On Mothers and Spiders : A face-to-face encounter with Argentina’s mourning

In the wake of Argentina’s dictatorship (1976—83), this article revisits the activism developed by the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo as a singular experience of live architecture. Over the last 30 years, this group of women has become the figure of an endless trauma, much like a monument, that has colonized the landscape of the central square of Buenos Aires in the name of the 30,000 missing. Assuming an experimental ontology that blurs the boundaries between the living and the non-living, I argue that the stubbornness attached to the Mothers’ performance could be grasped in tune with Spider, a massive installation designed by the artist Louise Bourgeois. As Spiders, the Mothers have captured the viewers in their webs while transforming the personal losses into a collective experience of grief. Ultimately, the affective entity co-enacted by the Mothers—Spiders can teach us how memory is experienced and transmitted in the tremors of the spectatorial body, both as a shelter and a trap.