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Exercises of memory: Guillermo Cifuentes

Thoughts on the horror, thirty years after the coup

Guillermo Cifuentes. Night lessons (1997-1998)

In Chile, both the media and the judiciary (two of the spheres where our recent collective memory is negotiated), the enormous amount of bodies and remains on which the military government based its viability and which represent the deep scar in the skin of our cultural memory, are necessarily denied in so many bodies in order to be able to appear before their symbolic systems. Eventually, in order to see the “truth” from these discursive apparatus, we should blindly turn them into “bodies of evidence”, legal or rhetorical, which allows us to stand back and consign them to others or to the past. Thus, these two representational machines fail to retain the deepest resonance of the experience they try to impose. They establish the present upon the elision of the most unyielding aspect of the past that produced it. Those burnt, marked, dismembered, wounded and interrogated bodies and the resulting tide of public and private expressions that mobilize in their trail are the material inscription of the long authoritarian night on our collective memory skin. It is also in those terms that they should be examined, questioned and reconsidered, whether we believe in the possibility of reparation or that the horrors of human rights violations remain finally unassimilated in ethical and psychological terms. The re-examination of this imaginary and its complex role in the representation of repression and resistance, guilt and innocence, is imperative if we want to understand the nature and effects of a disturbing historical legacy. Guillermo Cifuentes