By analyzing some case studies that develop in different ways the symbolic value of home pictures in terms of restorative burial, the article reflects on the relationship between photography and memory in response to the campaign of political repression and terror occurred in Argentina and Chile from the 1970s to the 1990s. In the last decades, several artists have based their works on the reuse and recontextualisation of private photos, aiming at denouncing the denial of burial. This study will firstly focus on two well-known projects by Argentinean photographers – Marcelo Brodsky’s Buena Memoria (Good Memory, 1997) and Gustavo Germano’s Ausenc’as (Absences, 2006) – which not only highlight the physical absence of the disappeared, but also translate the aesthetics of the family into a depiction of grief and violent past. Secondly, the study moves into the Chilean political arena: by examining some sequences from two documentaries – Silvio Caiozzi’s Fernando ha vuelto (Fernando Returns, 1998) and Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia de la luz (Nostalgia for the light, 2012) – it will demonstrate how it is possible to turn the natural assumption of “(private) images are relics” into “relics are (private) images.” By using both social practices of memory and visual artistic operations, it is possible to notice on the one hand an aesthetic need to give real identity back to the victims; on the other hand, a practice of looking, which is specifically marked by postmemorial interpretations, and backshadowing.
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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
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Private Images in Place of the Beloved Bodies: Relics Against the Politics of Disappearance
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Private Images in Place of the Beloved Bodies:
Relics Against the Politics of Disappearance
Alice Cati, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore




Abstract

   By analyzing some case studies that develop in different ways the symbolic value
   of home pictures in terms of restorative burial, the article reflects on the relation-
   ship between photography and memory in response to the campaign of politi-
   cal repression and terror occurred in Argentina and Chile from the 1970s to the
   1990s. In the last decades, several artists have based their works on the reuse and
   recontextualisation of private photos, aiming at denouncing the denial of burial.
   This study will firstly focus on two well-known projects by Argentinean photog-
   raphers – Marcelo Brodsky’s Buena Memoria (Good Memory, 1997) and Gustavo
   Germano’s Ausenc’as (Absences, 2006) – which not only highlight the physical
   absence of the disappeared, but also translate the aesthetics of the family into a de-
   piction of grief and violent past. Secondly, the study moves into the Chilean politi-
   cal arena: by examining some sequences from two documentaries – Silvio Caiozzi’s
   Fernando ha vuelto (Fernando Returns, 1998) and Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia de
   la luz (Nostalgia for the light, 2012) – it will demonstrate how it is possible to turn
   the natural assumption of “(private) images are relics” into “relics are (private)
   images.” By using both social practices of memory and visual artistic operations, it
   is possible to notice on the one hand an aesthetic need to give real identity back to
   the victims; on the other hand, a practice of looking, which is specifically marked
   by postmemorial interpretations, and backshadowing.


   In the aftermath of the military dictatorships in Latin America, many art
works, including films, were produced in order to deal with the phenomenon
of massive and forced disappearances. Between the 1970s and the 1990s, all the
promises of modernization were tragically betrayed and repressed throughout
the continent by subverted governmental authorities that led to the extrajudicial
kidnapping and executions under the Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile, the Dirty
War in Argentina, the military repression in Brazil, to name a few. The political
ideals of social justice and equality, shared by the young generations during the
1960s, were quickly wiped out and methodically oppressed by the military rule,
aiming at creating a climate of violence and pervasive threat of social persecution.
   From different points of view and with different representational strategies,
                                                   Cinéma & Cie, vol. XV, no. 24, Spring 2015
                                              Alice Cati


