Life Writing

ISSN: 1448-4528 (Print) 1751-2964 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rlwr20

Archival Autofiction in Post-Dictatorship Argentina

Anna Forné

To cite this article: Anna Forné (2019): Archival Autofiction in Post-Dictatorship Argentina, Life
Writing

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2019.1642174

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LIFE WRITING
https://doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2019.1642174

Archival Autofiction in Post-Dictatorship Argentina

Anna Forné
Department of Languages and Literatures, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This article explores the incorporation and representation of archival Memory; autofiction; archive;
material in autofictional narratives in Argentinian literature Argentina; post-dictatorship
produced during the last 15 years by children of the disappeared
during the last dictatorship (1976–1983). The purpose is to
examine the forms and functions of materiality in the artistic
mediation of memories in what I conceptualise as archival
autofiction. This notion comprehends an artistic expression in
which the authorial subject—identical to the protagonist—
exhibits the creative processes of archival recycling and reflects
on notions of authorship as a way of engaging the reader. I
specifically put the focus on autofictional narratives because the
tensions created in this kind of texts between the materiality of
the past and the present textual configuration of the authorial
subjectivity raise key questions on the relationship between
subjects and objects in relation to the works of subjective memory.

Introduction
This article explores the incorporation and representation of archival material in autofic-
tional narratives in Argentinian literature produced during the last 15 years by children of
the disappeared during the last dictatorship (1976–1983). There has been a continuous
practice among this group of artists, in literature as well as in film, theatre, performance
and visual arts, to work with documentary materials and other objects of the past in an
autofictional mode. Jordana Blejmar, among others,1 has previously highlighted this gen-
ealogy and in Playful memories: The Autofictional Turn in Post-Dictatorship Argentina she
asserts that these ‘pioneering practitioners […] share similar aesthetic choices’ (2016, 3).
In this regard Blejmar points out that:
Indeed, the photographic montages, semiautobiographical novels, subjective documentaries,
testimonial artworks, blogs and biodramas by the post-dictatorship generation are character-
ized both by the use of humor and by an original interplay between imaginative investments
of the past, the fictionalization of the self, visual collages and artistic modifications of docu-
mentary archives. (2016, 4)

While the focus of Blejmar is autofiction and what she calls a ‘playful aesthetics’, the
purpose of this article is to examine the forms and functions of materiality in the artistic

CONTACT Anna Forné anna.forne@sprak.gu.se

© 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License
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2 A. FORNÉ

mediation of memories in what I conceptualise as archival autofiction. This notion com-

prehends an artistic expression in which the authorial subject—identical to the protagonist
—exhibits the creative processes of archival recycling and reflects on notions of authorship
as a way of engaging the reader. I specifically put the focus on autofictional narratives
because the tensions created in this kind of texts between the materiality of the past and
the present textual configuration of the authorial subjectivity raise key questions on the
relationship between subjects and objects in relation to the works of subjective memory.
The guiding hypothesis is that archival autofiction operates in two complementary direc-
tions. On the one hand, this kind of artistic practice plays with the documentary authority
of the archive and the authenticity of tangible objects, a modus operandi which bring into
question how to approach narratives in which the subject interacts with and even changes
places with the exposed material traces and objects. On the other hand, archival autofic-
tion’s transparent self-reflexive mode as well as its recyclive practices, which privilege frag-
mentation and repetition, poses the reader as participant, invited to reconstruct what has
been dismantled and to make sense. This perspective involves a problematisation of the
possible agency of objects in relation to that of the subject, significant for rethinking the
role of materiality in memory practices (Munteán, Plate, and Smelik 2017, 13). Despite
the well-known connections of memory and materiality (Proust’s madeleine) in the
field of cultural memory studies, to date the material dimension of memory work is an
underexplored area. This same observation can be made with respect to the field of life
writing, in which not much attention has been given to what Sheringham calls the
‘hiatus between the materials of the past and the present act of manipulation’ (2005,
53). In the recent works on the artistic practices of the children of the disappeared in
Argentina there are still, to my knowledge, no studies concerned with a how materiality
contributes to the formation of subjectivity departing from the idea of an archival impulse.

