What do literature and art do with archives related to repression in the Southern Cone?
Archives: What do literature and art do with archives related to repression in the Southern Cone?
Teresa Basile, Florencia Larralde Armas and Andrea Raina (Coords.)
This book, co-published with the IdIHCS-CONICET-UNLP and the Foundation for Integral Human Development, explores the so-called “archival turn” that encompassed such diverse trends at both global and local levels. Here, the focus is on the remarkable importance of the archives related to state terrorism in Argentina during (and even before) the dictatorship (1976-1983), in their dual nature: the archives of repression and the archives of the victims. These are, as Jacques Derrida would say, “the archives of Evil.” This significant archival surge fostered the creation of numerous literary and artistic works that recovered documents, photographs, objects, files, interviews, bones, and DNA from both institutional and family archives. These collections were manipulated, contaminated, diverted, blurred, slashed, and fictionalized to explore areas beyond the judicial arena, giving rise to the creation of new archives.