several artists and filmmakers have made strong standpoints on this issue. On
the one hand, the aestheticization of loss has represented the main creative force
in dealing with a traumatic past. On the other, from a political perspective, those
artistic responses have aimed at denouncing the denial of burial, which has been
used as a means to extend the state of terror to the afterworld.
   The annihilation and the funerary obstruction of the material body have led
the victims’ families to sublimate the private pictures of the beloved as privi-
leged channels for their personal mourning. In other words, this common social
practice has usually revealed the purpose of rehumanizing the victim before
finding scattered remains, while the indexical nature of the photographic sign
has intensified the relic value of a portrait that cannot be placed on the grave.
Meeting the need of these people to reject the idea of their relatives’ forced
non-existence and to fill the empty space left by their death, the essay will ana-
lyze some case studies1 that develop in different ways the symbolic value of the
private photographs in terms of restorative burial.
   Firstly, this study will focus on two significant projects by Argentinean photog-
raphers – Marcelo Brodsky’s Buena Memoria (Good Memory, 1997) and Gustavo
Germano’s Ausenc’as (Absences, 2006) – which not only highlight the physical
absence of the disappeared, but also translate the aesthetics of the family into a
depiction of grief and violent past. Secondly, the study will move into the Chilean
political arena: by analyzing some sequences – Silvio Caiozzi’s Fernando ha vuel-
to (Fernando Returns, 1998) and Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia de la luz (Nostalgia
for the Light, 2012) – the essay will demonstrate how it is possible to turn the
natural assumption of “(private) images are relics” into “relics are (private) im-
ages.” The films show not only how private images are physically used as a sort of
dowsing rods during the search for body fragments, but also how the practices of
exhumation may offer an uncanny representation of these two intertwining and
complementary ways of visualizing the emanation of the referent, that is to say, of
the irreplaceable, beloved body. Thus, the filmic representation becomes a burial
gesture in order to dispose the missing people in their lacking physicality and
at the same time assign a position to those who still live. Facing a broader theo-
retical debate about visual culture, memory and postmemory related to specific


1
  The four case studies are well-known within the cultural debate about the visual practices con-
nected to Argentinean and Chilean post-dictatorships. From a methodological point of view, the
selected works have been chosen with the purpose of highlighting the transnational nature of the
political trauma that has affected Latin America since the 1970s. Moreover, they were produced
in different historical periods: on the one hand, Brodsky’s and Caiozzi’s projects represent acts of
memory much closer to the crash of the military dictatorship; on the other hand, Germano’s and
Guzmán’s ones testify a persistent lack of restorative justice in the present. Finally, according to
the previous literature, it is possible to reflect on two different, but coexisting, social practices of
re-use of private images in public spaces. Brodsky’s and Germano’s works need to be related to the
visual and performance practices that deal with disappearance and engendered by the cooperation
of human rights organizations (Madres y Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, H.I.J.O.S, etc.) and artists
since 1983. Whereas Chilean documentaries, specifically Caiozzi’s one, must be read in the light of
actions and discourses of the Comisión Nacional de la Verdad y la Reconciliación.

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    Private Images in Place of the Beloved Bodies: Relics Against the Politics of Disappearance


politics of memory in Argentina and Chile,2 such case studies show the intimate
connection between photography and trauma, as well as the subjective turn as an
ideological and conceptual reconstruction of the past based on the privatization
of memories and juridical testimonies.3


A hindsight glance at pictures from the past

   In 1996, twenty years after the coup d’état in Argentina, Marcelo Brodsky
began his photographic essay Buena Memoria,4 in which he meditated on the
collective memory from a private perspective. To carry out this project, the pho-
tographer drew on emotional memory and the purity of childhood in order to
denounce the human tragedy occurred during the years of the Dirty War.
   The title ‘Buena Memoria’ alludes both to the personal memories brought
back through the photographic shots, which render present an absent past, and
to the fact that having a good memory means remembering people, events and
things so that they do not fade into forgetfulness.
   Through the reuse of private images, previously stuck into his teenage photo
album, Marcelo Brodsky created a visual space where the memories of the disap-
peared symbolically intertwined personal and social needs of recovery. Most of
the pictures had been taken and gathered by the artist since 1968, when he was
fourteen and had just begun his photographic practice.
   In a specific part of the project, a selection of fifteen pictures taken from the
family album depicts the artist’s brother, Fernando Rubén, as a main subject,
kidnapped in 1979 at the age of twenty-two. The series Nando, mi hermano starts
and comes to an end with black and white snapshots of Nando where he is either
alone or looks like a ghostly presence. In the key image of the series, Fernando
en la pieza, one of the first pictures Brodsky had shot in his life, Nando is in the
room he shared with his brother, sitting on the bed, but his face appears blurry
and shapeless. Taken with the underexposure of a Euming, an old camera Mar-
celo’s father gave to him, the subject was still and motionless for one minute.
The fact that in the picture Nando seems to have lost his face features may be
interpreted as a sort of premonition of future events, an uncanny sign of a tragic
destiny.
   Photography with its ability to freeze a point in time is a perfect tool that can


2
  See Nelly Richard, Crítica de la memoria, Ediciones Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago de Chi-
le 2010; Ludmila Da Silva Catela, Mariana Giordano, Elizabeth Jelin (eds.), Fotografía e identidad.
Captura por la cámara-devolución por la memoria, Nueva Trilce, Buenos Aires 2010; Gabriel Gatti,
Identidades desaparecidas. Peleas por el sentido en los mundos de la desaparición forzada, Prometeo
Libros, Buenos Aires 2012.
3
  Beatriz Sarlo, Tiempo Pasado: Cultura de la Memoria y Giro Subjetivo: Una Discusión, Siglo
Veintiuno Editores, Buenos Aires 2005, pp. 21-22.
4
  The photographic series can be accessed in the web exhibition at http://www.marcelobrodsky.com/
intro.html, last visit 1 December 2014.

