Saturday, October 10, 2026
News and Views from the Global South
ART-ARGENTINA: Honouring Mothers of the Disappeared
Marcela Valente
- Nearly 100 artistes from various parts of the world are contributing to a huge project that has been in preparation for two years to honour women whose children disappeared under the last dictatorship in Argentina.
The project, ’20 Poems, 20 Artists, 20 Years’, began in 1996 as a simple homage to the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. These are women who have walked around a square here each week for the past 20 years, demanding to know the fates of their sons and daughters who vanished during Argentina’s 1976-1983 military dictatorship.
Since then, so many singers, musicians, writers, poets and playwrights have pitched in that the taped material collected for the exhibition has surpassed all expectations, so no specific date has been set for the event.
The project seems infinite and is growing in circles, like the march the women, wearing their traditional white scarves, perform every Thursday, demanding to know the truth about their children.
The unending work of compiling the material will result in four film versions of the homage, one each for Argentina, Latin America, Europe and English-speaking countries, Claudio Siampo, one of the coordinators of the project told IPS. Each version will feature the artists best known to the local public, and will respect the local language by using subtitles.
The intricate mixing of cultures already is a fact. The British playwright Harold Pinter passionately recites a poem of Chilean Ariel Dorfman which begins: “When they tell you that I have been imprisoned do not believe them.”
A fragment of the film for Argentina was shown in Buenos Aires during the Sep. 11-13 International Communications Congress, organized by the Argentine journalists’ Union, which also plans to present two special programmes for television in 1999.
The organizers have been editing the presentations of the invited artists, who contributed for free, in a small workshop and they have been alternating the performances with scenes from the daily lives of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo.
There are also references to the disappeared in the form of images of empty rooms, abandoned toys or a solitary table in a bar.
The artists read poems, sang or recited plays. British pop star Sting – the first to invite the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo to join him on stage at a stadium in Buenos Aires while he sang ‘They dance alone’ – praised the poem ‘Saint Kevin and the Blackbird’, by Irish Nobel prize winner Seamus Heaney.
Bono, leader of the group ‘U-2’, recited, ‘Mother’, a poem written by another Irish Nobel prize winner, William B. Yeats, while Panamanian singer Ruben Blades sang ‘Disappearances’. Brazilian singers Caetano Veloso and Chico Buarque sang “I am coming home to the south,” and “What does your silence mean?” respectively.
Spain’s Antonio Gala read a poem dedicated to the mothers and Cuban singer Silvio Rodriguez recited the poem, ‘To my brothers who were killed on November 27’, written by Jose Marti.
Argentine artists Hector Alterio and Cecilia Roth, and Spaniard Nuria Espert recited poems by various poets, while British pop star David Byrne selected the poem ‘Song’, by Allen Ginsberg and the Italian Milva read an extract from Bertoldt Brecht’s writings. Uruguayan writers Eduardo Galeano and Mario Benedetti and Paraguayan Augusto Roa Bastos also recited from various texts.
Argentine singer Leon Gieco read the poem, “Psalm X,” by Nicaraguan priest Ernesto Cardenal.
Other participants included Vittorio Gassman, Dario Fo, Chiara Mastroianni (Italy), Glenn Close (USA), Catherine Deneuve (France), Chilean writer Antonio Sk rmeta and Argentine actor Alfredo Alc”n. “We’re waiting for a response from Spike Lee,” said Siampo, who added that the project could wait for the U.S. film-maker to finish his film projects for this year.
No date has been set for the mega project nor has a budget been worked out.
Siampo explained that, thus far, the production has been kept going with contributions from friends and producers who donate their time and labour. The project is still waiting for a loan from the Argentina National Film Institute. The equipment has so far been taken to 11 countries for filming while, in other cases, artistes have sent their videos.
Emilio Cartoy Diaz, the project’s director, said he had refrained from making a chronological narration of historical facts.
“I am more interested,” he said, “in reproducing the circular nature of the corners in the Plaza de Mayo. This is a circular history and that’s why it will never end. The infinite constancy of the Mothers’ work is what I want to see retained as a testimony.”
The 20 poems are much more numerous as the number of original artistes have been multiplied at least fivefold and the mothers have spent more than 20 years demanding to know their chilren’s whereabouts.
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