RIGHTS-ARGENTINA: Park to Honour Thousands of ‘Disappeared’

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Dec 11 1999 (IPS) - A park in Argentina’s capital will honour the memory of the victims of the country’s last military dictatorship (1976-1983), with sculptures chosen by a jury of human rights activists, artists, and art critics.

“The jury’s criteria could be summarised in the words of a European revolutionary leader at the beginning of the 20th century, who said ‘ethics are the aesthetics of the future,”‘ stated Argentinean art critic Fabián Lebenglick, a member of the team that selected the works from among the nearly 700 presented.

The ‘Parque de la Memoria’ (Park of Memory) project was approved by the City of Buenos Aires Legislature under the initiative of 10 human rights organisations, most made up of family members of those assassinated or “disappeared” by the dictatorship’s repressive forces.

Legislator Gabriela Alegre, co-ordinator of the Pro-Monument Commission, told IPS the park will be inaugurated in December 2001, though some sections will be open to the public before then.

The dictatorship launched by a military coup d’etat in 1976 is considered one of Latin America’s bloodiest. An estimated 30,000 people were detained, tortured and disappeared, according to human rights groups.

The illegal repression of the seven-year military government included the creation of more than 400 clandestine detention centres. Survivors affirm that many detainees were thrown out of airplanes, alive, over the Rio de la Plata.

The Parque de la Memoria will be located along the banks of this river. Urban experts say Buenos Aires “has turned its back on” the river coast.

The 14-hectare site is bordered by another 26 hectares that surround the ‘University City’ area, where several departments of the public University of Buenos Aires are located.

Prior to the park’s construction, the area will need major improvements because it is currently a vacant area that accumulates garbage and other waste, which in turn pollute the river.

The park project jury included the participation of Estela Carlotto, president of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo. The group was created in 1977 to search for an estimated 500 children who were arrested along with their parents or born to imprisoned mothers. Most were illegally adopted by families with military ties.

Also participating in the selection were the 1980 Nobel Peace Prize winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, and four Argentinean artists and critics, including Carlos Alonso.

International panel members included Brazilian Paulo Herkenhoss, director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, England’s David Elliott, director of the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm, and Lillian Llanes, the Cuban director of the Havana Art Biennial.

“All were invited to be part of the jury because of their commitment to Latin American art and to the concrete issue of art as memory, which has become an independent artistic current,” remarked Alegre.

In late November, the jury announced eight selections from nearly 700 works sent from 44 countries. “It was a very difficult task because there were works that were really incredible,” Carlotto told IPS.

Among the eight works chosen is a sculpture by Colombia’s Germán Botero, who presented a ‘huaca’ (a spiral groove in a spindle), a monument in the pre-Colombian tradition that represents those who are simultaneously present and absent.

Another of the sculptures is by Argentinean Claudia Fontes, who proposed an homage to the youngest of the disappeared, Pablo Miguens, age 14. The work is a silhouette of a youth on a rise with a megaphone in hand, which will appear as if he is standing over the river.

Brazilian sculptor Nuno proposed a construction that represents the clandestine detention centre known as “El Olimpo,” but in the reverse sense, as the walls will be made of glass and the doors and windows are to be opaque.

The eight chosen works will be accompanied by another eight by artists who have been closely linked to human rights work, such as Argentinean Leo Vinci, Poland’s Magdalena Abacanowicz and Jenny Holzer of the United States.

The jury alsow recommended the sculptures of four additional artists, asking that their works also be placed in the park. Among them is a piece by Argentinean sculptor Nicolás Guagnini, whose father was disappeared by the dictatorship.

The park will also have a stone path in which the names of the detained-disappeared individuals will be engraved. The walkway will lead to a chasm in the earth, a kind of “open wound,” according to Legenblick, that ends inside a hill.

There, underground, a hall will be built for showing videos and presenting temporary exhibits.

“Those of us who shared in the duties of evaluating, selecting and granting the prizes, worked with a mixture of utopia and reality that is characteristic of the art,” affirmed Legenblick, “but which also mirrors the struggle of those we are honouring and the struggle of the human rights organisations.”

He added that the identification between ethics and aesthetics, that guided the choice of works, will no longer be “utopic” once the Parque de la Memoria is finally inaugurated.