                                                                                                81
                                            Alice Cati


be used to connect the past with the bodily reality of the photographed subjects.
According to Roland Barthes, by looking at a photograph we cannot deny that
the “thing has been there.”5 As such, the picture of Nando attests to the physical
existence of a person, whose body literally vanished, and as it usually happens, it
helps people think about the present in light of the past.
   Although the image shows a concluded, past event, it is boundlessly ac-
cessible through interpretation and recontextualisation, and thus becomes a
changeable and not a fixed reference point. A dialectic is involved between the
factual source and its re-appropriation in the present; in other words the future
events directly influence the reading of the past. Re-displaying Nando’s old pic-
tures acknowledges not only the incommensurability between the meaning of
the image in the past and the one it holds now, but also the possibility to carry
a message of death into the future.
   In this section of the exhibition there is another picture, a crystallized vision
explicitly read by Marcelo Brodsky as a “portent of later events.”6 In Fernando
en la fiesta, Nando was photographed during a family party, where adults and
children were spending time together. However, in that precise moment, the
line of sight that connects the pictured subject and the observer is interrupted:
whilst Nando appears with his eyes closed, the people next to him are looking
the other way:

     The backs of the guests remind me a little of the way people turn their backs on what
     was happening around them during the worst years of the military dictatorship. There
     also seems to be a generation gap: the grown-ups ignore the children, represented by
     Fernando, and look the other way.7

   It is possible to imagine that the nostalgic desires shape the current act of
viewing, because it is clearly settled on the discrepancy between what the view-
er knows and what the subject of the image cannot have known. That is the
reason why, as far as the work of postmemorial interpretation is concerned,
Marianne Hirsch assumes that “the picture’s indexicality is more performative
– based on the viewer’s needs and desires – than factual.”8 Moreover, in front
of every “picture from before,” the vectorial temporality typically displayed in
the family album collapses. The representation of a lifetime is marked by the
natural growing of children or the unfolding rituals of the social space, but
the recollection of traumatic events, such as disease and death, are left in the
blank space between the images. Thus, if the picture was taken to preserve


5
  Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire. Notes sur la photographie, Ed. Gallimard, Paris 1980 (Eng. ed.
Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Hill and Wang, New York 1981).
6
  Nerea Arruti, “Tracing the Past: Marcelo Brodsky’s Photography as Memory Art,” in Paragraph,
vol. 30, no. 1, March 2007, pp. 101-120.
7
  http://www.marcelobrodsky.com/intro.html, last visit 1 December 2014.
8
  Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust,
Columbia University Press, New York 2012, p. 61.

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    Private Images in Place of the Beloved Bodies: Relics Against the Politics of Disappearance


the memory of a precious and intimate experience, by trying to immortalize
the originality of an instant (the projection of the past onto the future), the
emotional involvement in seeing a lost happiness actually activates an opposite
reaction: the projection of the future onto the past.9
   From a personal point of view, Marcelo Brodsky delves into heterogeneous
time plans to analyze the dynamic layering of time, intrinsically related to the
mourning process of a death without a body. It can also be noticed that the
restorative looking is constructed by unveiling a subjectivity that permeates the
single images taken into account as well as the whole visual project. Personal
memory, by working in an articulated way through an artistic expression, triggers
the process of collective memory. Following Brodsky, the viewers are perfectly
aware that these pictures play a part in both private time and the time of his-
tory. This temporal intertwining produces the collapse of the conventional time
frames, which surfaces in conventional historicizing of the dictatorship. Instead
of the common concept of linearity and chronological progression, an emotional
connection to the past signals that the temporal dimension is porous: not only
does the very moment of the past penetrate into the present, but also the very
moment of the future penetrates into the past.


