Staged memories: Conflicts and tensions in Argentine public memory sites

Territories of memory

A monument to national peacemaking. A green space. A place for reconciliation. These ideas and words were knotted together in the presidential decree 8/98 of 6 January 1998, signed by President Carlos Menem. In the place where the major clandestine detention centre (CDC) the Naval Academy of Mechanics (ESMA) had functioned, there would be built ‘a monument as a symbol of democratic co-existence among Argentines and their will to be reconciled with one another’. ¹ With this decree a battle for memory began. Indeed, it turned out to be a hinge moment in relation to the need to preserve as sites of memory the places that had been CDCs. Very quickly the relatives of the disappeared presented a recurso de amparo (a writ to protect fundamental rights), and in December 1998, the Second Chamber of Appeals in the Federal Administrative Contention Court asserted that the intention to demolish ESMA was against ‘the interest of all society’ and its demolition

would prevent the establishment of the fate of the disappeared and in the case of their having died, the circumstances of their death, as well as the whereabouts of their remains. […] and [prevent] the whole community from knowing the true history, which would be affected by the destruction of the building. ²

At the time I called such disputes ‘territories of memory’, ³ a notion aimed to open up the meanings and classifications of the past in terms of conflict. It emphasised conquest, litigation, extension of boundaries and above all dispute. Where the State had used decrees and laws to impose pardons and forgetting, different groups and institutions responded by unleashing a battle for memory and truth. This battle had different foci, among them, the incessant demand for justice, the ‘recovery’ of the ex-CDCs, and the opening up of the archives of repression.

In this text, I wish to show the genesis of a field of argument between the actors who participate in human right organisations and the State in relation to the imposition of a notion of memory focused on the sites of memory (ex-CDCs, archives and cultural centres). I analyse moments that helped construct the idea that the ex-CDCs ought to be the nucleus of institutionalisation of memories. To do this, I first discuss the change in public politics and policy with the arrival of a new president in 2003, to then focus on one concrete site of memory, the Provincial Archive of Memory in Córdoba. I start with some general observations about these changes to then focus specifically on the public policies which revolve around sites of memory.

Bringing memory into the state

The change of century was characterised in Argentina by political and economic crisis. 19 and 20 December 2001 created a rift in the country’s history. In relation to the construction of memories of the dictatorship, the year 2001 functioned as a hinge. New groups affected by repression in supposedly fully re-established democracy – let us recall that 39 young people were murdered during public demonstrations throughout the country ⁴ – appropriated the symbols and strategies created since the 1970s and established links with human rights organisations. In this way, different social groups called on the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo to defend them, mothers of other kinds of victims wore the headscarf and new markings indicating the deaths of young demonstrators were added to the headscarves stencilled on the pavement of Plaza de Mayo.

At government level, dialogues were now being initiated between branches of the State and human rights organisations, and proposals for creating institutions of memory and public monuments were put forward that would remember the disappeared. If during the 1990s the dominant State discourse had been one of reconciliation, with the change of century, fissures were beginning to appear within a context still generally adverse to human rights demands. In 2000, the Provincial Memory Commission was created in La Plata, ⁵ to serve henceforth as a model replicated in a number of provincial and municipal agencies throughout the country. Gradually, subterranean memories were gaining access to spaces of power, ⁶ initiating a singular process that would eventually see them transformed into dominant memories.

These tendencies became visible in a striking fashion in 2003 with the arrival of a new president, Néstor Kirchner, whose very figure was one of the most significant elements of this period. When he spoke about the dictatorship, Kirchner positioned himself as an agent involved in that very past. He used the notion of ‘generation’ as a ‘place of memory’ (Nora, 2009), focusing on his personal experience and identity as a Peronist as an element of solidarity, understanding and commitment to the past. ⁷

From the beginning of this century, a State politics of memory was conceived that responded to demands from the victims of State terrorism. Whereas the period of ‘democratic transition’ had been characterised by the search for the traces of horror, including the bodies that had disappeared into common graves, and by demands for trial and punishment, the commemorations of the military coup’s 20th anniversary in 1996 inaugurated a production of ‘small memories’ and ‘local markings’ (Da Silva Catela, 2006) aimed against the various State politics clearly intending to erase and forget. By contrast, the 30th anniversary of the coup in 2006 was a moment of ‘monumental memories’ (Da Silva Catela, 2011), including the creation of institutions such as archives, cultural centres, memorials and sites centring their narratives on State Terrorism, taking the periodisation 1976–1983 as their temporal axis. Thus, memories which had been ‘underground’ for a long time became ‘official’, acknowledged by and informing public policies.

