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Exercises of memory: Julieta Hanono

Thoughts on the horror, thirty years after the coup

Julieta Hanono. The hole (2004-2005)

“The hole” was the information center, the detention and torture center that operated in the old police prefecture, in the junction between Moreno and Urquiza streets, in very center of Rosario city. From November 1977 until December 1979, first missing, separated from the world for the first few months, then prisoner for over a year.

In 2004 I came back to shoot a film, a kind of trip into the heart of that monstrous testimony of the devastation. The shooting is a story that explores the place through my most intimate history, intertwined with that of Argentina. Reaching the bottom, reconstructing the sense through images; framing the dark, irrupting with a camera that spins on its rotary axel. Discovering that place that back then we used to call “the shantytown” because of its bric-à-brac architecture, with its boarded and improvised rooms that always tried to obtain the most room possible. Through the image I had to build the relationship between this place, a true «state of exception», as Giorgio Agambentrue would call it, and my own lost inner me..

Desde Paris, pudieron surgir los relieves de una narración en fuga, aquella de mi propia historia que en la Argentina yo no podía ver. Pues siendo tan cercana, continuaba a existir como un punto ciego. When I get to Paris I start making works with doors and wooden boards that I collect from the street. I brought those objects that had been thrown away, condemned to be trash, to my studio. Only later did I understand that recovering those things that had been lost was closely related to my own story: On November 11th 1977, when I was 17 years old, during the military dictatorship, I was gone missing (kidnapped from life and cast out of the world). From Paris, I could start hinting at the details of a narration put to flight, that of my own story that in Argentina I could not yet see. It was so close to me that it continued to be a blind spot.

Julieta Hanono

Abstracts from the text “Returning to the place of disappearance”, by J.L.Déotte

(J.L.Déotte teaches Aesthetic in the Philosophy Department at the Paris 8 University. About these issues he has published, in cooperation with Alain Brossat: L’époque de la disparition (2000) et La mort dissoute, (2002) L’Harmattan, as part of the Aesthetic collection.)

Like Kracauer stated in his “Theory of Film, The Redemption of Physical Reality” (1960) about Nazi concentration camps, it is necessary and possible to take into account the cinematographic representation, provided it is used as Theseus uses his mirror-shield against Medusa. You can’t deal with the Thing without mediation: It is blinding and a killer; it must be attacked through its reflections.

….Julieta can confront the reflections: That which stems from the hole, from the mis-en-scene to the secret, from the disgrace on the small display of the digital camera scanning the labyrinth of the rooms converging into the central hall, where the guardian was. In a room, like all the others, a school teacher’s desk: The place where the questionings were carried out, the power cords hanging. Looking from inside out we understand that it is an apartment that overlooks a busy street: We construe that from the sounds – because of the cars. But, how hard it is to get out of that place! The camera does not fully show all the rooms and keeps coming back to them, in the same manner that the official cover (the currently abandoned Police Station) is filmed and asserted in the same trench, we keep coming back; we are obsessed by one Thing. Always the same facades, the same imprisoned room (Because of which secret record? What accounting entry?) The list of disappeared, does it still exist?) Might it not be that what’s being recorded, in another way, is the place of meeting others, the object of love: What else to do but come back to the place where we have been fully exposed?

But we can construe the hypothesis of the videographic work through one peculiarity, the same function that the special technical pieces of equipment (neither implements, nor instruments, least of all machines) that have always been invented-found (by modernity: perspective, dark camera, museum, picture, movies, etc.) for restoring the representation against the influence of the Thing. And that the challenge has always been to relaunch time by inventing new ways of temporality, but not against the unconscious, which is not affected by time, but against the compulsion to repeat, against destiny, boredom, the eternal return of the living-dead, because all of that is anti-time.