The need to remember
image: Gilprim
In the 1970s and 1980s, Argentina faced a severe dictatorship. The regime did not shy away from using brute force and torture. People who showed their dissatisfaction also regularly disappeared. For her PhD, Ana Saab researched how the memory of these disappeared people was kept alive anyway.
‘By making people disappear, the regime hoped to stifle critical voices, but it also got itself into trouble with this approach,’ says Saab. 'The regime denied the existence of the disappeared people and so they started asking questions about them. In the beginning, these were very logistical in nature: who was doing the work of this person who no longer exists? What about all the other information we have about them?
Mothers
‘From this logistical nature, a very personal form of protest eventually followed,’ Saab continues. 'If you want to make people disappear, and be effective in doing so, you need to erase some form of memory, of archive. While the regime was somewhat successful in achieving that in the public sphere, it failed on the personal level. More and more family members - especially mothers - protested with photographs and other images of the disappeared, supposedly never having existed.'
'Images of identity cards were particularly popular, a particularly unique means of protest. After all, such a card is intrinsically linked to a government. By deploying them, mothers are using the very tools of the regime to contradict its official truth.'
Alienation
To make sense of the effect of this form of visual protest, Saab draws on Walter Benjamin's ideas on man's ability to mimic reality. ‘Benjamin argues that it has two sides,’ Saab clarifies. 'One side is performative and the other side causes alienation. By using the images of disappeared people, the mothers and other family members go against the performative reality of the regime and manage to give meaning to the resulting alienation. Alienation that then serves as a protest against that same regime.'
It is this alienation that caused these visual protests to have such an impact in Argentina. 'This broke the daily routine of silence and obedience to the regime. The images began to occupy an increasingly important position in the public space and the regime had no idea what to do about it. Because these images are still there today, they enable people to critically relate to the past and the historical traumas that came out of that period even now. Especially now that the authorities in Argentina are starting to look at that past in a different way.'