We can pinpoint at least five actions that characterise these politics of memory:

This politics of ‘bringing memory into the State’ had a manifest foundational ambition, the invention of a new tradition where the State assumes that the politics of memory must not be aimed at reconciliation. Thus, for the first time, the memory of relatives and comrades of the disappeared, and all those who shared a collective memory began to dispute a dominant memory accompanied by the State. This newly hegemonic collective memory, naturally, co-exists with new kinds of subterranean memories – especially local ones and those held by groups with less power to impose themselves in the public arena, such as campesinos (peasants) and workers, or those with denied memories (such as the ones carried publicly by the so-called victims of the guerrilla). ⁸

Institutionalised memory: sites, archives, cultural centres

The creation of museums, archives, cultural centres and sites of memory at the beginning of this century in Argentina has generated endless discussions and debates about what these spaces must be like, who they belong to, how their stories are to be told as well as, fundamentally, who is to take these projects forward. Nevertheless, up to now, there have been fewer discussions about what is entailed by the moment when, having been mobilised, certain memories are being cast into the public sphere. The following questions emerge: what role do sites of memory play as producers of political meaning, symbols and significations in the public space? What are the conflicts and battles over public memory?

On the basis of my experience of working in an institution like the Córdoba Provincial Memory Archive (APM), I will analyse some moments of conflict (activities involving the images of the disappeared, exhibitions with sensitive documents, incorporation of non-dominant memories into the archives, etc.). I concentrate on situations of crisis that allow us to see the forms of legitimation used to impose points of view, and the mechanisms of crystallisation of meanings to control what must be said, who can do so, how, for what purpose and for whom. ⁹

Before beginning an analysis of these scenes of conflict, I will briefly give an account of the genesis of the APM. The Archive and the Provincial Memory Commission of the Province of Córdoba ¹⁰ were created – with functional autonomy and independence – by Provincial Law 9286, in the context of the commemorations of the 30th anniversary of the military coup. Three old buildings were allocated for it, situated in the very centre of the city of Córdoba, between the historic town hall and the cathedral. These buildings had housed the Department of Information of the Córdoba Provincial Police (D2) which functioned as a CDC from 1974 to 1980. Law 9286 created an archive as yet without any documents and a site of memory without museographic content. One of the major challenges was to work this double signification Archive/Site of Memory. On the one hand, it is a site of memory, a place where acts of violence, humiliation and mistreatment of all kinds were carried out against political and religious militants, trade unionists, men and women of culture, and simultaneously against common detainees, prostitutes, homosexuals, gypsies and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

The Archive presently comprises a huge documentary collection connected to police and military repression during the 1960s and 1970s, recovered by scouring all the police stations of the province of Córdoba. The process of taking charge of the documents has involved transferring them to the APM building, where they have undergone a process of preservation and cataloguing to make them available for public consultation. Materials are also kept from the National University of Córdoba, the Prison Service, the Archbishop’s Office, the Carbó College and hospitals among others. The accumulated documentary material also comprises private donations (letters, intimate journals, prison notebooks) and other types of documents such as magazines, journals, pamphlets and so on. At the same time, with the section for oral history, an archive has been created that houses more than a hundred interviews where the other side of repression finds expression: popular, political, cultural and religious struggles that were engaged in before, during and after State Terrorism.

In order to be able to give an account of the politics and objectives of the site of memory and archive, a great variety of professionals are involved in day-to-day work: architects, anthropologists, lawyers, historians, communicators, archivists, film-makers, computer experts, psychologists, educationalists and so on. The group is drawn from those involved in human rights activism and those who have a more academic commitment to the subject. This multi-disciplinary team works in a horizontal fashion, with weekly meetings where the agenda of activities is discussed. Discussions about administration and the staging of the past take place between moments of reflection about the place a worker occupies in defining the stories of the site of memory. By contrast with other places and museums, where many decisions about exhibitions and the contents of the museum are taken by technicians, a commission of notables or a working panel, here they are taken collectively.

