to find a way of reclaiming the dead

"Poets and intellectuals—who are paid little, and who are usually ignored by the general population—have this consolation, at least: they are the ones the tyrants go after first." - Frederick Smock, Poetry & Compassion

A slow day at work and the first true spring "spring day" had me feeling a bit of cabin fever, so I took a long walk and then a train ride uptown to Spanish Harlem to visit El Museo del Barrio to see The Disappeared (Los Desparecidos).

One of the first (and only) times I bore witness to my father and his father in an all-out war of words was on a Sunday morning in 1982, coming home to pick me up after one of the many sleepovers at my grandparents'. The night before, my parents had gone to see Costa-Gavras' film Missing, about the execution of Charles Horman, a 31-year-old Harvard graduate (along with his friend, Frank Teruggi), who was just one of tens of thousands of workers and intellectuals that "disappeared" during Pinochet's coup against Allende. What stuck with me about this morning was the absolute rage I heard (and did not recognize) in my father's voice. My father—who I know battled with his dad over the Vietnam War, Watergate, Kent State, and all that that decade was about—was standing in an archway of his childhood home, staring at his father with, for the first and only time I ever saw, a look of absolute disgust. I was not yet 10 years old. It would be several years before I saw the movie myself, but that morning memory stayed with me and initiated a fascination and desire for knowledge not only about Chile's "September 11," but also, all of the atrocities that ravaged South America for decades.

The Disappeared includes photographs, prints, and sketches, all works by artists from countries throughout South America—including Chile, Colombia, Uruguay, and Argentina, each victim of the terror and violence of their governments (often aided and abetted by our own)—who "vanished" thousands upon thousands of their own populations and kidnapped and tortured thousands more. The artists often have direct links to the tragedy, either as workers in the resistance; family of the "disappeared"; or living as exiles themselves.

The exhibit brings all of the social horror of these vanishings together with a stifling intimacy. The close up portraits, sometimes of a person's face, sometimes only what remains of their existence, objects, bereft—a piece of jewelry, human bones arranged in the image of the Chilean flag, or a dental x-ray—bring about the inevitable shiver and reveal nothing so much as the rage and despair of the artist by what is missing. What has disappeared.

The exhibition, The Disappeared (Los Desparecidos) runs until June 27; El Museo del Barrio is located at 1230 Fifth Avenue between 104th and 105th Streets in New York.
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Image Credits:
Luis Camnitzer, He Practiced Every Day, From the Uruguayan Torture Series, 1983
Sara Maneiro, Berenice's Grimace (detail), twelve C-prints, 16 x 20" each.