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The "Informer-Dénoncer" room is where we most strongly sense
the importance of politics in Latin American photography,
due to the omnipresence of political violence.
To understand this violence,
we need to look back at the importance of the Cuban revolution.
It launched a subversive movement in Latin America in the '60s and '70s
as well as a counter-revolutionary movement.
Fundamentally, it is these two faces
of violence, not the same violence,
that we see in the works presented here.
In the '60s, Juan Carlos Romero
collected a series of front pages
that portray the subversive nature of numerous worker
and student movements in Argentina.
He emphasizes that this violence permeates
the society of image emerging at that time, at the cusp of the '60s and '70s.
Unlike Romero, who shows violence in its raw form,
graphic and brutal,
Johanna Calle
depicts this same violence without showing it.
Typewritten below these white photos
are captions describing corpses
and the brutality of the repression
which might befall these subversive movements
but without showing violence, or rather,
by showing it in a more metaphorical way.
The Tucumán Arde collective
that developed in Argentina in the late '60s
allowed a series of artists to occupy the walls
of various cities, especially Tucumán
to denounce the economic and social policies of the dictatorship
of General Onganía.
Later, they will try to organize a show
which will, of course, immediately be censored.
The key figure in the Tucumán Arde movement
is Graciela Carnevale.
This collection of her inscriptions which have been photographed
brilliantly illustrates the interplay of words and image,
the uniting theme of the entire show.
One of the most emblematic works in this room
is by Luis Camnitzer.
In the 60's, he produced a series entitled Christmas Series
which denounces the nefarious influence of American imperialism
in Latin America, but also worldwide.
This series is very powerful.
It portrays a series of Latin American rebels
killed in their struggle,
including the most famous, Che Guevara,
but also Brazilian Communist Marighella,
and Colombian priest Camilo Torres killed with Communist guerrillas,
but at the same time, connecting them to the Vietnam War,
and what Camnitzer calls
the "right-thinking triumphalism" of the United States,
symbolized by Nixon standing on the hood of a car
with his arms raised in victory.
The artists' political engagement extended to resistance
of the counter-revolutionary dictatorships emerging in the '60s and '70s.
A good example of this resistance is Lotty Rosenfeld's work in Chile.
She glued white strips
to a road's white broken line
to express with this gesture
that the Chilean dictatorship of General Pinochet
leads the entire society down a one-way street that she challenges
by creating diagonal or perpendicular lines on the road
and then photographing those lines.
1973 is an important date in Argentina's history:
The return of "Old" Juan Domingo Perón.
He'd led Argentina between 1946-55,
was exiled to Madrid, and now, he'd returned.
To celebrate Perón's imminent return,
Luís Pazos gathered together some students
and as performance art, had them form,
with their bodies, the letters "V" and "P"
meaning Perón Vuelve or "Perón Return"
to "imprint" on a public space and then, on photographic paper,
the great change represented by the return
of the historic leader.
We might think the presence of political violence
is limited to the '60s and '70s,
and then with the return to democracy,
this militant aspect of Latin American photography, of denunciation,
would disappear.
That's not the case.
León Ferrari's work is a clear example.
In the '90s, around '95
he created a series of images entitled Nunca más
to show that in the democratic Argentina of those years,
the scars and memories of the dictatorship's political violence,
responsible for over 30,000 deaths and disappearances, remain present.
This is a particularly interesting image.
It shows one of the key figures of the dictatorship
and a series of headlines
reminding us of how bodies were thrown from helicopters
into the Atlantic ocean to get rid of "inconvenient" corpses.
The representation of violence in this room
isn't limited to political violence,
or subversive or counter-subversive violence.
Sometimes it's other forms of violence,
other forms of human misery,
other forms of social and economic violence that alienate individuals.
The work of Mexican artist Teresa Margolles is fairly representative of this.
She went to all the morgues in Guadalajara, Mexico,
to collect suicide notes.
She wrote out excerpts of these notes
on movie theatre marquees
to denounce the everyday violence and misery
that pushes some to suicide.
The advance of democracy across Latin America
for over 20 years now
contributes to the gradual disappearance of this violence
and its political dimension, so present in this room.
However, other forms of violence are still at work:
That of drug traffickers,
widespread femicide, gang warfare.
These new dimensions of violence
obviously greatly stimulate photographic work,
as well as aesthetics and film in contemporary Latin America.
English Translation Lynn MASSEY
S O F T I T R A G E C O M