Some of the questions that will be developed below are tied to the possibility of understanding the ways in which staff at the institution define ‘the necessary’, ‘the legitimate’ and ‘the representable’. I am interested in reframing the political dimensions that underlie these interpretations and evaluations that precede or follow a conflict, during which public actions at a site of memory are submitted to decisions over what ‘is worth being remembered’. On the other hand, I will reframe the notion of ‘administrating the past’, taking up Mario Rufer’s (2010) observations who understands this concept as an unstable but above all unequal process in the struggle to fix and regulate the past. If it is the case that administration means management, it also incorporates the idea of a ‘social appropriation of the forms of ordering, manipulating and attempting to fix, through differentiated resources, access to and the meaning of the narratives of the past’ (Rufer, 2010: 35).ⁱ To understand these processes of the management of the past, my analysis will include a look at the representations, beliefs and pre-notions which support the proposals generated inside the sites of memory and sustained over time.

Whose photographs are these?

Every Thursday, the Pasaje Santa Catalina is filled with 700 photographs of the people who were disappeared and murdered in the Province of Córdoba, the pictures being hung between the walls of the Cathedral and the historic Town Hall. On the same days, the site has school visits. The central strategy of the APM’s pedagogy of memory is that visits begin in the Pasaje, in front of the memorial to the disappeared and murdered, to show just how visible and urban the space was where the CDC functioned. This strategy of using the public space surrounding the APM runs the risk of confronting conflicts of memory in situ, including expressions of opposition to the meanings this space imposes on the public sphere, in the voices of men and women who are going about the city. On one occasion, a woman shouted at those who were participating in the so-called Memory Round street action, stating that ‘those killed by the subversives don’t have human rights’. Those responsible for the site’s educational politics have run this gauntlet of aggression in different ways. At first, they argued verbally, but in time and following a more productive reflection on these events, they have transformed these interpellations into a politics of educational action, using these sentences in order to provoke students into asking questions about their own positions, identities and memories in relation to State Terrorism. Subsequently, these episodic actions will sometimes be translated into written and visual materials for public use. ¹¹

The photographs of the disappeared in the Pasaje San Juan were problematised not only by those trying to advance other significations, demanding the incorporation of other memories that they considered had been denied, such as those of the victims of ‘subversive acts’. There also were (and are) discussions inside the APM as to who should be included or not in these ‘memory strips’. Is there a place there for the murdered? Can those who were executed inside the guerrilla ranks also have space? Disputes can emerge around the authority to use images of the disappeared, or can be posed in terms of punctual questionings in relation to the origin of this private photograph that becomes public. The daughter of one disappeared addressed the institution demanding: ‘who gave you permission to hang that photograph of my disappeared father with my mother who is still alive?’ The most intense debates emerge with the categories of people who are dead but are not clearly defined politically or historically, or those where different interpretations are held by relatives about how and where they should be remembered.

Two examples can illustrate the variety of situations an institution confronts when it makes collective use of individual memories. Among the photographs hung out on Thursdays is one of a young militant of the ERP (Revolutionary People’s Army, the non-peronist guerrilla organisation). For the APM, this person disappeared, as the reports and accusations in CONADEP show. As far as the cousin of the young man is concerned, he was killed by his own comrades in the ERP. So his image should not be hanging alongside the disappeared, since he was executed. The second episode which revealed tensions about what is exhibited in public representations of memory concerns the death of a 6-year-old boy. The boy was killed in a street confrontation between the police and political militants. The boy’s father asked the APM to withdraw the photograph and the name of the boy, since it was making the whole family upset and sad. After various meetings with the father, he finally agreed to allow the memento of his son to remain in public. However, the situation generated a series of questions about what should be done in the face of these demands, whether to prioritise the idea of memory as an institutional politics or to respect the will of the individual or relatives.

