to participate. I refer to ‘El Siluetazo’ (The Great Silhouette). Beginning in Buenos Aires it spread to towns throughout Argentina. The artists brought their first home-made silhouettes into the street (assisted by organisations such as the Madres de Plaza de Mayo) and spontaneously people flocked to join them – finally finding a voice to vindicate the disappearance of friends, families and loved ones. [53] Rodolfo Aguerreberry (one of the artists) recalls that ‘within half an hour of arriving, we could have left the square as we were no longer needed at all’.[54] People contributed in every way they could to the creative process, adapting it to suit their personal needs of expression – thus the original silhouettes were joined by those of children and pregnant women and participants began adding the names of their loved ones.[55]. One person decorated them with red hearts.[56] People stopped using the stencils and preferred to draw around their own bodies – an important symbolic recognition that identified themselves with the disappeared. When the pens ran out, people returned to their homes for more or created a kitty to share the costs. Overnight, the city was covered with an army of silhouettes whose silent and blank accusation spoke louder than words. The Dictatorship’s Cabinet reportedly expressed its concern that such an event had been able to happen without having been detected by its intelligence forces.[57] This clearly shows the strength that ‘power from within’ can generate when it spreads from the individual to create a united force. Diana Tello, a Montonera whose husband disappeared in 1978, whom I interviewed in San Juan in April 2011, emphasised the important role that art had played for her in surviving the dictatorship individually and collectively. ‘During all those years, art was the only thing that allowed us to maintain a collective legacy.’^[58] In fact, Roberto Cerisolo writes about El Siluetazo: ‘The political stand could not have been taken without the aesthetic one, above all because the manner in which this latter was created implied the recovery of those ties of solidarity that had been lost under the dictatorship’.[59] In fact, ‘The repressive forces [the army] had no preparation to enable them to repress such a creative and aesthetic act and decided to guard the walls’. [60]

While the artists of ‘Tucumán Arde’ abandoned their artistic careers, those behind the origin of ‘El Siluetazo’ continued theirs but vindicated their decision to keep the piece outside of the art world and its institutions, and refuted individual authorship of the artwork. Although, they had originally conceived the piece as an artwork for a Salon organised by the ESSO Foundation in 1982, as the idea developed they completely changed their emphasis.[61] They considered every single person who took part to be author and artist: ‘If you want to read it as an artistic event, then everybody who made or hung up the silhouettes were artists.’[62] They have accepted their rights as ‘authors’ solely in order to be able to refuse permission to have any of the silhouettes, or even documentary photographs, shown within any institution or museum. Their reasons are this: ‘[the silhouettes] wouldn’t work, they would be confiscated like the Quechuan artefacts, separated from their contexts’.[63] Their self-written declaration ends: ‘This leaves the members of the group with the question as to whether ‘creating systems for others to express themselves is not a valid field of investigation for artists to undertake?’ [64] In other words, is using art as a means to create ‘power from within’ in others as well as in yourself not a valid form of artistic expression?

In April 2011, I interviewed eighteen different people in Buenos Aires, Córdoba and San Juan who were either survivors, ex-political prisoners or relatives of people who had disappeared and in varying degrees they all acknowledged or emphasised the role art had played in the thirty year fight for ‘Memory, Truth and Justice’ in Argentina.

‘It wasn’t that Kirchner just came along […] and decided to give us trials. […]These were 35 years – in my case 33 years – of fighting and protest – a continuous struggle of presentations before the courts. […] We won it by fighting and a fundamental tool for this was art […] Art strips the human being bare and transcends this. It reaches the essence. It’s invaluable.’[65]

Examples of this go from the Abueles’ Theatre and Cinema for Memory and for Identity, to the use of art, music and theatre in the HIJOS’ Escraches and to the work of groups such as Gas-Tar, CAPaTaCo and GAC (Grupo de Arte Callejero). The ‘spaces for memory’ that have begun to be opened in the ex-camps are all focused around providing artistic services, projects and workshops that can empower ‘under-privileged’ members of society. From my interviews with the people who help run them, one thing is very clear: these are not museums. They are ‘spaces for memory’ – both collective and individual because the one cannot exist without the other – that use art as a means for empowerment.[66]

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[53] see Appendix B for artists’ names and fuller details of the event

[54] From Hernán Ameijeiras’ interview with Aguerreberry published in La Maga, Buenos Aires, 31^st March 1993 and cited by Longoni & Bruzzone (2008), pp 29-30

[55] La Madres de Plaza de Mayo had specifically amended the artwork’s proposal to say that every silhouette must be anonymous. When they saw names being spontaneously added, they accepted but distributed lists of the desaparecidos so that everybody could be included. Ibid pp 111-2

[56] From Hernán Ameijeiras’ interview with Aguerreberry published in La Maga, Buenos Aires, 31^st March 1993 and cited by Ibid p 194

[57] article published in September 1983 by Clarín national newspaper, cited in Ibid p 94

[58] see Appendix C p 44

[59] article published in La Maga magazine, 31^st March 1983, cited in Ibid p 100

[60] Ibid p 103 – see also photograph on p 18

[61] The Salon was cancelled due to the outbreak of the Falklands War. Ibid p 24

[62] From Hernán Ameijeiras’ interview with Aguerreberry published in La Maga, Buenos Aires, 31^st March 1993 and cited by Ibid p 194

[63] ‘Las Siluetas’ by Aguerreberry, Flores & Kexel published in Ibid p 78

[64] ‘Las Siluetas’ by Aguerreberry, Flores & Kexel published in Ibid p. 81

[65] see Appendix C p 45

[66] I refer in particular to ECUNHI in the Ex-Esma in Buenos Aires (opened 2008) and El Archivo, La Perla and La Rivera that opened to the public in Córdoba between 2008 and 2010 following the Provincial Law no. 9286, passed on 22^nd March 2006.

