Hallazgos (Jan 2019)
Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, children of the disappeared, recovered grandchildren and siblings: from “detective work” to cultural, artistic and media actions and productions
Abstract
The present article proposes to build a genealogy of dramatic, performance and artistic practices of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, the generation of the children of the disappeared, recovered grandchildren and siblings of appropriated and recovered grandchildren, grouped in Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice against Oblivion and Silence (HIJOS, in Spanish) and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, that took place on the public stage between the end of the seventies and the end of the nineties, which can help to understand, on the one hand, why the theater was considered by the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo as the most appropriate means of artistic communication to reflect on the appropriation of minors as a crime that affects social identity; and on the other hand, can contribute to understand why those who came to collaborate with the political- institutional cause of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo were actors and actresses, whose profession, as affirmed by the philosopher José Pablo Feinmann, is to find their identities through the thousands of faces of the characters they embody. The institutional discourse and the search, denounce and dissemination actions of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo are examined from an approach that prioritizes the cultural, artistic and media aspects of their institutional work. The practices of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo are considered as tactics or strategies according to the different historical-political contexts and the terms developed by De Certeau. To analyze the tactics and strategies, the concepts of social theatricalities, testimony, familism and humanitarian narrative are taken. In addition, studies on generational renewal in the human rights movement are taken into account, starting with the emergence of Hijos in 1995, and the notions of performative protests motivated by trauma, performative DNA, performances and artistic activism.
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