Mutual projections
In her account of autobiographical writings in relation to posthumanism, Kari Weil poses
the question: ‘With agency “cut loose from its traditional humanist orbit” and the self ani-
mated and perforated by the material world of which it is inseparable, what becomes of
self-representation?’ (2017, 88). A main objective of this article is to look into the changing
relationship between subjects and objects and its implications for archival autofictional
practices, an approach which connects to the contemporary epistemological discussion
on how to conceptualise subjectivity in relation to new materialism. Autofiction is a
genre inscribed in the epistemological parameters of the poststructuralist ‘subjective
turn’, challenged by posthumanist theory. Stefan Herbrechter and Ivan Callus suggest
that inevitably new conceptions of subjectivity will come out of the ‘specificities of the
present’, but underscore that this does not necessarily imply an epistemological break
with humanism:
Attempts at reinscription and re-application of concepts and terms which have served us well
in the past—including subjectivity—are affected, and rigour demands that they allow them-
selves to be read back by the current realities that they attempt to read. (2012, 242)

In a similar vein, Barbara Bolt maintains that it is unconceivable to invalidate the insights
of the cultural turn, and suggests an understanding of the subjectivity of new materialism
 LIFE WRITING 3

as a material-semiotic actor (Barrett and Bolt 2013, 3, 7). And likewise, according to
Andreas Huyssen, interactions between subjects and objects in memory practices
provoke mutual projections:
[M]emory in and of objects is always based on a reciprocal interchange between self and
object world, affective human perception, and the thing in question. But neither can the
memories triggered by objects merely be seen as reflecting a subjective projection. Both sub-
jects and objects project, and the projection of the object into the subject is tied to the object’s
very materiality, which in turn allows for the projections generated by the subject. (2016, 108)

As Derrida states in his foundational work on the archive, access to it, its constitution,
and its interpretation is a question of power (1996, 4, 16–17), and more recently in relation
to cultural memory, Aleida Assman stresses the constructed character of the archive and
the dynamics of power involved. Assman suggests that contemporary self-reflexive
memory art practices turn to the archive not to store it, but to use it ‘as an index, a refer-
ence to a human “depot of suffering” that is retranslated into communication’ (2011, 13).
This performative use of the archive, and more precisely of photographs, is evoked by
Marianne Hirsch in her influential conceptualisation of postmemory. Hirsch suggests
that in postmemorial practices, indexicality is performative and not factual or referential,
because it is created in relation to the needs and desires of the spectator: ‘the index of post-
memory (as opposed to memory) is the performative index, shaped more and more by
affect, need, and desire as time and distance attenuate the links to authenticity and
“truth”’ (2008, 61). According to Hirsch, the photos of the past only conserve an aura
of indexicality because postmemory shifts in-between the pre-formed repertoires of cul-
tural memory and the performativity specific to postmemory. That is, postmemory
explores the symbolic dimensions of material traces in order to project superimposed
and coexisting meanings that revise the emblematic narratives of memory.
Repurposing of archival material in film and literature is not a new artistic practice.
However, the examples of incorporation and representation of archival material—more
specifically photographs—explored in this article have in common the production of a
critical discourse beyond mere reproduction. It is the narration in-between subject and
object which urges the reader to take an active role in the process of decodification and
construction of new meanings carried out by the author, who is represented at the
same time as created in relation to materiality. The materiality of memory refers to the
incorporation and use of archival material and objects in artistic practices, which in
turn conditions the construction as well as the reception of the text, for as Hal Foster
suggests, the fragmentary materiality of the archive makes it ‘call out for human interpret-
ation … ’ (2004, 5). That is, when the reproduced materials are inserted in new contexts,
they activate new senses by generating something unprecedented in relation to conven-
tional practices and repertoires. In ‘An Archival Impulse’ Hal Foster sets forth (referring
to contemporary art) that:
Finally, the work in question is archival since it not only draws on informal archives but pro-
duces them as well, and does so in a way that underscores the nature of all archival materials
as found yet constructed, factual yet fictive, public yet private. Further, it often arranges these
materials according to a quasi-archival logic, a matrix of citation and juxtaposition, and pre-
sents them in a quasi-archival architecture, a complex of texts and objects … . (2004, 5)
4 A. FORNÉ