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Relatives making clay tiles in remembrance

March 2009 – La Perla ex-camp, Córdoba

Photograph courtesy of Diana Tello

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Chapter 3: Tucumán Arde and El Siluetazo in

relation to the contemporary art world in Britain

‘The people have been making art for centuries, only we don’t recognise it because the people who made it were working-class, or women, or non-European. It’s time to re-evaluate. In 1971 the Arts Council of Britain discovered something had been going on, in 1973 they called it community arts and in 1974 set up a funding panel’. [67]

‘Tucumán Arde’ took place in 1968. The source above would show that ‘Community Art’ was beginning in Britain at about the time. I first want to show how precisely because ‘Tucumán Arde’ was made in a different culture and within a completely different social and political context its message can be precious for people in Britain. I then want to show how the key messages that I have identified as the heritage from ‘Tucumán Arde’ that have been passed down in Argentinean’s social and cultural history can create a valuable framework for re-assessing how we evaluate British community art in its relationship to the mainstream art world. These are issues concerning authorship, notions of quality and each individual project’s ability to create power from within as opposed to power over.[68]

‘[T]he term ‘art’ functions as one of a series of categories whose purpose is to assist in the construction and maintenance of a hierarchy of values which, having been constructed, can be made to appear as both natural and inevitable.’ [69]

I believe that largely due to what Bourdieu termed ‘symbolic violence’, it is always difficult to take on a contrasting view to that with which we have been brought up, or to perceive a different reality to that which we have been brought up in – literally immersed in, like a fish in water, so accustomed to our habitus that it is invisible to us.[70] Except the very metaphor of a fish in water is incorrect as it implies – as the Symbolic Order would like us to believe – that we could not survive if we were ‘a fish out of water’. Similarly, contemporary art has imposed a series of values that seem unquestionable but which are simply the result of a linear, temporal history of movements, counter-movements, crises and reactions to these crises. If we are able to step out of the centre – and it’s false notion of neutrality and objectivity – we can see that:

‘Art is an ideological construction; a generalisation which has a complex history through which its meaning has both shifted and narrowed. In its current usage its chief purpose is to bestow an inherent value onto certain activities and the products resulting from these activities, while withholding this value from certain other activities.’[71]

Any attempt to rebel against the system has been cleverly incorporated into the system itself so that any ‘efforts to sublate art become artistic manifestations that, despite their producer’s intentions, take on the character of works’.[72] Bürger claims that with the incorporation of Dada into the mainstream art world, no true avant-garde is any longer possible: ‘To the extent that the means by which the avant-gardistes hoped to bring about the sublation of art have attained the status of works of art, the claim that the praxis of life is to be renewed can no longer be legitimately connected with their employment.’[73]  Bürger’s prophecy can indeed be seen in the incorporation of works by artists such as David Wojnarowicz or Keith Haring into the art’s mainstream. Their artworks have become symbols of prestige and are bought, sold and used to serve the purposes of an elitism that the artists themselves fought hard to counter. I believe that the attitude that the artists of ‘Tucumán Arde’ and ‘El Siluetazo’ took towards the art world demonstrates their recognition of this and their search for a solution. ‘El Siluetazo’ did indeed unite art with ‘the praxis of life’ and so according to Bürger’s definition could be described as a truly ‘avant-garde’ piece. Taking this to its logical conclusion, all social art works – from community art to art therapy – are therefore potentially ‘avant-garde’ as they break out of the institution to have a direct effect on people’s lives.

Objections to this claim probably lie with notions of ‘safe-guarding quality’ and so I should like to examine how quality has been constructed within modern and contemporary art and is inextricably linked to authorship (the creation of a brandname) and economic value. In reaction to Dada’s ‘attack’ that coincided with a rapid change in the way the art market was structured, art had to deal with a double paradigm – anything could be art but the moment it became art, its market value became independent of its original object value. This is made explicit by Cildo Meirles’ 1969 piece ‘Tree of Money’ where 100 one-cruzeiro bills are bound by a rubber-band on a pedestal. The original label priced the work at 2000 cruzeiros. Art has had to justify this discrepancy and it has done so by various means. The first is by creating a common consensus of elitism. There is a general, unspoken understanding that art speaks to its connoisseurs. Hence, by questioning these values, by admitting that ‘I do not understand’, I automatically lose my right to question them. Catch 22. This has simultaneously removed any responsibility from the artwork itself to communicate effectively because it becomes I, the viewer, who has the responsibility of entering the initiated world of connoisseurs not the artist who has a responsibility to talk to me in a language I may understand. Nowhere could this be clearer than in Greenberg’s reprimanding of the Russian peasant who would choose a Repin painting over a Picasso. Greenberg’s argument is problematic for many reasons but what is relevant here is that he finds his proof that Picasso is indeed avant-garde and represents a higher art than Repin (who ‘is somehow art too, on however low a scale’) in his absolute confidence in the Russian peasant’s answer (who of course he never asked).[74] Thus, according to Greenberg, the measure of Picasso’s quality and status is in direct proportion to its unintelligibility to someone in a lower social class with limited education (as well as a different cultural environment but that is blind to Greenberg and so is not a part of his argument). Greenberg may have been discredited by many for his elitism but this measure of quality still exists today. How many YBAs and ‘bad girls’ have exploited the tabloid shock effect to boost their prestige? And theirs isn’t simply the motto of ‘there’s no such thing as bad publicity’. It’s about the importance of proving that only the right kind of person could understand. It becomes a double endorsement between art collector and artist: Saatchi gains status because he understands that Emin’s ‘bed’ is ‘Art’ and Emin gains status because she has been bought by Saatchi. The myth of the misunderstood artist working alone in his attic has been replaced by the misunderstood artwork – alone in its white cubic space, ‘untitled’, defying the viewer to establish communication with it.

