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back to Exercises of memory (Ejercicios de memoria)

Exercises of memory: Leandro Nuñez

Thoughts on the horror, thirty years after the coup

Leandro Nuñez. Faces (2006)
In cooperation with Laurence Bender and Lucía Kuschnir

“Faces” is an interactive work; the screen permanently shows a series of familiar photos, pictures of those who disappeared during the last military dictatorship, among those pictures we can glimpse current presences; those who attended the exhibition were captured, their pictures were processed and included in this series which bears witness to the fact that horror is not a thing from the past The system controls our image and turns us into passive and necessary participants. We can only see who becomes part of that arrangement and who doesn’t. But those who make part of that memory are just a remembrance, an image without identity, a ghost.

The interface of this work functions just like the memory does, it keeps some fragments and forgets others. It is there where the observers merge with the disappeared, constituting a single list. Being inside this system in any of its forms: active, passive, present or disappeared, is being a part of it; and becoming aware of this is creating another point of view about our current and past reality.

To be “disappeared” is not an intermediate state between life and death. It is not a state in the margins of nature; it is not a balanced state: it is a state of disorder created by men founded on horror and terror. We are immersed in a system in which our mere presence makes us part of it; we are only left to decide what place to take in it. And that is the greatest search of all; that of oneself as starting point in the search of the other. It is not beyond us, the anguish is not someone else’s; it is ours, of each and every one of us. Hidden among memories, the disappeared can never come back to where they never left from before. …You stem from me, I stay in you… Images that are faded, wrinkled, worn out, broken by time, losing their identity, yet we recognize them immediately nonetheless. Meaningful and loaded with terror, they float in time and come back to me.

“Faces” proposes a thoughtful look over a past that is our past.

Leandro Nuñez