I first came into contact with the concept of historical memory through the work of Marcelo Brodsky. I was studying and living in Buenos Aires as a temperamental youth, aged 15, when I encountered Brodsky’s piece Buena Memoria in a group show held at the Centro Cultural Recoleta. I don’t remember why my parents and I went, or if we even knew what the show was about. Most likely we had stumbled into the place looking for something to penetrate the shell of mute and half-blind alienation produced by culture shock.
I spoke almost no Spanish at that point, and remember the process of coming to understand the significance of this piece as a slow awakening. Initially struck by the eeriness of the fixed composition of the school-portrait, I focused on the individual faces of the subjects—the children, and tried very hard to understand the concept of their absence. At that age, I’m sure the sensation of sitting for a school portrait that resembles this one was all too familiar.
I was vaguely familiar of the dictatorial history of Argentina, and the use of disappearance as a weapon of state terror. Brodsky’s piece, however, brought the reality of disappearance into perspective for me. This photograph spoke to me of disappearance as the painfully intimate fact that it is. Disappearance is a political, public, and socially urgent question to be addressed and recuperated from on a collective, nation-wide scale. I knew, or vaguely understood this before I was confronted with Buena Memoria. However, this piece introduces the victims of disappearance to me on their own turf, from within their own lives. They are among each other, posing for ritual of the school photo, their individual identification within an institutional collective. I suddenly knew them and through that, felt the reality of their absence.