In the rhetorics on the objectives and mission of sites, archives and cultural centres of memory, the slogan of weaving links between the past and present is almost common sense. But how are these links established and activated in a public institution with these characteristics? On 19 February 2012, at the exit to the Baile de Cuarteto dance hall in the city of Córdoba, Facundo Rivera Alegre disappeared. Nothing is known about Facundo after that date. There are many claims and accusations, but all of them point towards the police. Facundo was the ‘nephew of a desaparecido’, an identity that he never used, or at least, never used as a calling card. The causes of his own disappearance are not the issue, rather the silence of the State. Vivian Alegre, his mother, like the mothers of more than 30 years ago, went to the human rights organisations in search of help and validated her claim as a relative of someone who had been disappeared, given her brother had been abducted in 1976. She appealed to ties of blood in order to be heard and included in a struggle that had no breaks with the past.

Inside the APM, the subject of debate was about the role the institution should play in the face of this disappearance. In one of the Monday meetings, various ideas came up, such as making a sticker to put on buses, a video, a round table and so on. It was also proposed to add Facundo’s photograph to those hung up on Thursdays, differentiating it by the use of a colour photo by contrast with the others that were in black and white. In response to this, there was a short but effective discussion that thought through the difficult relationship between past and present, the sacred and the profane. Among those who were opposed to this idea, the arguments moved between: ‘It’s not the same, we can’t mix Thursday photographs with Facundo’s’ and ‘The disappeared are one thing but Facundo is something else’. The discussion came to an end with the argument that the photo memorial did not belong to us:

When we made the photos public in the Pasaje Santa Catalina, they stopped being ours and we have to think about what effect they have on the relatives of the disappeared. The memorial is theirs. Those memories don’t belong to us. ¹²

Debates about the public use of photographs of the disappeared and murdered in the Pasaje de Santa Catalina reveal that the demands constructed by definitions of what to include and exclude all turn around the general notion of the ‘victim’. Thus, there are those who claim that their denied memories should also be included, and those who dispute the public meanings the institution/archive seeks to impose, claiming that ‘they ought to be consulted’. Both demonstrate that it is not the photographs themselves that are in dispute but rather control over the place of memory constituted by each of these images in public space. I am thinking here of the meaning given by Pierre Nora to the notion of place of memory and how each strip of photographs is turned into a ‘place of memory’ that encloses a ‘maximum number of meanings in the minimum number of signs’, since as spaces of dispute, ‘they only exist by their capacity for metamorphosis, in the incessant resurgence of significations and the unpredictable branching of their ramifications’ (Nora, 2009: 33). Each of these episodes reveals different levels of interpellation of the site of memory and its workers in relation to the always arbitrary cuts and selections involved in the process of memory. One response would be not to respond to these questions, not to see them as worth thinking through, not to include them in the difficult task of administrating the past. The other possibility is to assume that the challenge is less about affirming ‘memory’ and more about taking up the constant confrontation with the past and the memories that emerge from its interpretation. The case of Facundo demonstrates the subtle nature of the hierarchy that weighs down on the victims, often reproduced by the institutions as denial, without it being noted or recognised. At the extreme, they demonstrate the mechanisms of invisibilisation at work in the space of commemoration that regulate what should be remembered and what should be forgotten, or silenced. ¹³

Can there be a tribute to a traitor? Classification and the sacred place

One of the cells in the former CDC where the Site of Memory now functions represents by means of a typewriter and a short testimony part of the life of a person abducted and subsequently accused of having ‘quebrado’ (broken up), become a ‘collaborator’ and ‘traitor’. Charlie Moore is an ‘uncomfortable’ figure in the memory of police repression in Córdoba. An ERP militant, his figure explodes simplistic analyses of the recent past. Many of those who were abducted to the CDC at the same time as Moore questioned and rejected any acknowledgement of his memory at the site. Nevertheless, the history of the Information Department of the Córdoba Police – D2 in the years 1974–1978 would be difficult to relate if it did not include the controversial and ambiguous ‘character’ Charlie Moore:

Carlos Raimundo Moore, alias Charlie Moore, had been a member of the ERP since at least the middle of 1974 […] On 13 November 1974, Moore was arrested along with his wife Mónica Cáceres in an illegal raid by the personnel of the Information Division (D2) of the Córdoba Provincial Police. Some months later he was sentenced to death by the ERP, accused of having betrayed his comrades and of collaborating with the officers of D2. He served a total of 6 years as a prisoner in D2. Finally, on 13 November 1980, he escaped. He crossed the border and sought asylum in Brazil. On arriving in Brazil on 15 November, he made an extensive declaration in which he reported an impressive number of crimes committed inside D2. After this declaration he was finally granted asylum in England, along with his wife Mónica Cáceres. (Robles, 2010: 33–34)