An illusion prevails that an artwork’s economic value reflects and confirms its level of quality. In actual fact a work’s economic value is created by its brandname. A work by an emerging artist acquires value only as the artist’s brandname acquires value through exhibiting in the right institutions and being bought by the right collectors. The same art work that was worth £1000 when an artist graduated may be worth £100,000 ten years later, while in terms of quality it can only have deteriorated.[75] Thus, the economic value of contemporary art is entirely independent of quality or may even contribute to creating ‘quality’ – not vice versa. Thus, an anonymous artist threatens the system of the contemporary art world – because as such there is no longer any means of being able to insert the piece within its measure of quality.[76]

This illusion that ‘quality’ is reflected by economic value adds to the Catch 22 situation whereby the status quo is unchallengeable. The talent of successful ‘art stars’ is proved by the figures their work fetches and emerging artists are encouraged to identify with these ‘stars’ and consequently discouraged from making their own critical assessment. YBAs have taken on an iconic status similar (within the art world) to that of pop stars or footballers with a parallel marketing of their lives and success stories as an object of desire. It is a contradiction to both want to be Tracey Emin and to criticise her work. Emerging artists are fed on the double message that such success is both possible (if they are equally talented) and impossible (because stardom places the icon out of reach) – in a similar pattern to that used by the mass film industry, as described for example by Adorno.[77]

This exposes how the mechanisms of creating and maintaining ‘power over’ are identical both for high and low culture. The elite are no more or less immune than the ‘masses’ and like any binary opposition, the one ‘high’ depends upon the other ‘low’ to exist and vice versa. In contrast, from their position outside of the system, the artists of ‘Tucumán Arde’ clearly state that money wasn’t an issue in their decision to renounce the art institution: ‘This idea of making a living out of art was something that just wasn’t inside the heads of the majority of us.’[78] I am not suggesting that artists should be unpaid – rather that the art system distorts our perspective, our priorities and our methods of evaluating our achievements.

By questioning the ‘unquestionable’ standards of quality within the art-world, we open up the door for a new framework to be created which can fundamentally alter the way we see and evaluate community art. While writing this essay, I saw a beautiful collaboration of poems written by refugees exhibited at the Southbank attributed by a large plaque with bold letters to the artist ‘Gitta Gschwendtner’.[79] The names of the refugees were printed underneath the poems on paper as part of the artwork. If the project’s intention is to give a voice to these people, if the project genuinely aims at facilitating ‘power from within’ then her role as facilitator becomes of secondary importance. I am not suggesting that she should not receive recognition but that the implications of power be considered in the way this is done. The large letters of artists and funding bodies sometimes make me ask: are these projects about creating ‘power from within’ or about boosting the artist’s and institution’s image as ‘charitable’ benefactors ultimately asserting their power over these people and status in society?

Similarly, I was saddened while reading an otherwise thought-provoking and beautiful piece of writing by Andrea Wolper on community art projects and the homeless. She found the need to justify that this was ‘art’ and not ‘art therapy’. She conceded that it was ‘art that was therapeutic’ but could not bring herself to admit that it could be ‘art therapy’.[80] Is this something ignoble? With what criteria have people accepted that using art as a healing tool is demeaning and not ‘real’ art? And why would many people believe I was being belittling if I drew attention to the clearly auto-therapeutic aspects of much of Emin’s work? I would like to propose the notion of how far an artwork creates ‘power from within’ as a nobler tool than its economic value for measuring its success and thus its ‘quality’ and status as ‘art’.[81]

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[67] Dickson (1995) p 16

[68] Hoagland’s terminology

[69] Dickson (1995) p 10

[70] Bourdieu (2001)

[71] Dickson (1995) p 10

[72] Bürger (1984) p 58

[73] Ibid

[74] Greenberg, C. (1986) pp 15-16

[75] Due to low-quality materials and poor technical knowledge, many contemporary artworks do not conserve well and so aesthetically it may well have deteriorated.

[76] It is interesting here to notice how the Western art market deals with the anonymity of so-called ‘ethnic’ works. For the sale of these works, the country of origin or tribe is recognised in place of the author. However, this is over-ruled when establishing re-sale rights. A group of Italian solicitors have put forward a good case that these artworks should be entitled to re-sale rights and that this money can be returned to organisations within the countries of origin to be used for social and community projects. See: Candela, Cicchetti & Savini (2009)

[77] Adorno & Horkheimer (1995) p 140

[78] Roberto Jacoby in an interview in: Longoni & Mestman (2000) p 288

[79] 2011 Lion and Unicorn installation at the South Bank. Participants are from: The Refugee Council, Refugee Youth, The Refugee Home School Support Project, and The Klevis Kola Foundation, working with Joelle Taylor, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Philip Wells and Yemisi Blake.

[80] Wolper: Making Art, Reclaiming Lives: the artist and homeless collaboration in: Felshin (1995) p 265

[81] It is not possible to expand on this point but it is worth noting the auto-therapeutic aspects of diverse work throughout modern and contemporary art history: Edvard Munch, Claude Cahune, Jackson Pollock etc

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Conclusion

‘Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference – those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older – know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish.’[82]

The purpose of this essay has been in many ways to show that being ‘a fish out of water’ can be difficult but it can also be a position of self-empowerment. It can mean facing prejudices but it can also mean the privilege of seeing the values and strictures with which we have been brought up as what they are – restrictions. ‘We only feel the chains when we begin to move.’[83] Art made within the community can use its privileged position to make a real difference in people’s lives. This may become its benchmark with which to measure its success or failure, irrelevant of the symbolic, cultural or economic capital that the field of the mainstream art-world wishes to bestow upon it. ‘El Siluetazo’ demonstrates what art can achieve when it is used as a tool by the people and used to create ‘power from within’. It contributed to healing the social network of trust damaged by the dictatorship. It was able to stand up to the regime’s power leaving the government bewildered and incapable to react. No wonder then that those who seek to maintain ‘power over’ would like to relegate community and social art practices to a secondary position. I believe that if art was given back to the people, the ‘culture industry’ would cease to function as there would be no void for it to promise to fill.