Reframing the private absence

  The migration of the original private image into a new one, affected by the su-
perimposition of heterogeneous projections, shows how the familial structures of
mediation and representation increasingly favor the transgenerational relation-
ships. As Marianne Hirsch points out:

     Familial structures of mediation and representation facilitate the affiliative acts of post-
     generation. The idiom of family can become an accessible lingua franca easing identifi-
     cation and projection across distance and difference. This explains the pervasiveness of
     family pictures and family narratives as artistic media in the aftermath of trauma.10

   Private images are not only affective memories of personal experiences, but
they are also conventional representations, through which the family is per-
ceived from the outside. The family snapshot is the image through which family
members imagine themselves, and can be recognized by others.11 In this sense,
a person can easily imagine to be in the pictures of other people and share their


9
  Nelly Richard (ed.), Políticas y estéticas de la memoria, Editorial Un Cuarto Propio, Santiago de
Chile 2000, p. 166.
10
   Ivi, p. 39. See also, Nelly Richard, Fracturas de la memoria. Arte y pensamiento crítico, Siglo XXI,
Buenos Aires 2007.
11
   Luisella Farinotti, “Fuori di sé. Identità e immagine,” in Comunicazioni Sociali, (special issue
on L’impulso autoetnografico. Radicamento e riflessività nell’era intermediale, ed. by Alice Cati and
Glenda Franchin) no. 3, 2012, p. 450.

                                                                                                    83
                                          Alice Cati


aspirations and desires they secretly harbour. Thus, the recovery process of those
who have been lost appears particularly effective when the past is re-enacted in
the present by means of private images.
   A literal re-enactment of past family experiences is presented in Gustavo Ger-
mano’s visual project, Ausenc’as, inaugurated on 26 February 2008 at the Centro
Cultural Recoleta in Buenos Aires.12 The photographic exhibit displays fourteen
sets of two pictures, where an old family picture from the 1970s is placed next to
a new one shot more than thirty years later with the same people, décor and con-
ditions as the originals. However, the viewers immediately face the empty space
left by the vanished body. Even the title of the exhibition alludes to the idea of
erasure by removing the stem in the letter ‘i’ of the word ‘ausencias’.
   Ordinary moments as well as extraordinary rituals are eternalized by the origi-
nal pictures that still spread their poignancy in the present. Their euphoric and
crystalline atmospheres deeply move the observer, whose gaze is suddenly mag-
netized by the palpable void of the second picture put beside the former one.13
Every sign is methodically rearranged and every scene is artificially re-staged,
except for the fact that someone is not there anymore.
   Germano captures absence by re-photographing families, including his own,
prior to and following the disappearance of one or more loved ones. For in-
stance, for the recreation of the photograph of his own family, he chose a portrait
of himself with his brothers – Guillermo, Diego and Eduardo.
   The picture was taken in a photographic studio, during a journey from the
province of Entre Rios in Argentina to Uruguay, its neighboring country. While
the family was crossing the international border, the Argentinian police offi-
cially requested a picture of the four brothers. Except for the fact that Eduardo
is missing, the grown-up men carefully performed their old picture in the new
one. Also here, three temporal levels are interconnected: firstly, the original
picture congeals forever a moment in time; secondly, it is allowed to look at it
in present time; thirdly, such an image projects itself into the future by reiterat-
ing its message forever. In other words, a weird tension influences the reading
of the signs of the past: why shouldn’t Germano’s photo be interpreted as a
memory of the future? Is it really possible to disregard the latent gaze of the
main enunciator/addresser, the Argentina military control that ruled the pri-
vate/family life before and after the atrocity?
   Moreover, making the absence of the body visible, another element stands
out: the passage of time and the traumatic interruption of the natural and pro-
gressive continuity of life. Actually, the ghostly presence of the disappeared is


12
   The group-photograph can be accessed in the web exhibition at http://www.gustavogermano.
com/#ausencias, last visit 1 December 2014. The project has also been developed in two other
series: Ausencias – Brazil and Distancias, devoted to displaced people.
13
   Celina Van Dembroucke, “The Absence Made Visible: The Case of Ausenc’as, Gustavo Ger-
mano’s Photographic Exhibition,” in InTensions Journal, no. 4, Fall 2010, http://www.yorku.ca/
intent/issue4/articles/pdfs/celinavandembrouckearticle.pdf, last visit 1 December 2014.