In a similar way, autofictional narratives—both in literature and film—call attention to the

constructed nature of the subject, as well as of the material with which the self is confi-
gured. In this way, autofictional texts call for an active reader, who is attentive to the mech-
anisms of story construction. In this regard, Patricia López-Gay talks about a ‘compulsive
aestetisation of the traces’, and drawing on Derrida’s Archive Fever she suggests that this
artistic practice comes about as a way for the archival-I to take possession of, control and
organise the archive (2017, 242).
In the works analysed below, the figure of the archive primarily refers to the concrete
materiality of its elements, which by means of artistic practice acquire new meanings and
open up for a critical discourse. In this regard, archival autofiction can be thought of as a
narrative of return and rewriting in which the figure of the author-protagonist is confi-
gured in-between the material traces of the past and the artistic practices of the present.
Hal Foster famously argued, in the field of arts, that archival artists try to physically
restore historical information, and in some cases the found traces and objects belong to
popular culture, and in other cases they are ‘obscure, retrieved in a gesture of alternative
knowledge or counter-memory’ (2004, 4). I would argue that the artistic series concerning
us here move in between the familiar and the obscure, and that the retrieval of supposedly
trivial objects of childhood can show to have important counter-memorial implications, as
for example in Marta Dillon’s novel Aparecida [Appeared] or in Albertina Carri’s autofic-
tional docufiction Los Rubios [The Blonds].2
In this article, I will look into three literary examples of what I conceptualise as archival
autofiction, with a special focus on the incorporation and representation of photography in
these works: Pozo de aire [Well of Air] by Guadalupe Gaona (2009), Otras fotos de mamá
[Other Photos of My Mother] (2007) by Félix Bruzzone, and finally Diario de una princesa
montonera [Diary of a Montonero Princess] (2012) by Mariana Eva Pérez.3 The first
example is a cross-generic book which combines photography and poetry, the second
one is a short story in a collection entitled 76 and, finally, Pérez’s work is a blog turned
into novel. What these three pieces have in common is that the authors are all children
of disappeared and in all three examples, the authorial subject tries to reconstruct part of
his or her memories departing from a photograph, which also is the archival strategy I
will focus on in what follows. Finally, the three examples can be defined as autofictional,
with a greater or lesser extent of self-reflexivity. In all three examples the real author engen-
ders some kind of fictional double by means of archival practices.

The first and only picture …

The disappearance of people without a trace epitomises the elaborate cruelty of military
repression in Argentina during the last dictatorship (1976–1983). Still today Argentine
families continue to search for the remains of their relatives as well as for the estimated
500 children born in detention given new names and identities by the military. These
events of the past are very present in today’s Argentine, where the trials of the military
continue and the grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo still look for and are reunited with
their illegally adopted grandchildren.
In a press conference in 1979 Rafael Videla, dictator in power between 1976 and 1981,
stated that: ‘But while he is disappeared he cannot have any special treatment, he is an
 LIFE WRITING 5

unknown person, he is a disappeared person, he has no entity, he is not dead or alive, he