‘[A]rt is something that penetrates the human being where nothing else can reach – not even reasoning. It transcends thinking and emotions at a sublime level, incomparable with any other kind of human activity.’[84]

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[82] Lorde (1984) p. 112

[83] Peace News, 21^st November 1975, no. 2008 cover page

[84] Diana Tello, in interview with me, San Juan, see Appendix C p 43

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Bibliography

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Bartlett, Kellie (2005) Cash Canvas, Chronicle of Higher Education, Vol. 51, Issue 34

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López Barros, Claudia (2001) Arte y política de vanguardia en la Argentina del ’60: extensiones y límites de una experiencia Crítica en revista: Zigurat, año 2, volumen 2, Buenos Aires: la crujía ediciones,  pp 155-160.

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Stone-Mediatore, Shari (2007) Challenging Academic Norms: an epistemology for feminist and multicultural classrooms, NWSA Journal, vol. 19 no. 2, Summer pp 55 – 78

Thompson, Paul & Corti, Brenda (2008) Whose community? The shaping of collective memory in a volunteer project, Oral History, Vol. 36, no.2, Autumn, pp 89-98

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E- Journals and World Wide Web Articles:

Candela, G., Cicchetti, A. & Savini, L. (2009), Droit de suite, ethnic art and anonymity: legal and economic aspects, translated by Rivkah Hetherington. Italian publication available at Aedon, Rivista di Arti e Diritto online, no. 1:

http://www.aedon.mulino.it/archivio/2009/1/candela.htm [Accessed 10th July 2011]

[1993] El grupo de artistas de vanguardia, La Maga Magazine, Buenos Aires, Feb. 24th, pp 28-29. Available at: http://www.thefileroom.org/documents/dyn/DisplayCase.cfm/id/11 [Accessed 27th June 2011]

Fiori, Luciana & Vega, Virginia Inés (2010) Grupo de artistas de vanguardia: un itinerario, Revista Ánfora, Colombia: Universidad Autónoma de Manizales, año 17, número 29, July – Dec. Available form: www.uamvirtual.edu.co/anfora/ediciones/1sem2011/ART3.pdf [Accessed: 30th June 2011]

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Lippard, Lucy R. (2009) Curating by Numbers Tate’s Online Research Journal – Landmark Exhibitions Issue. Available from: [Accessed: 20th June 2011] http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/tatepapers/09autumn/lippard.shtm

Longoni, Ana (2007) El Siluetazo (The Silhouette): On the Border between Art and Politics Sarai Reader: Frontiers Available at: www.sarai.net/publications/readers/07-frontiers/176-186_longoni.pdf [Accessed 26th June 2011]

Padin, Clemente (1997) Art and People – Latin American Art in Our Time, English translation by Harry Polkinhorn, Light and Dust Mobile Anthology of Poetry in cooperation with Atticus Press. Available from: http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/padin/lcptitle.htm [Accessed 16th June, 2011]

Taylor, Astra (2011) Experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer looks back on her thirty-plus years in film. Filmmaker – the magazine of independent film. Available at:http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/issues/winter2007/features/open_eyes.php [Accessed: 9th July 2011]

Film/Video:

Not Reconciled: Nobody Knows What a Body is Capable Of (2009) directed by Marcelo Expósito, 127 minutes, viewed at screening – ICA, London, 20^th Jan. 2011

Resisting Paradise (2003) directed by Barbara Hammer, 80 mins, viewed at Nitrate Bodies film festival, Bologna, May 2006

Tucumán Arde (1999) directed by Mariana Marchesi, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires & Queens Museum, New York, 26 minutes, DVD

Podcasts:

Bornat, Joanna (2006) Oral History in the UK – Being an oral historian: the route from the margins to the centre, 6th September, The Open University. Available from: http://stadium.open.ac.uk/stadia/preview.php?s=1&whichevent=770 (accessed 17th March 2011)

Fieldworks: Dialogues between Art and Anthropology, Symposium at Tate Modern 2003. Available at: http://channel.tate.org.uk/media/37110346001#media:/media/37110346001/27688590001&context:/channel/most-popular (accessed March and April 2011)

Conferences:

Genealogies or Cartographies of Feminist Art, Wednesday 15^th June 2011, Katy Deepwell, Feminist Art Seminars, ICA, London UK

Laura Mulvey in Conversation with Griselda Pollock, Wednesday 26th January 2011, Graduate School Program, Chelsea College of Art and Design, CCW, University of the Arts London UK

Interviews – 2011:

(consent forms obtained for all interviews)

(as part of a residency organised by the Italo-Argentinean Foundation Gentes de Yilania)

In Buenos Aires:

Abel Petrini, Asociación Madres de Plaza de Mayo (13^th April)

Augustin Cetrangolo, H.I.J.O.S. Capital (6^th May)

In Córdoba:           

Manuel Américo Nieva, Ex Preso Político and Director at the Archivo Provincial de la Memoria (18th April)

Antonio Alcazar Fidel, Ex Preso Político and assistant at the ex-camp La Perla (18th April)

Cecilio Manuel Salguero, Ex Preso Político (18th April)

Ovidio Ramón Ferreyra, Ex Preso Político (19th April)

Jorge Luis Argañaraz, Ex Preso Político (19th April)

Rodolfo Novillo, Ex Preso Político (19th April)

Emilio Pihen, member of H.I.J.O.S. and Director of Culture at the ex-camp La Perla (19th April)

Jesica Rosencovick, assistant at ex-camp La Rivera (19th April)

Sara Liliana Waitman, Vice-President of the Asociación Ex-Presos Políticos (20th April)

Rosa Ester Cabral, Ex Presa Política (20th April)

Carlos Manuel Avila, Ex Preso Político (21st April)

Ana Maria Mohaded, Ex Presa Política (23rd April)

In San Juan:

Emily – pseudonym (25th April)

Marcelo – pseudonym (26th April) – his brother disappeared in 1978

Marcela Oliva (26th April) – both her parents disappeared when she was a baby

Maria Cristina Olivarez (26th April) – her brother disappeared on 16^th August 1976

Diana Beatriz Tello (27th April) – her husband Oscar disappeared in 1978 – see Appendix C

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APPENDIX A

 

TUCUMAN ARDE

Tucumán Arde was an art project that formed the last phase of a series of exhibitions and projects known as the ‘1968 Itinerary’ organised in Buenos Aires, Rosario and Sante Fe by a group of artists from these three towns.