In thinking about the guide to the D2 site of memory, Moore’s figure often appeared in testimonies: Some witnesses accused him of having tortured them or were sure they had heard his voice, and some of his former militant comrades simply recalled meeting him in D2 as abductees. Much of the information that gives an account of D2 came from his declaration at São Paulo in 1980. The cell in which Moore lived with his partner Mónica Cáceres, where his daughter Natalia Moore was conceived and later baptised, was ‘empty of content’ until the appearance of Miguel Robles’ book. Having published the book under the APM’s editorial imprimatur and having read the smallest details that Moore had related about D2, the decision was taken to do something with the cell where Moore had lived for 4 years in order to narrate the ‘Moore case’. By means of a very straightforward arrangement, a typewriter like the one he used in the CDC to carry out the tasks demanded of him by the police, and a projection with part of his testimony in Brazil. This intervention followed long discussions, conflicts and reflections on the notions we had come to associate with Moore: traitor, broken, torturer. ¹⁴ At the same time, we knew it was impossible to understand D2 as a CDC without including this ambiguous figure who was the product of the concentrationary experience. Neither the publication of the book nor the intervention in the cell was easy and both had a central axis of discussion: the need to understand the camp victims, with no attempt to justify their actions. Nevertheless, there was something prior to this reflection, a notion shared by the majority of those of us working on the narrative of the site: every person who was illegally abducted and tortured in a CDC was a victim. This was the basis from which we began.

Making a short intervention into the site of memory around Moore’s cell concentrated several of the debates about the representations of a site museum and its dangers. One day, two ex-militants of the ERP came into the site to talk to us about Moore. How was it possible that a place intended to render tribute to the victims should finish up homenaging a traitor? People who ask these sorts of questions are not always seeking explanations, and this was the case here. After a long discussion with the research team, these people decided to intervene in their own fashion and make their discontent felt. They turned round the plaque that marked the cell, and wrote the following in a book meant for the narration of the experience of exile:

Charlie Moore came personally to abduct me and beat me in this very place [the book is in what was once the CDC kitchen]. Charlie was more than a traitor to the PRT: he was an ‘agent’ infiltrated right from the start, him and his wife. And he had the luck to escape unhurt from two attempts to execute him. TRUTH AND JUSTICE! Thanks to Charlie I spent ten years in exile. (Capitals and underlining in the original)

This prompted a series of internal discussions and the decision of the team working on the project ‘The Times of Exile’ to remove the page from the book, not because of the content of the message but because that piece of writing did not respect the intention to produce a collective book on exile. ¹⁵

Reversing the caption and attempting to erase Moore’s presence from the camp, or throwing him out as an ‘agent’ might seem to be an act of ‘innocent’ resistance. However, I would suggest that such actions seek to maintain an idea of the ‘purity’ of the victims that permits no shades of grey. It fails to open up understanding and explanation to the fact that the limit situation of the concentrationary experience necessarily includes the ambiguous and the impure. Rather than moving forward over the wounds produced in the concentration camps, it seems that the demand is to maintain a history of polar categories: martyrs/traitors, heroes/collaborators and strong/weak. But the past is always at risk and in dispute. To construct spaces of memory means being able to debate and dismantle the discourses of glory. Explaining the tragedy of the concentration camps, places which generated ambiguities intended to dismantle ‘the other’ until they became inhuman and turned into the guilty. The risk we run is that of saying nothing, and where nothing is openly said, nothing is incorporated or understood in its full complexity. ¹⁶

Other alterities and (dis)interests

From its creation, the APM has sought out and rescued hundreds of documents on repression, making them publicly available. A great deal of this ‘sensitive’ material is used in legal cases or in response to inquiries from victims or their relatives. Among these documents are a dozen albums of police photographs that record and construct the notions of a dangerous ‘other’: extremists, homosexuals, prostitutes, gypsies, among other categories. Throughout the decade of the 1970s, the police gaze produced images of various kinds and formats. These photographs, as opposed to those used in the Thursday exhibits, require investigation, research and institutional decisions to turn them into museographic objects and so make them public. But, above all, they need dialogue and contact with the individuals revealed in the prints. Resolutions about what to show, why and how are not made without tensions, questions and rejections, both by those who have to consent to the use of these images and those who work with them on a daily basis.

