The figured massacre: an approach to the uses and appropriations of the Siluetas de Margarita Belén

Abstract

The article analyses the uses and appropriations of the Siluetas de Margarita Belén, which were painted for the first time in 1984 by the artist, writer and former political detainee Miguel Ángel Molfino. The images were aimed to register the memory of the victims and the incident of the Margarita Belén massacre in the public space of Resistencia, Chaco. This visual happening acquired a great potentiality for the activation and remake of the latest civic-military dictatorship’s repression. This work investigates the place that Siluetas de Margarita Belén occupied –and occupy still- as representations strategies that, fragmentarily and heterogeneously, evoked the memory of the massacre and its victims.

In this sense, the article reflects on how these images were rapidly taken by human rights militants and used in murals, magazines, posters, invitations to commemorations and even becoming the object of memory policies. The Siluetas were even taken as objects of memory policies. To this end, we seek to reconstruct some production, appropriation and reproduction instances of these images through different supports and contexts since 1984. Moreover, we are interested in investigating the ways in which these visual forms emerged, inscribing the past in different presents. The investigation starts at the use of visuals registers of the Siluetasen various formats of diffusion, texts and interviews with people related to the dissemination of these images.