is missing’.4 With this declaration in mind, Argentine writer and researcher Martín
Kohan suggests that the political pretension in the seventies to create an everlasting inex-
istence was soon overthrown and disappearance was turned into a unique form of exist-
ence that has endured into present times, that of the disappeared (2018, 71). This
semantic shift is paramount in the oxymoronic title of Lucila Quieto’s paradigmatic
work with photography called Arqueology of absence.5 What is at stake here is an arche-
ology of absence which discloses not only as a search for the traces of the disappeared,
carried out in the personal and public archives, but also a present configuration of that
loss. The lack of pictures from the clandestine detentions centres makes impossible the
invocation of the Barthesian ‘this has been’ but, as Kohan states, this does not imply that
it is necessary ‘to surrender, just like that, to the conclusiveness of the unimaginable,
which is that of the unspeakable, which is that of the inenarrable’ (2018, 73).6
However, Kohan underlines, when it comes to the disappeared in Argentina we are
not dealing with the ‘images in spite of all’ of which Didi-Huberman talks and which
work by means of an oversaturation of corporality. Instead, in the Argentinian case it
is a subtraction of bodies in a limbo between the living and the dead (2018, 74). It is
in this indeterminate midpoint where archival autofiction tries to restore history and
bring it into the present by means of found traces and objects. Every so often, the archi-
val objects are photographs from the past and it is mainly the second generation, that is,
the children of the disappeared and likewise the siblings or contemporaries of the robbed
babies that turn to archival materials in order to reconstruct the story of their parents,
which is also their own story of loss.
In Pozo de aire, Guadalupe Gaona sketches memories of her childhood through an
assemblage of photographs and short narrative poems. What at a first sight seems to be
landscapes photos from the south of Argentina and pictures from a family album,
accompanied by brief poetic reflections, soon reveals a more sinister facet when we read
the prologue of this beautiful edition of what seems to be a coffee table book:
I stand in the bow of the boat with scant balance, my dad in the island, a conquistador in
swimming suit, gives me his hand. My mom runs to fetch the camera. Click. This is going
to be the only picture I’m going to have of my dad and I alone. Winter arrives quicker
than was expected -and takes everything. On March 21st of 1977, my dad goes missing
but that picture remains. And there were many times I went through my mother’s sleeping
table draw to look at it. It is the image I trust the most. (2009, n.p.)7

Pozo de aire consist of a series of brief poems on everyday objects and events, interspersed
with photos of the Patagonian landscape and some family portraits accompanied by lost
words ‘clear of significance’,8 as described by the poetic voice, to tell a story of absences
and presences.
In her review of the book, Mariana Enríquez highlights the strangeness of Gaona’s
work, at the same time that she inserts it into the genealogy of second-generation
artists in Argentina. In the article Enríquez quotes Gaona, who says that when Pozo de
aire was created, she was ‘connected to the works of Albertina Carri, Nicolás Prividera,
Lola Arias, the stories of Félix Bruzzone … ’ and also that:
There is a very strong epicenter that is the disappearance of my dad. It is a starting point that
later resignifies everything. But I tried not to saturate that topic: it is very complicated to face
6 A. FORNÉ

it in an artistic project, and more if it is biographical. For me, the book is something else, but
that is so strong that it ends up going through everything. (2009, n.p.)