Confronting the past also entails recognising other victims, less legitimate, unknown or ignored ones. Access to the documents of repression often reveals what has been silenced by the dominant memories. Once one has access to this type of knowledge about the recent past, it is interesting to wonder about those silences and occasions of forgetting. During the 1970s, D2 was a space of repression whose targets were not just political militants, guerrilla groups, trade unionists and social activists. D2 had a police imprimatur, and its actions were expanded to those considered as ‘social ills’. Prostitutes, homosexuals, poor people and to a lesser extent Jehovah’s Witnesses and gypsies were another focus of repression, abduction, humiliation, torture and death.

Even though these events took place in the same space in which the CDC functioned, these experiences still have no place of public enunciation nor any place in the narrative of the site of memory. Although these subterranean memories are often brought into collective debate, they are difficult to incorporate. Or rather, without negating them there is a certain difficulty in integrating them within the dominant narrative: political violence. On the one hand, the difficulty of access to these communities has to be considered. For example, Jehovah’s Witnesses, whose publications were banned during the last military dictatorship, declined to participate because they were unsure ‘about the APM’s intentions towards them’. On various occasions, the Córdoba gypsy community was invited to look at the police photo album dedicated entirely to ‘Gypsies’, but this never became reality. Whether because of ideological distance (in the case of the Jehovah’s Witnesses) or radical alterity (in the case of the Gypsies) there was no appropriation of the meanings and significance constructed at the site that would (still) allow a dialogue about and with these groups.

The situation of those catalogued as prostitutes and homosexuals is quite different. Both communities, whose militancy, ideological sensibilities and approach were closer to those of human rights organisations, shared the view that there was a space to conquer in the site of memory. A space which they also felt as their own, where they had been prisoners during the 1970s, but a space where alterity is not so radical because they shared many of the banners raised in the name of human rights. This is the case with José.

For the second time, José re-enters what was the CDC in which he was held prisoner during the 1980s for being ‘homosexual’, as he himself remembers. On his first visit, he stated, ‘Today I can only come in and out of the place, but I still can’t tell my experience’. Five years on, José went back to the APM to turn his experience into a public life story, a militant action about his condition as homosexual. He was interviewed for the oral history section. That history today occupies one of the collections entitled ‘Sexual Diversity’ and can be consulted by the public. In addition, during ‘Sexual Diversity Week’, this memory activist organised a round table entitled: ‘You Don’t Talk about That. Analysis of Police Persecution and State Terrorism in Relation to Minorities’. What is interesting is that, in order to do it, he first had to reclaim a space at APM.

The strategies that people from minority and dominated communities take up in relation to ‘legitimate’ memories about the recent past reveal the mechanisms created to make use of a State conjuncture and produce a political re-reading of events from the past that remain in the present, through the use of symbols and actions already legitimised within the horizon of the public sphere. Subtle but intentional, this type of demand also struggles to produce a ‘wider’ narrative about whom the site of memory recognises, accepts and produces. I consider that this type of memory action raises debates about the way in which some groups make a claim for their history to be included and their stories made audible in the present.

Showing horror: the dilemmas of representation

The story about the past includes what happened in the site of memory. Through various means and arrangements, there is an attempt to transmit the forms in which State Terrorism manifested itself, imagining the audiences that might visit the place. The site has permanent exhibitions and thematics such as a library of banned books, lives to be told, escrache and identity. Once a year, in the context of 24 March, a temporary exhibition is being planned, whenever possible making use of the documentary resources of the APM. During 2012 and 2013, the exhibition ‘Moments of Truth’ was mounted. Through photographic images of the period, this show attempted to represent the repression in D2. Once the exhibition and its story had been decided on, we had to choose the images, all coming from a police catalogue entitled ‘Register of Extremists’. This consisted of a date, a name and the number of a negative of an abductee. These negatives had been held by the APM since 2010, when they were requested from the Federal Justice Department. A great number of these negatives matched up with secret abductions carried out by D2 and show men and women in captivity in this police building.

