Viewing Photography in Post-Dictatorship Latin America by David Rojinsky

Author:David Rojinsky
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783031175909
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Other Walls of Faces

Bearing this premise in mind, it is worth pondering the contrasting fates of the photographic memorial at Puente Bulnes and an analogous photographic mural of framed black and white portraits of the disappeared housed in the city’s Museo de la Memoria y de los Derechos Humanos (Museum of Memory and Human Rights) (MMDH, henceforth). Located in front of Santiago’s oldest park, the Quinta Normal, which is home to several other national museums and cultural centres, the enormous three-storey building complex was rushed to completion prior to the very end of Michelle Bachelet’s first term as President (2006–2010) and is most notable for its use of audio-visual archival documentation in its permanent exhibitions (Sodaro 2018, 112). Yet, while acknowledging the criminality of state repression and eliciting empathy with its victims, the historical itinerary of the MMDH emphasises universal human rights, the experience of terror and the authority of the memory museum as archival repository. In other words, the political causes, the historical context prior to 1973 and the residual effects of the past in the present are largely excluded from the museum expository design. Indeed, the museum’s mission has underscored its concern with being modelled on, and inserted within, a global network of memorial sites which, to varying degrees, appeal to the Holocaust as a master trope for such sites, the institutionalisation of the ethos of non-recurrence and, by extension, a depoliticised history of yet another instance of human depravity and suffering (Sodaro 111). The “universal” status of the MMDH is further reinforced in its omission, not only of the significance of US intervention in Cold War Latin America, but also of the fundamental role of conflicting political and economic ideologies in the years leading up to the 1973 coup. Moreover, by ending the historical scope of the itinerary with the 1988 plebiscite and the ostensible return to democracy by 1990, the museum evokes an unsatisfactory sense of closure which can only serve as an awkward dissimulation of today’s conflictive memory politics and, ironically, the museum’s true symbolism. According to critics, while responding to the “performative” characteristics of the modern memory museum through its appeal to an interactive pedagogical experience, this memory site actually functions as a monument “to the contradictions of Chilean society and to the fragility of its democracy” (Meade quoted in Andermann 2012, 74). In other words, by offering an historical acknowledgement of the state’s human rights violations, official memory sites such as this one have tended to supplement actual justice by compensating symbolically for stuttering progress in eroding post-dictatorship impunity (Andermann 2012, 69).

However, those same critics agree on the exceptional presence of La velatón, a commemorative space designed to simulate the velatones (candle-lit photographic vigils) performed by human rights groups for the victims of state terror (Sodaro 129). It is here that museum visitors might sit and contemplate a photographic mural of framed black and white portraits of the disappeared covering the south wall in a giant cloud of faces not unlike the concept of the memorial at Puente Bulnes.

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