The few critical readings of Pozo de aire available approach Gaona’s photo-poems on the
basis of the classic texts of Marianne Hirsch on the family album and postmemory as well
as the interventions of Argentine cultural critic Beatriz Sarlo (2005) on the subjective turn
of memory, or departing from the contemplations on photography by Walter Benjamin
and Georges Didi-Huberman. According to these lines of reflection, the artists of the
second generation appropriate the visual supports to denounce and make visible
absence. In this regard, Natalia Fortuny suggests that the pictures of empty landscapes
taken by Gaona in the present are an attempt of a repetitive reinstatement of the scenes
of the past, as well as a way of creating the photos missing in the family album as conse-
quence of the disappearance of her father: ‘Using family photos she attempts to rebuild the
picture missing in the album. The artist makes evident, thorough new photographs, the
emptiness of the absence, the family breakdown and the emotional hole left by the disap-
pearance of her father’ (2013, 107). This brings to mind the projections carried out by
Lucila Quieto in Arqueología de la ausencia (2011). However, in the photographs of
Gaona no remaking of the portrait of her father takes places, only of the landscapes
and sites of her childhood vacations. In this regard, Fortuny and Blejmar propose that
Gaona searches for memory in the landscapes that her father had contemplated before dis-
appearing, reiterating in the present a visual field of the past, that is, the gaze of the lost
parent.9 According to this reading, the temporal dissociation of the photos and the gaze
recalls and replicates the absence of the disappeared, at the same time as trying to diminish
it. Drawing on Didi-Huberman’s deliberations on the anachronic, Blejmar and Fortuny
suggest that this peculiar distance enables the encounter between the two gazes and tem-
poralities, that is, of present and past (2011, 216–217). This refusal to repeat and cite the
portraits of the past, included in the book, suggest an archival practice which rejects the
possibility of an oneiric and fictional third moment invoked and invented for example
by Quieto in her photomontages where temporalities meet, making possible an encounter
(Amado 2004, 55).
In most part of Pozo de aire, words do not support the images, that is, they do not
reinforce the content, but rather create uncertainty because what we read and what we
see do not correspond. Indeed, the description of the only photo that Gaona has with
her father, which is the vertebral image of the small poetic anecdotes told in Pozo de
aire, is the only example when the words sustain the image in a referential and immediate
way. For the rest, the poems do not translate the images in the sense that they do not
confirm and intensify the content of the photographs, but on the contrary, the relations
between word and image produce indetermination and a sense of confusion. All the
photos of the summer house that appear in Pozo de aire show it from the outside, in
the distance. Only in two of the images of the house appear people, in the first one the
camera observes from a distant position and the observer only sees the silhouettes of
two people interacting inside the house. This image is in colour and its dissolution and
colouration makes us think that it is one of the photos taken by the artist in the
present, at the moment of returning to the place where in her childhood the first and
only photo with her father was taken. The second image in which people appear is a
typical family album photo, with the appearance of a polaroid snapshot taken just
 LIFE WRITING 7

before leaving, to return to the city once the holidays are over. The house is the same as in
the first picture, only nature is a little different and with time also the composition of the
family. The succession of the pictures is hypothetically chronologically reversed, showing
the present before revealing the lost past, with family members happily posing in the grass
outside the house. In this regard, the photographs in Pozo de aire ask to be read in series
according to a sequential archival logic, despite being inserted accidentally in the book and
without legends. It also the spatio-temporal disconnection between the different parts of
the material gathered by Gaona that makes the unattended receiver become a committed
interpreter, like an archivist dedicated to reordering the scattered materials. The arrange-
ment of the images of Pozo de aire is unpredictable and incoherent and, in that way, it does
not enable an immediate decoding. On the contrary, its unfinished and fragmentary struc-
ture requires the active intervention of the reader who is asked to make sense of interrup-
tions and disconnections between the materials of the past and the present act of
manipulation. The possible critical potential of archival autofiction lays in its exposure
of the mechanisms of remediation, a practice that interpellates the reader to participate
actively in the artistic reconstruction of the archive. If it wasn’t for the short testimonial
anecdote included in the first pages of the book, Gaona’s work could be read along the
lines of the recycling of found photographs in contemporary art, which normally inter-
rupts the closed system of autoreferentiality between producer and consumer, as a conse-
quence of the anonymity of the material as well as the erasure of the original context
(Fontcuberta 2017, 149). However, in the artistic series of the children of the disappeared
that concern us here, the aesthetic effect, that is also highly political, is grounded in a
strong affirmation of referentiality as well as of the context of production as well as recep-
tion and in this case: ‘The poetic effects of the found photos are staggered according to the
degree to which the content and the history concerns the observer’ (Fontcuberta 2017,
141).10 In the introductory pages of La furia de las imágenes [The Fury of the Images]
Joan Fontcubierta states that if in the past, photography was tautologically linked to
memory and truth, postphotography breaks those ties (2017, 15). In this way, the usual
sociological use of the photograph of the family album changes. This, however, does
not seem to be what happens in Pozo de aire, a work of art that despite its strangeness
and narrative interruptions relies on the personal archive as an authority. In this case,
despite its invocation to the reader/observer to rearrange the dispersed archival materials,
it does not seem to exploit archival art’s ‘potential to fragment or destabilize either remem-
brance as recorded, or history as written, as sufficient means of providing the last word in
the account of what has come to pass’ (Merewether 2006, 10). In this regard, not only an
encounter between temporalities is problematic and contradictory, as Blejmar and
Fortuny suggest, but also a renewed perception of the past in the present seems unfeasible.
The perception of the photograph so many times looked at in the drawer of her mother’s
bedside table is unaltered, despite its relocation in the poetic archive of the present. Poss-
ibly this is an example of the compulsive aesthetisation of the traces Patricia López-Gay
mentions, which is as a way for the archival-I to manage and rearrange the archive
(2017, 242).
In Félix Bruzzone’s short story Otras fotos de mamá [Other Photos of My Mother] there
are no actual photos reproduced in the book. The story gravitates around the lack of infor-
mation on what happened to the nameless narrator and protagonist’s mother, when and
where she was disappeared and whether it is possible to gather more information about
8 A. FORNÉ