We all know that the violence meted out on the bodies of political abductees has to be told through images, and testimony can situate memories in spaces and times that act as material supports of memory so that it can be ‘credible’. Each of the people who were abducted retained in their bodily and auditory memory details of the buildings that they did not see, but touched and felt. Staircases, the number of steps to go to the bathroom, benches, patios or covered rooms, the sounds of doors or bars, the sensation of vulnerability or asphyxia. These details that can often emerge unexpectedly in life today turned into markers of the memory of the concentrationary experience.

Articulating those stories and the photographic images produced a sort of kaleidoscope of the situations of repression within CDCs. The blindfolds acquired a visual dimension, the blows ceased to be an abstraction and the sensation of vulnerability could become graphic. In this way, when an assemblage of photographs ‘shows’ what innumerable testimonies relate, there is an obligation to put them on display. If planning the exhibition ‘Moments of Truth’ already involved a decision about the use of such images, ‘making them public’ prompted another series of conflicts. Here I will indicate only two. The first was connected to the public use of the image of a desaparecido or survivor without his or her permission or that of a relative. The second dilemma was connected to our own limits in relation to ‘not wanting to reproduce the horror’. These two conflicts came into contradiction with the need for these images to become public, and the decision to make them so.

In discussions on the representation of horror, we tried to turn the question round and ask ourselves what was being revealed. From there came the notion of thinking the photographs as ‘moments of truth’, fragments of the passage of thousands of women and men through the CDC. Confronting the raw image of someone photographed after a beating can make us incapable of analysing it. To be able to emerge from terror is to make an effort to understand the concentrationary experience without falling into the danger of banalising it. What do the photos reveal? How are we to contemplate them, take them up, describe them? Why? For whom? How should they be disseminated, analysed, used? One of the central questions for reflecting about these images says less about their use and circulation during the dictatorship and more about their own contemporary conditions of existence. In this way, the danger that we run, as Didi-Huberman (2004) says, is that of claiming that they are ‘the whole truth’. They are still remains, fragments yanked out of a fraction of a second of someone’s life. On the other hand, although what we see is extreme and has a powerful impact, it is still too little in comparison with what we know. So the great challenge was not to relegate them in the name of horror but to be able to place them in context and recognise them as part of the production of the notion of an ‘other’ on the basis of the gaze of the security forces as they carried out their clandestine and extreme activity. These images show. And the challenge was to include them, despite the difficulty provoked by the reflection on evil.

Here, then, we confront a double tension, in relation to whether those recorded in the images give their authorisation to distribute them or not. At APM, when the images are ‘given back/restored’, requests are made that they be freed for historical or educational ends. The great majority ask for ‘time to think’; others reject the idea because they do not want an image in which they do not recognise themselves to be reproduced, or adduce family reasons, including protecting their children. Interestingly, the same people who have told their stories, given testimony and written about their torture and their experiences in the CDCs refuse to give permission for their image to be distributed right when the request is made. Others, by contrast, give their consent in the hope that they will be turned into a ‘lesson’ about what happened, dropping their individual concerns in order to become part of a more collective and exemplary memory.

By way of conclusion

This survey of some of the conflicts emerging from the unstable situation of representing the past in a site of memory has tried to discuss the difficulties that appear when using the past in the present – with all its shadings and relief, different temporalities and views that are not always concordant. In a general way, I consider that these scenes confront us with forms of administration of that past, but also with how it is recorded and validated in the public arena. On the other hand, they evoke asymmetries in the sites of enunciation and in the way in which we establish dialogues with the knowledge and cultural capital carried by each individual who addresses the public and uses them to validate their demand. Finally, they generate tensions in the institution and reveal the risks to which it is exposed after the decision is taken to widen the notion of memory, going beyond the mere literal enunciation about what happened, to put forward new directions for investigation and include other stories seemingly less legitimate and less firmly established in the dominant memory. To open up is also to put at risk what has been established, legitimised and crystallised, and to take up the conflicts and debates this generates. Such narrated experiences do not cease to be micro-actions, often imperceptible, but good for thinking through what is simple, that is, to assert that memory has to be thought in the plural, that the patrimony belongs to everyone and that these spaces construct open and democratic gazes, and what is complex, which is to put those slogans into action, reflexively, that is to say, open to criticism, doubt, exploration and everything that maintains a state of permanent debate about the public, the social, the cultural and the political.