84
     Private Images in Place of the Beloved Bodies: Relics Against the Politics of Disappearance


not in a condition of invisibility, that is to say, someone or something that is pre-
sent but not visible. On the contrary, it might be said that the proper aesthetic
dimension of the disappeared body is that of a-visibility. After being defeated
by the violent politics of forced disappearance, the victims are the sans-traces,
because for them there is not even an inscription on their tombs that could be
the only traces left after their death.14
   For example, in the last diptych of the series, the picture of two young par-
ents, who are showing their few-months old baby to an amateur photographer/
addressee, is followed by the portrait of a thirty-year-old woman deprived of
her parental care. Leaning on her knees on the same bed where her parents sat,
Laura Cecilia Mendez Oliva looks at the camera, in order to evoke that nothing
can replace the material emptiness of the bedroom, which symbolizes the most
intimate space in the house. Birth and death are put side by side, although the
latter cannot be honored by a decorous inscription in the social space.
   The very uncanny effect of Germano’s photographic project is produced not
only by giving prominence to the empty spot that results from reshooting the
same pictures, but also by depicting a spectral community which overlaps into
the political community of the living.
   Moving from a personal experience, represented by the private image of the
four Germano brothers, the author is interested in reaching the grief and the
mourning process both at a personal and collective level. Because of its serial
visual and narrative structures, Ausenc’as stands for a symbolic palimpsest of
memory, where the intrafamilial relationships (the transmission of memories
among the members of the same familial group) open up to the intergenerational
and transgenerational exchanges (the transmission of memories among different
generations and different social contexts).


A “warm” piece of evidence

   In the range of the visual expressions devoted to cultural trauma, we can find
many documentary films that aim to witness human suffering inflicted by state ter-
ror. The operations of borrowing and recontextualizing private images drew the
attention to documenting the victims’ physical existence, since the light emanat-
ing from the body had chemically affected the photographic film. If that unique
analogical shot had been impressed by the individual and irreplaceable body,
there are still irrefutable proofs and tools that can be used to ensure resistance to
oblivion and contradict national attempts to seclude the country. Similarly, repre-
senting a material connection with the past, family pictures turn into relics both
at a symbolical and ritual level: under conditions of disappearance, when there is
no physical body to mourn, any image of the beloved is considered as an object


 Jean Louis Déotte, La Falsification par les disparus, in Alain Brossat, Jean Louis Déotte (eds.), La
14

Mort dissoute. Disparition et spectralité, L’Harmattan, Paris 2002, p. 228.

                                                                                                  85
                                            Alice Cati


of credence, a fetish that bears the traces of the missing person. Reflecting on the
concept of index, it is not surprising to find documentary works that enlighten the
strong relation between photographic signs and human remnants.
   For instance, in the documentary Fernando ha vuelto the Chilean filmmaker
Silvio Caiozzi filmed the dramatic identification of Fernando de la Cruz Olivares
Mori’s skeleton by the team of forensic experts and members of the Instituto
Médico Legal, namely the coroner’s office in Santiago.
   Spectators are asked to participate in the dramatic experience of the relatives of
a detained person, who later disappeared, and whose corpse finally returned home.
The film documents the family process of bereavement, in particular of Fernando’s
widow, Agave Diaz, to ritualize an unnatural mourning. Following the development
of the four chapters of the film (The Identification, The Wait, The Return, and The
Goodbye), we become aware of the fact that the exhumed remains of the victim need
to be identified, seen, described and assessed before giving him a respectable burial.
Thus, only the recovery of the relics is able to interrupt and put an end to the state
of superimposition of life onto death and indeterminacy that conditions the fate of
any disappeared person, as long as he/she is still missing and, as a consequence, not
proven dead. Nevertheless, as Hito Steyerl explains, “Being subject to observation
provokes the second death of the victim: the one that ends its state of limbo.”15 During
the investigation conducted by Patricia Hernàndez, a forensic medical doctor, and
Isabel Rebecco, a forensic anthropologist, on Fernando’s bones, the documentary
assigns a specific ethical role to the spectator, because by watching the film he/she is
included in the process of observation, which is going to declare the person dead. It
is as if a kind of eye-witnessing is provided, as a final support not only to the belief
that the person has died, but also to attest the countless injuries he/she received at
the hands of his torturers.
   Probably, the crucial sequence of the film concerns the moment when Hernández
describes in great detail the methodology employed to identify Fernando’s skeleton
that needs to be superimposed with Fernando’s private portraits. While some
shocking documents are shown to the camera, the spectator is forced to watch a
macabre montage of Fernando as a living being over images of his skeleton. In
other words, four pictures are glued on a sheet, highlighting a development of the
somatic features as a result of the juxtaposition of a private image and a picture of
the victim’s skull. Inscriptions of the anthropometric measurements point out the
good match between the two figures, or the entanglement of death and life. For
instance, by using the split screen filming technique in a frame, a sweeping motion
from left to right of the dividing line turns a wedding picture into a depiction
of death. Slowly, Fernando’s profile becomes a skull and Agave, by his side in
the snapshot, progressively disappears. Although more wedding pictures appear



15
  Hito Steyerl, “Missing People: Entanglement, Superimposition, and Exhumation as Sites of Inde-
terminacy,” in E-Flux Journal, no. 30, October 2012, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/missing-people-
entanglement-superposition-and-exhumation-as-sites-of-indeterminacy, last visit 1 December 2014.