 

Definition of the work ‘TUCUMAN ARDE’ taken from the artists’ document: Informe: viajo a Tucumán de los artistas

(Source: Longoni & Mestman – my own translation)

The creation of the work ‘Tucumán Arde’ by the Group of Avant-Garde Artists is made up of four stages:

First stage: The gathering and study of documentary material about the Tucumán problem and the social situation in the county. This stage was completed with a prior fact-finding trip in order to weigh up the essential aspects of the problem and establish initial contacts.

Second stage:

a) Assessment and verification of the actual situation in Tucumán for which the artists travelled to Tucumán accompanied by a technical team and journalists, where they carried out investigations, interviews, reports, recordings, filmings etc. These were made in order to be used in the accusatory-exhibition, which will highlight the contradiction between the contents of official information and the reality of fact. This is part of ‘Operation Accusation’

b) In accordance with the artists’ plan for the artwork, a press conference was held on their arrival in Tucumán, in the Museum of Fine Arts with the consent of its director, Maria Eugenia Aybar. This brought together representatives from the media, local artists and council members in charge of culture in the county. This procedure’s purpose was to cover up the work’s real motive of political accusation and so facilitate the artists’ task and avoid repression. This was achieved through the communication of false information to all the media and authorities in the Tucumán capital, presenting a camouflaged version of the work. A second press conference was then held on the artists’ last day in the city to reveal the work’s true meaning and achieve the political repercussions implicit in its ideological formulation. There they violently unmasked the profound contradictions caused by an economic-political system based on hunger and unemployment and the creation of a false and gratuitous cultural superstructure.

Third stage: The accusatory-exhibition was held in collaboration with the Argentine General Confederation of Labour, in the respective regions of Rosario (3^rd -8^th November), Santa Fe and in the centre of Buenos Aires. All the documentary material gathered in Tucumán was used in a montage of audio-visual media and the artists, intellectuals and specialists who had taken part in the investigation also gave oral information to the public.

Fourth stage: The fourth and last stage consists in bringing the information overload on the Tucumán problem to a head and is comprised of:

a) gathering and analysing the documentation;

b) publication of the results of the analysis;

c) publication of bibliographic and audio-visual material;

d) founding of a new aesthetic and its evaluation.

List of artists who signed the declaration at the Rosario exhibition:

(this is not an exhaustive list of the artists who actually took part in the work. It excludes several who did not sign for varying reasons as well as others who were part of the 1968 Itinerary but became less involved in its final stages. It also includes two critics – Gramuglio and Rosa.)

María Elvira de Arechaval, Beatriz Balvé, Graciela Borthwick, Aldo Bortolotti, Graciela Carnevale, Jorge Cohen, Rodolfo Elizalde, Noemí Escandell, Eduardo Favario, León Ferrari, Emilio Ghilioni, Edmundo Giura, María Teresa Gramuglio, Martha Greiner, Roberto Jacoby, José María Lavarello, Sara López Dupuy, Rubén Naranjo, David de Nully Braun, Raúl Pérez Cantón, Oscar Pidustwa, Estela Pomerantz, Norberto Puzzulo, Juan Pablo Renzi, Jaime Rippa, Nicolás Rosa, Carlos Schork, Nora de Schork, Domingo J. A. Sapia, Roberto Zara.

 

Names and dates of those artists interviewed by Longoni and Mestman whose interviews are referenced in this thesis:

Beatriz Balvé (Rosario) – October 1992

Graciela Borthwick (Santa Fe) – 31^st May 1994

Aldo Bortolotti (Rosario) – 20^th September 1993

Graciela Carnevale (Rosario) – 20^th September and 26^th October 1993

Jorge Carballa (Buenos Aires) – 23^rd August and 2^nd September 1999

Noemí Escandell (Rosario) – 28^th June 1993

León Ferrari (Buenos Aires) – 24^th July and 7^th October 1992, 11^th November 1993

Roberto Jacoby (Buenos Aires) – 25^th June 1993

Rubén Naranjo (Rosario) – 20^th December 1993

Margarita Paksa (Buenos Aires) – 29^th November 1993

Eduardo Ruano (Buenos Aires) – February 1997

Pablo Suárez (Buenos Aires) – 3^rd December 1993

Chronology of the 1968 Itinerary

(source: Longoni and Mestman)

30^th April – Action of Ruano in the Premio Ver y Estimar – Buenos Aires

15^th – 23^rd May – Experiencias 1968 in the Di Tella Institute – Buenos Aires

27^th May – Beginning of the Cycle of Experimental Art (with Puzzolo’s work) – Rosario

June – First reactions to the censorship clause in the rules of Premio Braque

12^th & 13^th July – Assault at Romero Brest’s conference at the Association of the Friends of Art. Return of funding by the artists to the Di Tella Institute. Change of venue for the Cycle of Experimental Art.  – Rosario

16^th July – Incidents during the opening ceremony of Premio Braque in the National Museum of Fine Arts culminating in the arrest of 11 artists – Buenos Aires

10^th & 11^th August – 1^st National Meeting of Avant-Garde Art – Rosario

9^th September – Favario’s piece in the Cycle of Experimental Art – Rosario

Mid- September – First trip to Tucumán

End of September – Private view of  Premio ‘Materiales, nuevas técnicas’ in the Museum of Fine Art – Buenos Aires

7^th October – Carnevale’s piece for the Cycle of Experimental Art – Rosario

8^th October – The Red Fountains – Buenos Aires

22^nd October – Second trip to Tucumán

End of Oct./beginning of Nov. – Publicity campaign for ‘Tucumán Arde’ – Rosario, Sante Fe, Buenos Aires

3^rd November – Private view of ‘Tucumán Arde’ in the CGT headquarters, Rosario. (The exhibition lasts two weeks)

25^th November – Private view of ‘Tucumán Arde’ in the trade union Gráficos, Buenos Aires (the exhibition is closed after a few hours)