her. The story starts with the narrator and protagonist telling that last Saturday he got to
know Roberto, a former boyfriend of his mother who got out of the country right before
she was disappeared. At Roberto’s house he is showed two photos of his mother, briefly
described in the story:
Roberto talked about my mother and showed me two photos: in one they are both embraced
by a canal: in the other she smokes on a balcony and looks down. When I asked if he had
copies, he said he could do them and he promised that he would look for more pictures.
(2014, 49)11

The narrator-protagonist is asked to stay for lunch and tells that during the meal Roberto
talked very little about his mother. As a matter of fact, his void of memory caused by the
traumatic experiences of political violence, disappearance and exile are made explicit when
Roberto cannot seem to remember when he last saw the narrator-protagonist’s mother, or
why they stopped seeing each other. The only thing Roberto does remember is that shortly
before no one ever again heard from the narrator-protagonist’s mother, by coincidence
they had crossed in the street but they never said hello since she made him a sign not to.
When the narrator-protagonist gives Roberto’s wife Cecilia a ride he thinks of his
mother and the possibility of finding out more, while she talks:
Actually, nothing of what she said mattered much to me, and I felt somewhat uneasy. I won-
dered how old Cecilia could be, but I was more worried about finding out new details of the
morning when Roberto had seen mom for the last time. ¿Where had it been? How long
before her disappearance? Would this be the last news I would have of her or would I
ever find out something else? (2014, 51)12

When the unnamed narrator returns to his house he plans to write in his notebook on his
mother and drink two or three bottles of wine, as he always does when he finds outs some-
thing new about his mother. But he states, this time he did neither. He hopes for more
details, even from Cecilia, and states that every time a stranger talks to him about his
mother, he expects to find about something extraordinary, which catapults his imagin-
ation, with nightmares. Indeed, in Otras fotos de mamá the brief encounter with his
mother’s ex-boyfriend who shows him two photos mostly seems to reinforce the traumatic
void of disappearance and project a need to find out more to write down in his personal
archive, a notebook. The other photos, the ones not yet seen are of more importance than
the ones available. However, in this story the lack of memories and memory objects does
not, as in Pozo de aire, inspire the production new images to substitute the ones lost or
missing or aimed at reproducing the gaze of the lost parent. Instead, the narrative self
is perforated by the persistent voids of the archival objects he manages to gather. Bruz-
zone’s short story on the other photos ends in desperation and anxiety with the narra-
tor-protagonist getting drunk together with the Chinese drugstore owner in his block.
In 2012 Mariana Eva Pérez’s blog Diario de una princesa montonera—110% verdad
[Diaries of a Montonero Princess—110% Truth] was published as a homonymous
novel.13 This intermedial text is of a more extrovert and overtly political character than
the texts of Gaona and Bruzzone, since it relates not only to the personal story of loss
but it also comments on the political and artistic repertoires in post-dictatorial Argentina.
Diario de una princesa is protagonized by Pérez’s autofictional alter ego who while writing
her own texts reflects on the ways the narratives of the last dictatorship have been told and
she affirms that new forms of expression are necessary. This is not a solitary and introvert
 LIFE WRITING 9