86
     Private Images in Place of the Beloved Bodies: Relics Against the Politics of Disappearance


a few minutes later with the clear purpose of re-humanizing the victim16 and
making the spectators familiarize with Fernando’s semblance,17 it is impossible
to look at Fernando’s portrait without thinking of him as a “soon-to-become-
victim” of a waiting atrocity. In this sense, the reuse of family memories seems to
emphasize a state of vulnerability, as if intimate life naturally relied on ephemeral
happiness and fleeting plenitude, because an overwhelming catastrophe is always
forthcoming.
   On the contrary, a sort of strength stems from the factual evidence of bones
and the related images of all the remains. By providing a direct contact with
Fernando, the irrefutable proof of his death18 engenders a restorative effect in
those who have suffered the loss of the vanished body. Instead of distancing
and abjection, Fernando’s widow felt the warmness of the bones. In a moving
sequence, she picks them up and makes the skeleton part of the family’s ritual of
mourning. It is a gesture of familiarity and closeness as a response to the outrage
and acts of denial perpetrated by the military. Later she declared: “I had to touch
them, but I also had to give them warmth.”19
   Once identified, the remains of the missing person can return to his/her sib-
lings and be buried again, allowing the bones recover their former dignity. Al-
though, at the beginning, Fernando’s family photographs and the close-ups of his
skull could not be integrated smoothly, but such a photographic superimposition
challenges the spectators to accept the entanglement between death and life.
   The documentary ends with the preparation of the funeral and the ceremony
at a public cemetery, where the burial is attended by Fernando’s relatives and a
crowd of political activists. Without forgetting that many of the disappeared re-
main nameless, Caiozzi makes the victims (Fernando, but also his relatives Agave,
Fernando’s mother and his son) both recognizable and representative in order to
stand in the family as a prime site of affliction as well as of social recovery.


Collecting fragments of matter

  According to Michel de Certeau, burying a dead person has a symbolic mean-
ing that reassesses his/her place in history. By marking the boundary between
present and past, societies try to reshape the horizon of possibilities for those




16
   See Tomás Crowder-Taraborrelli, “Exhumations and double disappearance: Silvio Caiozzi’s Fer-
nando ha vuelto and ¿Fernando ha vuelto a desaparecer?,” in Social Identities, vol. 19, no. 3-4, p. 393.
17
   See Macarena Gòmez-Barris, Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile, Univer-
sity of California Press, Berkeley-Los Angeles-London 2009, p. 113.
18
   As Caiozzi’s second documentary ¿Fernando ha vuelto a desaparecer? (2006) clarifies, Fernando’s
corpse had been re-exhumed in order to conduct a second survey on his identity. Because of the
new forensic analysis, the family suffered a double disappearance of their beloved relative.
19
   Macarena Gòmez-Barris, Where Memory Dwells, cit., p. 111.