27^th & 28^th December – 1^st Meeting of Buenos Aires Cultura 1968 in the premises of SAAP, discussions last into early 1969 – Buenos Aires

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APPENDIX B

 

EL SILUETAZO (The Great Silhouette)

El Siluetazo was a project begun in 1982 by three artists: Rodolfo Aguerreberry, Julio Flores and Guillermo Kexel. They wished to make 30,000 silhouettes – one for each person who had disappeared under the military dictatorship (1976-83) that was still in force at that time. The three artists had planned the artwork as their entry to a private art-prize organised by the ESSO Foundation in 1982. The competition was cancelled due to the outbreak of the Falklands War. The artists realised the impossibility of creating the work alone and (possibly on a suggestion by Envar El Kadri) they contacted the Madres de Plazo de Mayo, who accepted the proposal on a few conditions. The main ones were: the silhouettes must all be identical and bear no inscription or name (because of the impossibility of naming all of the desaparecidos, the Madres preferred to name none); the silhouettes must not remain on the ground but be hung vertically or pasted onto walls – they should recall life not death.

The event took place in Buenos Aires on 21^st September 1983 in the Plaza de Mayo as part of the III March of Resistance organised by the Madres de Plaza de Mayo under the dictatorship. When the organisers arrived in the main square, they brought with them 1,500 silhouettes (made the day before with the help of various student groups) as well as six rolls of paper, paints, aerosols and stencils with which to make further silhouettes. People flocked to the square spontaneously to contribute and the work continued throughout the night. The artists recall that the material soon ran out. People began to bring whatever they had from their homes and started a kitty with which to buy more.

The ‘Abueles’ (grandmothers) asked for there to be silhouettes for the children and pregnant women who had disappeared. People stopped using the stencils and began drawing around their own bodies and personalising the silhouettes with names, dates and slogans. (The Madres changed their policy in reaction to this.)

In the months following this demonstration, silhouettes continued appearing throughout Buenos Aires and in cities across the country.

Two further ‘official’ Siluetazos were organised by the Madres together with other Human Rights Organisations in which the original artists were not involved. These took place around the Obelisk in Buenos Aires in December 1983 (to celebrate the start of Alfonsín’s presidency) and in March 1984 (the eighth anniversary of the 1976 military coup). Once again, silhouettes were sighted in neighbourhoods and cities around the country in solidarity.

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APPENDIX C

 

Extracts from an Interview with Diana Tello

(San Juan, Argentina – 27^th April 2011)

Translated by myself with the help of Viviana Lombardi

I’d like to speak about Oscar Silverio Castillo.  […]  We met each other through our political militancy. There were ten years between us actually – he was ten years older than me. We entered the organisation of Montoneros in 1971. […] We got married. We had a child. The dictatorship began. We remained here and by 1978 it was getting quite stifling because of the lack of freedom or self-expression. We were thinking of going into exile in France and it was then that he was arrested – on a charge that let’s say he had nothing to do with and which he was let off later. I was there the day before they let him out – that was a Thursday. […] On Friday, they let him out at ten o’clock at night – something that could only have been deliberate – nobody knew they had let him out – and he was abducted again, this time clandestinely. […] We have known nothing more about what happened to him from that moment on.

[…]

In September 1978, a neighbour stopped my mum in a petrol station on the corner of the street and said, “I’ve heard that the same thing has happened to the husband of your daughter as to what’s happened to my daughter. And we are getting together. I’ll give you my address and tell her to come. She’s invited to our meetings.” And that’s when I began to be a part of the Relatives of the Disappeared. It completely changed my life and my state of being. I felt like I could get a grip on my life again. I felt I could talk and be understood. I could cry and we would hug each other. We were partners in a common cause.

[…]

Tell me about when you went to the Perla [death camp] ?

I went back to the Perla after Nestor Kirchner had handed it over to the Human Rights Organisations. It was such a rainy day, such a difficult day. We had to go up the hill with water up to our knees because there were no roads. There was nothing yet. The speeches by the HIJOS were so tough and emotional and afterwards Kirchner said, “Let’s go in and have a look. It isn’t open to the public yet but the relatives can go in.” So we went in. It was really difficult, really emotional. For me it was indescribable. I don’t know. I can’t explain it. The images I have in my head are those that can’t be explained. The emotions.

I came back when it officially opened the following year, to see all the HIJOS and all the organisations, the work they had done and how they were taking over a space that had been built under democracy – in the year 1975 – under the democratic government of Isabel Perón -as a concentration camp. It was called the ‘Lugar de Reunion de Detenidos’ – the Meeting place for Detainees! It was planned. State terrorism that was already being planned under constitutional government under Peronism. It’s a really emblematic place and the fact that the relatives and the victims have taken it over is a bit like saying, the tables have turned – in some aspects at least.

Can you tell me about the second time you were at the Perla and the ceramics you made?

When we were at the opening there was actually a lot of artistic activity. For me, this is fascinating because I’ve always believed that art is something that penetrates the human being where nothing else can reach – not even reasoning. It transcends thinking and emotions at a sublime level, incomparable with any other kind of human activity. I remember that lot’s of artists came. For example, in ceramics they gave us each a little clay tile that was fresh and raw (I don’t know what the word is) and we each did something. One person placed their hand print, another a footprint, some wrote a thought or did a little drawing, and afterwards they fired them and then I don’t know where they were going to display them. Somewhere there I suppose. I remember that I wanted to leave a testimony to my partner and so I wrote ‘Oscar Silverio Castillo – Montonero from San Juan – present’. I never went back to see it but I assume it’s there.  I’m going to go back and see it. It’s a testimony full of sentiment. And the kind of people who go to these places have the sensitivity to understand it – everything that transcends all of this …

Do you know about other things they’ve done with art to commemorate or to fight for justice?

