La memoria abierta: archivo y desaparición

Abstract

The article explores the construction of memory practices in the context of Argentinean dictatorship and post-dictatorship. The photograph of a disappeared detainee, as a probative document of an existence, formed the basis of an archive at the beginning involuntary, improvised, artisanal, which grew and became more complex until it became a genuine counter-archive against the State’s narrative during and after the dictatorship. These first archival practices, marked by urgency and uncertainty, helped to shape a symbolic universe in which to hold the trace of the absent. The figure of disappearance fixed on the photographic medium evoked a fundamental disagreement amidst the pretensions of democratic reconstitution in post-dictatorship; it would also lay the foundations for practices of memory intensely linked to forms of cultural and political resistance still in force in Argentina.