                                                                                                     87
                                           Alice Cati


who are living.20 In other words, inserting the person as an ancestor, means revis-
ing familial genealogies as well as national ones.21
   Since the indeterminacy of remains universalizes family relations, any political
hindrance to victims’ identification is an interruption of the genealogical order. Lit-
erally mixed up with dust and heterogeneous fragments, the corpses are only name-
less and faceless human remnants in the mass graves dug by the military forces.
   To unfold this issue, the last documentary of Patricio Guzmán, Nostalgia de la
luz follows a group of women in search of human remains scattered around the
desert lands of Chile.
   The Atacama Desert of Chile, 10,000 feet above sea level, is considered the
driest place on Earth. It is a place where archeologists search for traces of hu-
manity’s past collecting human remnants kept intact by the fiery rays of the sun,
from pre-Columbian mummies to explorers and miners, to the bones of political
prisoners disappeared during Pinochet’s dictatorship. At the same time, Atacama
Desert’s sky is so translucent that it allows astronomers to see the movement of
stars and constellations very clearly by means of dozens of high-tech telescopes.
Whilst the astronomers scan the skies looking for clues to the history of the uni-
verse, at the foot of the observatories a group of women is still digging for bone
fragments of their relatives who vanished during the repressive dictatorship.
   Recurrently in Nostalgia de la luz, the filmmaker wanders around the ster-
ile, rocky, desolate ground of the Atacama Desert with his camera. In one of
these scenes, associated with Vicky Saavedra’s testimony, the camera lingers on a
black and white frame plongée portrait of her disappeared brother. The woman
tells the viewer that a few teeth and bits of bones are all what is left of her be-
loved relative. Furthermore, the archeologists found only one foot, which was
still in his shoe. Again the camera moves toward José’s photograph, showing
the smooth surface and sharpness of the image as opposed to the parched and
fissured soil underneath it. Bleached by the dazzling light of the sun, the young
man semblance is increasingly losing his recognizability. This close-up symboli-
cally represents the dialectic between the whole and the fragment.
   The aesthetic strategy of recontextualizing private images is employed in two
more sequences of Guzmán’s documentary, but they engage different practices of
memory. Toward the end, the director assigns Valentina Rodriguez, the daughter
of detained and disappeared parents, to unveil the deep meaning of the film. As
an astronomer, she has learnt to give another dimension to pain, absence and
loss. What happened to her parents can take on a new meaning if we consider
the universe as an vast site of energy and recyclable matter. Thus, celestial bodies
and human bones are materially, temporally and visually connected. While she is
speaking of her own experience, some private pictures are shown as they are put
into a frame and displayed in the domestic space. Wedding pictures of her par-


20
   Michel de Certeau, L’Ecriture de l’histoire, Gallimard, Paris 1975.
21
  Eviatar Zerubavel, Ancestors and Relatives: Genealogy, Identity, and Community, Oxford Univer-
sity Press, New York 2012, p. 10.

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     Private Images in Place of the Beloved Bodies: Relics Against the Politics of Disappearance


ents, black and white portraits of a smiling Valentina when she was a child, snap-
shots of her grandparents, the real fulcrum of her life, are intertwining like ties of
a genealogical lineage. In spite of the tearing pain they suffered, the family aims to
perpetuate their values through the bright memories that the pictures document.
   The long sequence ends with a cross-fading of two scenes, which apparently
cannot be compared: on the one hand, Valentina is seen while she is lulling her
newborn baby to sleep; on the other hand, there is a huge mosaic made of thou-
sands private, brownish-yellowish photographs of disappeared people. Because
of the passing of time, these photographic images have faded, and some of them
are completely illegible. Rather than bearing the traces of memory, they are now
affected by the flow of time, so that the corroded patina which covers them rep-
resents an index of oblivion and amnesia. Placed side by side on the memorial
wall, the pictures look like small tiles of a mosaic; or the pixels of a screen. As
well as the fragments of a body.
   As a result, the spectator is forced to reckon that together with those women who
handled the desert matter to collect human remains, he/she might be looking for a
past that is impossible to find. The indeterminacy of these human remains is part
of their essence, and their essence defines their indeterminacy. The deterioration
of the images is not a deficiency, but an additional layer of information, which is
about the mise en forme of the ghostly presence. This shape shows how the image
is observed, treated or ignored in the present, along with the clashes of time frames.
   The metaphorical image of the Shakespearean pearl diver, described by Han-
nah Arendt in the portrait dedicated to Walter Benjamin, is suitable to define the
endless action of collecting the remains of the remains.22 Like all relics, private
pictures might be imagined as those living eyes and living bones that the sea had
changed into pearls and corals. Consequently, any precious fragment defies with
its uniqueness any systematic classification and, at the same time, represents a
break in the chronological order of time. The collector – who collects his frag-
ments and scraps from the debris of the past – sacrifices the present to invoke
the shades of the departed. Not only are memory and forgetfulness perfectly en-
tangled, but also the work of juxtaposing heterogeneous fragments entails both
interconnection and disjunction of incommensurable temporalities.


Conclusion

   In Chile and Argentina, photographs have been used as a political vehicle to
denounce state cruelties. From the very beginning family pictures such as por-
traits, snapshots, cut frames or blow-up details represented a practical way of
finding people, as well as an undeniable proof of the material existence of those
people who had either vanished or been executed. Even today, for example, so-


 Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times, A Harvest/HBJ Book, San Diego-New York-London 1955,
22

pp. 199-200.