Here and on a national level too there’s been a lot of Teatro por la Memoria, Teatro por la Identidad, Cine por la Memoria y por la Identidad. ‘For the identity’ is looking for the children of the disappeared, those who were abducted alive. It’s been a tool for protest all these years – the same as the ‘Escraches’ of the HIJOS. Because we haven’t had justice. Because we had laws that impeded the trials. We had laws of impunity and so art was a tool for protest because the means of communication were in the hands of the governing regime that dictated the laws they dictated. We had no space on the television. We had nothing besides the ideology coming from the state – the theory of the two demons – on one side there were the guerrillas who were terrible (although there were never more than an estimated 12,000 guerrillas in the country because it’s always been something clandestine) and on the other side the Argentine air sea and ground armed forces – these two demons who confronted each other and well, what you got was a war… and the closing balance was this – 30,000 disappeared, exiles, prisoners etc etc. Well, with this most recent administration, with the presidency of the Kirchners, this ideology has really changed. What do they say? That the state – however much it is attacked and a certain section of the population starts infringing the laws and committing crimes –  can never act outside of the law because the state contains the means to repress legally. It has the means and this has been demonstrated around the world. From here, we get the definitions of crimes against humanity, genocides. In December of ’75 the guerrilla movement was considered defeated but from then on a systemic plan of extermination and persecution began – with of course the ultimate aim of installing an economic plan in the whole of Latin America. And because these kids, these fighters were inconvenient – that’s why they were exterminated. And in the light of this, there was an evolution – because there really was a historical evolution in trial and imprisonment for these crimes against humanity.

During the harshest periods under the dictatorship – because there were no guarantees of human rights – and during the impunity in the years that followed under democracy – during all those years, art was the only thing that allowed us to maintain a collective legacy. And we insisted on it. Because they didn’t just reward us. It wasn’t that Kirchner just came along, such generous people and decided to give us trials… no, no, no. These were 35 years – in my case 33 years – of fighting and protest – a continuous struggle of presentations before the courts. Everything comes from the fact that they were presented on an international level – the trials began for the Italian desaparecidos, for the Spanish desaparecidos, for Swedish Desaparecidos and from then on the judges began to demand the arrest of the military involved in Argentina. Because in Argentina there was impunity – here was paradise for genocides! And so this wasn’t a concession or a gift. We won it by fighting and a fundamental tool for this was art – photographs, paintings, poetry – it was seeking, touching and reaching the deepest parts of a human being with this human message – human and essential – not by reasoning – it was a war, it was a war, it was a war – No! It went beyond that. Art strips the human being bare and transcends this. It reaches the essence. It’s invaluable. Above all you see my partner was a photographer. My son is doing his specialisation in photography. It’s something that personally really touches me. I really value it. I really value it. And I understand it. There are people who say, “Oh yes, yes, what these kids are doing is quite alternative.” I don’t think of it like that. In my opinion it’s central.

[…]

Speaking of art, how can the ‘Spaces for Memory’ create life and not horror?

I don’t know the Rivera but I do know the ESMA and I was there I think in 2008 and I remember… I was in the space belonging to the Mothers. I think now you have other organisations too that are there. It was an activity they organised that was to show and exhibit magazines and newspapers from the fight against the conservativism of the ‘70s. These magazines from guerrilla organisations and political, social organisations. It was a jewel because during the dictatorship whoever had anything like that would burn it because they would kill you for this. They would make you disappear. It was really courageous to do these things.

So, the event began with a Murga (carnival) in true South American style with Candombe [traditional dance and music originating from South American negroes]. It began from the street and we entered singing. It was like a litany. They were saying sad things but they would say them with a smile and they would give you hope. The message was “We’re not dead! We’re alive! And life continues! And you’ve got to build on it.” You understand? This is what I took away with me from there – things that can be so painful to say. And this is part of society’s expression. That is a very big debt that Argentinean society has – and also some of Latin America. It certainly should make a confession, a recognition but not necessarily a vindication. I’m not expecting that but the truth is we were really wronged – all those people that wouldn’t even say hello to me, that looked straight through me as if I were invisible. It was like they didn’t even deliberately not speak to me. They simply ceased to see me. People I’d known all my life – friends, relatives, people from university. Some of these people, friends from university have said sorry to me, “How lonely you must have been!” – but as a society to say this, so that it can actually grow the healthy antibodies that safeguard against this ever happening again or in any other civilisation throughout the world. Never that someone thinks differently from you and you go to exterminate them. Create an antibody so as to turn on a light for a bell to ring in our heads: this is going down a bad path! This is Fascism! This is intolerance! This, no! It doesn’t matter that this guy’s smooth-talking, that he gives me money, that I’m ok or that they’re not going to touch me. It doesn’t matter. I don’t want this – for my people, for my children, for my world. I don’t want it because the country, the world is for everyone. And it’s very small, although it may seem unbelievable. It’s very small. Everything goes around, everything comes back. We have to maintain this greatness and generosity, it’s difficult but it’s a collective creation.

And how can we create this collective memory and collective antibodies?

I think fundamentally with justice, thinking with justice. The state must take a stance and say this is state politics – it’s not just the politics of this government or this regime that we can back down on afterwards… it’s not a law. It’s politics for the state for all time, for all history.

A person’s body isn’t to be touched, a person’s body is sacred. I don’t know if it conveys the idea because it sounds religious and I don’t like religion but I can’t find a better word and that’s how it is. A person is sacred. One is sacred. One can’t be tortured. One has to be able to think. One has to be free. The first thing is the role of the state. Afterwards, the means of communication – freedom of the press and recognition that this is a broad spectrum so you can have someone who says you have to kill this person but there is always the voice of someone who says no.

And then, I think that fundamentally all things to do with art matter a lot too. This new Argentine government is doing a lot with subsidies for cinema, for theatre, for all artistic activities because this creates a collective support system and a permanent vibrancy of creativity so that it doesn’t only rest on 35 year old photographs. It continues growing and it comes with all the ingredients that throughout all these years, some bad some better some worse, all begin to add up. And it makes a product. Because we’re not pure, we are what we are – good parts and bad parts – and only art that is in touch with society can bring these gifts.