exploration of the narrative self. On the contrary, Perez’s text is written from the collective
position of the politically active second generation, who wishes to make public their own
versions of political violence and disappearance. In this regard, a blog is the perfect plat-
form to scrutinise what the narrator calls ‘the embodied institutional prose’14 (2012, 46)
and to dwell on her own strategies of production in what she calls Disneyland des
Droits de l’Homme (126), that is, Argentina. Eva Mariana Pérez participates in many
different ways in the construction of new ways to approach the memories of violence
and particularly in the project of resignification carried out by the second generation.
In the context of this article I will focus on a blog post that dates the 30 of May 2010,
with the title ‘Mi primera foto con papá’ [My First Photo with My Father].15 (Figure 1)
In this post the well-known symbology of the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo as well
as the photomontages of second-generation artists, most notably Lucila Quieto, is repur-
posed beyond mere reproduction by means of a self-reflexive and ironic approach to the
authorial subject’s memory practices. In this picture, reproduced in black and white in the
book, we see a close-up in colour of Pérez’s face, partially superimposed on a blurred
black-and-white photo of her father in the background. By means of the insertion of
this photo, Pérez also plays a game of mirrors when the real writer visually unfolds in
her autofictional diary. The picture was taken when a memorial was placed on the
street where Pérez’s parents lived when being kidnapped by the military. The interaction
with the readers of the blog opens up for an active readership. One of the readers asks if
Pérez actually doesn’t have any pictures of herself together with her parents and she

Figure 1. Blog post from Diaries of a Montonero Princess—110% Truth

10 A. FORNÉ

answers that she only has one with her mother breastfeeding her, but for security reasons
the head was cut off by the photographer, who was her father. In a way, this gesture vio-
lently mimics what was a about to happen, and is being reversed when reappropriating
archival materials in public memory acts as well as in the blog. This public dimension
and collective participation is made explicit when in another post, also from the 30 of
May 2010, Pérez pays homage to Lucila Quieto who ‘captured all these fantasies’.16 Fur-
thermore, in the novel she also suggests that (2012, 125) the collage is the preferred tech-
nique of production in many of the art works of the second generation because it is a
practice that best responds to the concerns of this generation (125).
Indeed, the montage of personal and public materials in different forms of collages is
what characterises archival autofiction in post-dictatorial Argentina. Although all three
texts operate from an archival impulse that gravitates around photos of their disappeared
parents, the differences seem to be more than the similarities. Pérez’s blog-diary works
according to a logic of public archives, which dismantles the certainties of official histor-
iography from a collective position. Likewise, it requests the cooperation of its readers
referring to the blogs and the creations of other artists of the same generation, creating
in this way a new archive, open to the public. The photo-poems of Gaona, on the other
hand, projects more intimate and opaque memories, evoked from a photo stored in a
drawer. Instead of providing reading clues, the scarce referentiality and the incommensur-
ability of images and text in Pozo de aire, requests a reader that moves along with the
authorial subjectivity in the process of arranging and resignifying the interspersed
photos of the present and past personal archive. In Bruzzone’s short story, the interrog-
ation marks abound and the quest for materials to incorporate and arrange into an
archive has just started. In this case, the lack of objects seems to incite the authorial sub-
jectivity more than what the found photos manage to project in form of memories.