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                                            Alice Cati


cial practices of traumatic memory are mediated by the huge placards displaying
the enlarged images of the desaparecidos’ faces, carried around public spaces by
the Madres and Abuelas of the Plaza de Mayo.
   Thus, by looking at both social practices of memory and visual artistic op-
erations, it is possible to notice an aesthetic need to give real identity back to
the victims. Through private pictures it is possible to turn the spectral condi-
tion – the state violence imposed on them – into a visible and recognizable
body with a personal and emotional history.
   Nelly Richard explains that the connection between photography and ghostly
presence is sturdier than ever in the case of pictures of the disappeared. The im-
ages remind us that the missing were there and are no longer, suspended between
life and death.23 Typically copied from analogue photos, the grainy images of the
disappeared, as well as the missing people themselves, seem frozen in the past or,
as she puts it, in the continuous present of a suspended death.
   At the same time, images taken in the private sphere urge the viewer to focus
on the fate of singular individuals who metonymically stand for all the other
victims. The uniqueness of the beloved body is reflected on the uniqueness of
the relics left after his/her death. Unfortunately, in too many cases, the relics the
disappeared leave behind are only their own private pictures. The photos show
the victims in a state of innocence, a vulnerable pose which designates a unique
and unrepeatable moment of life in safety.24
   For this reason, those images are being looked at as if they were marked at
a formal level by backshadowing. What’s more, the denial of a public grief in
the present influences the perception of the past and its representations. Hence,
any euphoric home picture may be seen paradoxically as a gloomy foreboding,
influencing the perception of time and therefore leading to the consciousness of
the irreparable loss. This device of “retroactive foreshadowing,” as Michael An-
dré Bernstein introduced it, highlights the latent vulnerability of the represented
subjects, as if their painful destiny had already been written out.25 By warning
about the risk of the “illusion rétrospective de fatalité,” Paul Ricoeur suggests
that being aware of the fact that people in the past formulated hopes, desires,
projects, fears and expectations means breaking up historical determinism, in
order to reintroduce contingency in history.26 Although human actions had un-
wanted consequences, people in the past imagined a possible future. From the
philosopher’s point of view, the gap between the present and the past looks like
a “cemetery of shattered promises.”27 Therefore, a proper restorative action both


23
   Nelly Richard, Políticas y estéticas de la memoria, cit., p. 166.
24
   Ivi, p. 168.
25
   See Michael André Bernstein, Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History, University of
California Press, Los Angeles-London 1994 and Id., “Victims-in-Waiting: Backshadowing and the
Representation of European Jewry,” in New Literary History, vol. 29, no. 4, 1998, pp. 625-651; see
Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, cit., p. 63.
26
   Paul Ricoeur, La Mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, Seuil, Paris 2000, p. 497.
27
   Ibidem.

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     Private Images in Place of the Beloved Bodies: Relics Against the Politics of Disappearance


at a political and social level should reanimate and revive those shattered prom-
ises. If societies pathologize victims’ hopes defining them as mere willful delu-
sions, they risk obliterating permanently the horizon of possibilities which the
disappeared envisaged for their present lives.
    Therefore, it is important to recognize that private pictures not only bear traces
of happiness or simple openness to life, but also that they are not images of victim-
hood. Injuries belong more to the observers and the current need of claiming the
right of burial rather than to the smiling or thoughtful expressions shot in the im-
ages. As Richard suggests, the migration of home pictures from a private to a pub-
lic and mediatic domain transforms the testimonial value (consignación/insistencia)
of photographic trace into an act of political protest (no-resignatión/resistencia).28
    However, in the mourning process, home pictures show that individual life is
deeply intertwined with or, better to say, carved in other people’s stories. Ricoeur
says that the story of a person’s life does not belong totally to him/herself. Birth,
childhood and even death are stages of life that cannot be told in first person, be-
cause the memory of them is lost or because they are inherently incommunicable
as they belong to others more than to the subject himself or herself. Consequent-
ly, if personal history cannot assume a closed narrative structure, any fragments
of life can be placed as segments of a larger scale framework.
    As it has been shown with regard to relics in the strict sense, both the distinc-
tiveness and the representativeness of private pictures universalize family relations.
Social communities aim to restore familial bonds as a necessary step to renew po-
litical connectedness. Where mortality, as opposed to Arendtian “natality,” has
been for a long time the central category of political thought, neither individual
existence could have been preserved nor real conditions for remembrance could
have been created.29 The capacity of beginning something new is inherent in all
living beings, as long as they belong to the visible world. The attempt to begin
something new from the (represented) past, and despite that past, is indicative of
an ethical perspective to hand down the meaning of any forced disappearance.




28
     Nelly Richard, Políticas y estéticas de la memoria, cit., pp. 171-172.
29
     Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1958, p. 9.

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