Art can do this because it is grounded in reality, because it isn’t tied to any ideology nor a certain kind of government administration. It’s the freest thing that I know of – the most open and that was the place where the military didn’t manage to penetrate – our thinking. Because we could do things that they ordered us to but we were always free in our thinking. And in our desires – even when we had to swallow them up, literally. No-one could take away this freedom from us – this fantasy of dreaming of a better world with something different. You can’t take this freedom away. And this freedom, we had it … For example I began to feel it when I shared in our creation with my friends from the Relatives because it was a collective creation that we made. Apart from being a psychological unloading, creating our stories and our images was something really healing, we felt… we met up on Saturday afternoons and how we looked forward to this moment because when we left we felt healed. We hadn’t changed anything. We had the military ready to pounce above our heads, always clawing at our backs, but we felt renewed because we shared things. Someone would bring a magazine or look at a photo that had slipped through the net and been inadvertently published and we would create a fantasy that the strength of feeling and dissent must have grown and we would make an analysis – creativity, you understand. And this was the only place they weren’t able to penetrate- our creativity and our thinking. And for this reason I vindicate it. I vindicate it because it allowed me to survive more or less intact – more or less.

Can you explain the Montoneros to me?

The name – beginning from the name – comes from the Montoneras Federales who were Chiefs of the clans in the interior of the country and they began to take up arms when we freed ourselves from the Spanish colony and were invaded by English Liberalism (conservatism). Originally it began because the English imposed a sort of country onto us and our defecting governors accepted it – governors who are now historical heroes. They took away our raw material and sold it back to us as industrialised goods. They took the wool and sold us the cloaks. What did this mean? That the whole economy of inland Argentina that worked with these things collapsed. And we became dependent on the Port of Buenos Aires and everything they imported and exported. This impoverished the country terribly. And so the Montoneras was formed. They opposed this Liberalism and of course they were exterminated. We took up the name of this fight – against Liberalism, trying to reorganise a country that had been industrialised and that was only more or less autonomous with political sovereignty because while it was no longer a colony, after England we had been turned into a colony of the USA. An economic colony. We took the government of Peron of the ‘50s, that had had an attitude of political sovereignty, as a point of inflection. In fact it had been harshly castigated by the English. And then the USA intervened a lot in the coup d’etat of 1955. And from then on, everything that had been Peronism that was actually – Chavez, what do they call him now? I can’t think of the name – was banned. You couldn’t speak of Peronism nor have any of his photos, it was all practically eliminated. The first mass shootings began in this period with activists. The population began to resist and trade unions protested and over the years the need arose to take up arms because dictatorships went on and on and if there were two years of a democratic government, then once again there was a coup d’etat and another dictatorship and so this was a generation of young people – in which I include myself and Oscar – who thought that the only way was by armed fighting, by taking up the same arms as they had. Before us, there were the Tupamaros in Uruguay and there were guerrilla groups all over Latin America. We had the Cuban Revolution close to us and also the death of Che, which was a terrible defeat for us. It was a guerrilla of an urban kind. It went on until 1973. These guerrillas would put pressure on the establishment through armed coups to gain media attention until the dictatorship called the elections. Peronism won. After a month of a very popular pro-people administration, the Right wing sectors began to step up the pressure. Peron died. Isabel was left. Peron opened the door and left his legacy to trade union bureaucracy, Lopez Rega, the AAA, men like Videla and Massera. Peron had taken a choice -against the revolutionary sector that didn’t interest him – and changed his tack from when he had been in Spain. And from that point the Montoneros had to become clandestine, from ’75 and they were persecuted. With the rise of the AAA [Alianza Anticomunista Argentina] they became illegal.  I think in Spain there was a parallel that was the Somatén in the epoch of Franco. Peron and Isabel, their government knew that this existed and that they exterminated people from the left. The truth is that in this epoch the theme of peace and the value of life had not really been developed yet. Everything was very militarised. Society included. We were all consumed by the idea that we would win or lose. We were defeated as early as ‘75, in terms of our battle. The government began its extermination and those who could, fled the country. Afterwards, some Montoneros tried to regather abroad. But these are things related to individuals that remained outside – the history of Montoneros that took place in Argentina is what is valuable to me. The rest was like the effect of an explosion from which tiny bits of shrapnel flew here or there… and these bits of shrapnel would develop into something here and something there. It was not something that incorporated everybody. There were lots of differences. I don’t consider this part of my story. It’s like a diaspora.

I vindicate my being a Montonera because I’m proud of it. Because we didn’t do it for money or for privileges or prestige. We did it to create a better country, a better society. We realised that the methodology was… hmmm. Now, I can see the problems now with the light of history. But at the time it was impossible not to organise ourselves because the Argentine army was so powerful. It wasn’t the right way because there was the moment when we fell completely to the sidelines politically. And the same society gave us the thumbs down. If we were fighting for society and society didn’t understand us and wouldn’t support us, then we had to surrender or change something. This was our mistake – and did we pay for it dearly?! But this doesn’t invalidate what went before. People, our enthusiasm, everything we built up thanks to all of our technical teams. Our people who were working for this in health and education. Everything that was given by the people’s government that was wiped out when there was the military coup. We were enthusiastic to build. It wasn’t the right time.  It wasn’t the right method. We entered a race that we couldn’t get out of. We didn’t realise. We were in the eye of the storm. We didn’t see how the world was preparing for a new change – this world capitalism. We paid dearly – the price was very high indeed. I’m still paying for it today as you can see. The highest price was the belief that ‘you couldn’t’. And I see this now. I see it in the young. Now for the first time since then young people have started protesting again. Because they have reconquered this idea, they believe that change is possible. Because for many decades, after such a great defeat all that remained was ‘you can’t’. Here is the establishment, toe the line and you just have to accept. And if you deviate from the norm, disobey the rules, you die.

This is what gives me lot of joy, to see the young who are beginning to protest again because this means that they believe, because otherwise they wouldn’t get hooked. […] So now when I see this new young generation, it makes me really emotional and really happy. It makes me happy to have remained in Argentina and to have fought because I believe that all of this is something we should all have a bit of, not having changed sides, not having given up, not having negotiated, to have stayed in the country. Everything adds up.