'The Disappeared': Exhibit expresses pain of Latin American atrocities

[struggle4progress]

By Doug Pullen / El Paso Times
Posted: 06/13/2009 07:14:52 PM MDT

EL PASO -- Printmaking skills that Fernando Traverso honed in a sticker factory in his Argentinian hometown of Rosario came in handy when he helped falsify documents for friends trying to escape the country's so-called Dirty War ...

Traverso, who spent a week at UTEP last month, is a modest man, still obviously pained by the loss of nearly 30 friends, many of whom he commemorated with bikes spray-painted near their homes or known torture chambers. "It changes the way you live when you lose one of your friends," says Traverso, a self-described militant in the late 1970s. "It didn't stop us. It gave us more strength to move forward ... you can't go backwards."

"The Disappeared" is a look backwards. The piece that has been singled out the most in the press, "Identidad," was created by a 13-member Argentinian collective at the behest of Las Abuelas de la Plaza de Mayo (the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo), who are credited with helping bring down that country's oppressive government.

The 1998 piece has helped identify a few of the thousands of grandchildren stolen from families by the government and military. A mirror representing the missing child is positioned between photographs of two parents, allowing the viewer to see whether there's any resemblance to them. Arrest details and other information is positioned below the mirror ...

http://www.elpasotimes.com/ci_12585747?source=most_emailed

[Judi Lynn]

1. Wonderful image from the excellent article:

http://extras.mnginteractive.com.nyud.net:8090/live/media/site525/2009/0613/20090613__0614-f3-disappeared~7.jpg

This will be remembered by everyone who sees it.

Another article located:

Los Desaparecidos (The Disappeared)

This traveling exhibition, organized by the North Dakota Museum of Art and curated by Laurel Reuter, brings together visual artists’ responses to the tens of thousands of persons who were kidnapped, tortured, killed and “vanished” in Latin America by repressive right-wing military dictatorships during the late-1950s to the 1980s.

The Disappeared (Los Desaparecidos) gathers 14 contemporary living artists from seven countries in Central and South America (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Guatemala, Uruguay and Venezuela), all of whose work contends with the horrors and violence stemming from the totalitarian regimes in each of their nations during the mid- to late-20 th century. Some of the artists worked in the resistance; some had parents or siblings who were disappeared; others were forced into exile. The youngest were born into the aftermath of those dictatorships. And still others have lived in countries maimed by endless civil war. These artists whose work is represented in the exhibition are Marcelo Brodsky , Luis Camnitzer , Arturo Duclos , Juan Manuel Echavarría , Antonio Frasconi , Nicolás Guagnini , Nelson Leirner, Sara Maneiro , Cildo Meireles , Oscar Muñoz , Ivan Navarro , Luis González Palma , Ana Tiscornia and Fernando Traverso . Also included is a collaborative installation Identity/Identidad by a collective of 13 Argentinean artists.

The range of visual languages — drawings, prints, photographs, installations and mixed media — incorporated in The Disappeared (Los Desaparecidos) frequently employs similar forms to evoke the presence of the missing person or persons. Bodies, faces, personal possessions and names, often methodically compiled and arranged, appear both boldly and subtly throughout the work in the exhibition. “Through their intense visual and emotional impact, these works communicate the unspeakable and reveal the artist’s assumed role of social responsibility towards ending the silence surrounding these extreme cases of human rights violations,” says Julián Zugazagoitia, Director of El Museo del Barrio. “In this context of public awareness and education through art, El Museo, as the only venue in the Eastern United States for this internationally traveling exhibition, aims to assemble as broad an audience as possible to confront and preserve the memory of these recent historical tragedies.”

http://www.varnishgal.com.nyud.net:8090/pilar2.jpg http://rushourtribe.com.nyud.net:8090/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/thedisappeared_palma.jpg

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