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Expanded Fields: Postdictatorship and the Landscape

2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 21; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13569325.2012.694810

1469-9575

Jens Andermann,

Cinema and Media Studies

Abstract This paper aims to recast debates on postdictatorial memory in the Southern Cone, suggesting that the role of landscape alongside the more familiar models and forms of commemoration – archives, museums, monuments – hasn't thus far received the attention it deserves. Landscape, as a surface of inscription and as a spatial opening, encompasses a number of aesthetic registers, from architecture to writing and the visual arts. Here I shall trace its modulations through some of the memorial gardens created in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, to then focus on the poetic œuvre of Raúl Zurita and, finally, on Argentine films made by children of parents disappeared by the dictatorship. Rosalind Krauss's seminal essay 'Sculpture in the Expanded Field' (1978) will allow me to think about landscape as a critical interruption of monumental re-inscriptions and emplacements, opening these towards spaces of itinerance with a potentiality for moving beyond the temporality of trauma or at least of rethinking the latter in terms of present political practices. Acknowledgements I would like to thank Carolina Aguilera and Ana Torrealba at Corporación Parque por la Paz Villa Grimaldi (Santiago) and Florencia Battiti at Parque de la Memoria (Buenos Aires), as well as Claudia Feld, Elizabeth Jelin and the members of the Núcleo Estudios de la Memoria at IDES, for their insightful indications about the process of creation of these landscapes of memory, their present and future role. To Daniel Mosquera, Rory O'Bryen and Ben Bollig, I am grateful for their insightful readings and subtle suggestions for improving previous drafts. Notes 1 Zurita Zurita, Raúl. 1986 [1982]. 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