CRASSH

Visualising Violence: Art, Memory and Dictatorship in Latin America

Conference review

In the wake of many years of sustained political violence and military dictatorships in Latin America, images (photography, performance, cinema, visual arts) have played a crucial role in the construction of the memory of the traumatic past. This symposium focused on three contemporary features of these productions.    First, that these artworks are marked by new reconfigurations of the public-private dichotomy and subjectivity, using (auto)fictions to explore and construct identity in the post-dictatorship scene. Second, when engaging with the recent past of State violence in cultural productions, the younger generations in Latin America are strikingly interdisciplinary in their aesthetic approach, resorting to montage, collage, hybrid genres, anachronisms, and the cross-over between fiction and testimony as a means to understand the ways the political events of the second half of the twentieth century have shaped and redefined Latin American cultural production. Finally, the papers examined the generational dialogues proposed by these exercises of memory. 

The conference’s aim was to discuss the role of the visual arts in contemporary constructions of collective memories in Latin America. In particular, we were interested in the differences between the artists of the so-called ‘second generations’ and the older generations in terms of their approach to the past. With this objective in mind, it was especially constructive that the speakers ranged in age and personal and cultural biographies (from both Europe and Latin America) to foment discussion over generational dialogues. The range of the material discussed was wide: from literature to photography, from films (especially documentaries) to architecture and sculpture. There were some papers that also focused on what we could consider generational mediums especially linked to young people, such as graphic novels, blogs and graffiti. That some speakers gave their papers in English and others in Spanish also enriched the cultural exchange of the discussions, as did the fact that among the speakers there were both academics and artists, which added another original dimension and perspective to the debates over memory, art and transmission.

Within these contributions one especially productive discussion centred on who owns memory, who has the right to remember and the different appropriations of the memory of the victims of the traumatic past by art, academia, the relatives of the disappeared and human rights organisations. Linked to this discussion was the theoretical debate over the (im)pertinence of the indiscriminate use of notions coined to describe particular events in the United States and Europe – remarkably the notion of ‘postmemory’ (Hirsch 1997) –  when referring to Latin America. A third key issue raised at the conference was the value of fiction and imagination in the testimonies of the second generations of the postdictatorship; this issue led to some original observations about the importance of establishing different understandings of terms such as ‘victim’, ‘truth’ and ‘testimony’ when discussing different disciplines (whether social sciences, humanities or law).

Our intention is to publish some or all of the papers either in the form of a book or a special issue in cultural journals such as Memory Studies, Journal of Latin American Studies or The Bulletin of Latin American Research. Given that one of the convenors lives and works in Latin America and the other in the UK, we hope to publish the papers fully or partly in both English and Spanish. Furthermore, two of the speakers working in Germany on a collaborative project entitled Narratives of Terror and Disappearance have expressed their intention to continue the discussions sparked by this event at their university in the format of a symposium.

The administration, publicity and organisation were faultless, both before and during the two days of the conference. We have also received very complimentary comments from the speakers and attendants about the practical elements of the event. Everybody was impressed with the smooth running of the technical parts of the presentations (use of PowerPoint, film, etc.), and the venue – Faculty of Law – was very convenient and comfortable.

Jordana Blejmar

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