Notes
1. This artistic series has been addressed in several recent studies among which the above-men-
tioned by Blejmar (2016) as well as the ones of Blejmar, Mandolessi, and Perez (2018) and
Basile (2019) stand out.
2. See for example Forné (2017, 2018).
3. I am using the edition of Bruzzone’s 76 published in 2014.
4. All translations are mine, unless otherwise indicated. ‘Pero mientras sea desaparecido, no
puede tener ningún tratamiento especial, es una incognita, es un desaparecido, no tiene
entidad, no está, ni muerto ni vivo, está desaparecido.’ See for example: https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=ASMPYg0YueU.
5. In Lucila Quieto’s photo-essays Arquelogía de la ausencia [Arqueology of Absence] from
1999 to 2000 the adult children of the disappeared selected a photograph of their parent
which was projected onto a wall and the child took place in the projected imaged which
then was photographed, producing a new, sometimes the first, picture of child and parent
together. See: http://casanovaarqueologia.blogspot.com and www.comisionporlamemoria.
org/museo/project/arqueologia-de-la-ausencia/.
6. ‘ … entregarse, sin más, a la conclusividad de lo inimaginable, que es la de lo indecible, que es
la de lo inenarrable … .’
7. The Argentinian edition comes with a translation to English by Valeria Meiller and Marina
Mariasch, included as a loose leaf. In Spanish, the text reads: ‘Con escaso equilibrio me paro
en la proa del bote, mi papá en la isla, un conquistador en malla, me da la mano. Mi mamá
corre a buscar la cámara. Clic. Esta es la única foto que voy a tener sola con mi papá. El
 LIFE WRITING 11

invierno llega más rápido de lo esperado y se lleva todo. El 21 de marzo de 1977 desaparece
mi papá. Pero esa foto queda. Y muchas fueron las veces que revisé el cajón de la mesita de luz
de mi mamá para mirarla. Es en la imagen que más confío’.
8. ‘Limpias de significado.’
9. Fortuny and Blejmar also analyse María Soledad Nívoli’s documentary photo essay entitled
Cómo miran tus ojos [How Your Eyes See] from 2007. See: http://comomirantusojos.
blogspot.com/.
10. ‘Los efectos poéticos de las fotos encontradas se escalonan según el grado en que su contenido
e historia incumben al observador.’
11. ‘Roberto habló de mamá y me mostró dos fotos: en una están los dos abrazados en la orilla de
un canal: en la otra, ella fuma en un balcón y mira hacia abajo. Cuando le pregunté si tenía
copias dijo que podía hacerlas y prometió que iba a buscar más fotos.’
12. ‘En realidad, nada de lo que decía me importaba mucho, y me sentía algo inquieto. Me preg-
untaba cuántos años podría tener Cecilia, pero más me preocupaba saber nuevos detalles de
la mañana en que Roberto había visto a mamá por última vez. ¿Dónde había sido? ¿Cuánto
antes de su desaparición? `Sería esa la últma noticia que yo tendría de ella o alguna vez log-
raría saber algo más?.’
13. Montoneros was an urban Peronist guerrilla group active in the 1960s and 1970s. Many of its
members were disappeared during dictatorship.
14. ‘la prosa institucional que se me hizo carne.’
15. www.princesamontonera.blogspot.com.
16. ‘plasmó cada una de estas fantasias.’

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Anna Forné is an Associate Professor of Hispanic Literature and Cultures at the University of
Gothenburg. She has published extensively in the field of memory studies and Latin American lit-
erature and culture, focusing primarily on the narrative configurations of memories of dictatorship
in Argentina and Uruguay. Furthermore, she is currently working on a monograph on The Politics
of Poetics: The Testimonial Genre and the Literary Prize of Casa de las Américas (1970–2011).

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