Argentina: Representaciones y memorias de los Desaparecidos y de la Guerra de las Malvinas

Argentina: Representations and Memories on the Desaparecidos and the Malvinas War. Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, University of London School of Advanced Study. Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory Seminar, Room G34 (Senate House). Conferenciantes invitados: Dra. Claudia Feld y Dr. Federico Lorenz (CONICET Argentina y miembros del Núcleo de Estudios sobre Memoria, Instituto de Desarrollo Económico y Social IDES). Organizado por: Jordana Blejmar en colaboración con el Centre for Cultural Memory Studies at IGRS.

Claudia Feld: ‘Images of Disappearance. A Reflection on Audiovisual Mediums of Memory’

Recent extreme experiences in Argentina raise questions over and encourage reflections on the links between audiovisual communication mediums and social memory. This paper will focus specifically on the systematic disappearance of people during the 1976-1983 military dictatorship. In contrast to other cases of mass crimes that have occurred in different places and at different historical times, in Argentina there are no documentary images of torture and the clandestine murders. Despite this absence of visual documents, images have played a crucial role in the representation of these crimes in memory works during the dictatorship and beyond. Disappearance, an event defined by the subtraction of images, has become visible precisely through the use of images. This paper examines the role of photography, television, documentary and fiction films in the last Argentine dictatorship as an indication of how these events are held in memory and of the different aspects highlighted by these audio-visual mediums.

Federico Lorenz: Ambiguities on the Malvinas War and the Construction of a Narrative on the Recent Past

The 1982 Malvinas war was the only conventional war undertaken by Argentina in the twentieth century. The recent debates that took place in Argentina within the framework of the 30th anniversary of the war, brought to light a series of archetypal representations of the conflict and its protagonists that were shaped in the immediate post-war period. Was the Malvinas war an heroic deed, an absurd confrontation or a military strategy of the dictatorship? This paper will analyse the process of formation and circulation of some of these representations of the war. It will focus on the impact, be it large or small, that these depictions have had on the public sphere, and how they came to be seen as responses to the different political situations that developed as democracy was consolidated and as the conflict was re-interpreted.