In the 1970s/1980s, during Videla's military regime in Argentina, countless young men and women, the Desaparecidos, disappeared, after being kidnapped.... Read More
In the 1970s/1980s, during Videla's military regime in Argentina, countless young men and women, the Desaparecidos, disappeared, after being kidnapped. They were killed during the so-called “flights of death” in which sedated they thrown into the sea, erasing their identities and bodies.
This work is about ninety young Argentines held in a detention space, “Garage Olimpo,” narrated by Marco Bechis' 1999 film of the same name.
A book and insert collect ninety photographs of wet tarps, each with the name and date of disappearance of each boy and girl. The cloths, their only remaining trace, on the one hand restore a last dramatic presence, on the other hand the absence of their real face and body amplifies the drama of the erasure of their identity, the absence of even a lifeless body to be returned to their families.
Further endless cloths would be needed for a similar drama, actualized in the recent hope trips that daily cross the Mediterranean Sea, which like a black hole becomes a place of erasure, disappearance and annulment of lives, desires and illusions.
