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HOMO
SACER
The
Place of the Desaparecidos in Art
Encounter
Curator of the encounter: Tomás Ruiz-Rivas
06.11.07–08.11.07
Spanish Cultural Center in Buenos Aires
www.cceba.org.ar
/ info@cceba.org.ar
“Homo Sacer is an obscure figure of Roman
law, in which human life is included in the juridical order [ordinamento]
solely in the form of its exclusion, that is, of its capacity to
be killed, without the person who commits this act being legally
responsible or culpable for this act of annihilation.” This
definition by Ricardo Foster leads to a discussion of the thought
of Giorgio Agamben, who has revived the concept of Homo Sacer to
propose a new analysis of Nazi concentration camps and of certain
key elements of Western law. Life—bare life—occupies
a central position, opposed to political life, within a system of
exclusion/inclusion. As such, the Lager is no longer viewed as an
exception, but rather as a phenomenon that occurs within the logic
of our political tradition.
The desaparecido is an individual whose fate, whose status as a
victim, will never be recognized by the State apparatus of the executioner.
His or her exclusion from political life is the same as that suffered
by a prisoner of a concentration camp. While at the concentration
camp there is an abolition of historical and biographical time,
a disappeared person is pulled out of that time, nullified in every
human dimension to thus reduce him or her to a bare life: an extinguishable
biology without any process whatsoever. In either case, the annihilation
takes place outside the juridical order of that same dictatorship,
in an exceptional space or manner of existence that can only be
explained on the basis of the figure of the homo sacer.
Both in Spain and in Argentina, we are faced with the problem of
how to restore the desaparecido to biographical and historical time—to
political life. Individuals who have been accused of no crime, who
have not been judged or condemned and as such, who have not been
punished, cannot be redeemed or absolved. A number of political
organizations in Spain have called for the annulment of the summary
judgments of Franquism in order to restore some dignity to the desaparecidos
as historical figures—both to those who were executed and
to those who suffered other forms of punishment. But like concentration
camp prisoners, los desaparecidos lost both their lives and their
status as historical figures. Restitution is not an easy task, and
the collective sorrow produced by such an upheaval in society cannot
be appeased by legal means. In Spain—where around a thousand
bodies have been exhumed in recent years—we have seen that
even seventy years later, a reencounter with the disappeared person
is a true catharsis for family members. But we are still lacking
a language capable of expressing the fear and pain that has been
latent in our consciousness for such a long time.
In this encounter, we discussed each participant’s experiences
when dealing with this subject, as well as the analysis offered
by the disciplines of art criticism and history. We spoke of the
place of the disappeared in art, or whether art is capable of creating
a place for the disappeared, and about the kind of symbolic constructions
needed to name the unnamable.
SPEAKERS
Tomás Ruiz-Rivas / Tom Lavin
Artist and independent curator
Günter Schwaiger
Neumarkt-Salzburg, Austria, 1965. Director of short films and documentaries
that have garnered international awards.
Ana Longoni
Writer, researcher and professor of Media and Cultural Theory at
the Faculty of Arts of the University of Buenos Aires.
Francesc Torres
Barcelona, 1948. Visual artist.
Argentinean Forensic Anthropology Team
An association devoted to recovering the remains of the desaparecidos.
Street Art Group
An artistic and political collective in Buenos Aires.
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