Ausencias

July 31, 2011 Ausencias

One current artist whose work is centered around the dictatorship is Gustavo Germano. In 1976, his brother Eduardo was abducted in the province of Rosario, Argentina. In 2006 in memory of the thirtieth anniversary of the dictatorship, Germano developed a new photography project that he called Ausencias (Absences). This exhibition is an homage to the 30,000 people that were taken and killed by the military government. The project consists of seven diptych photographs. Germano asked friends and family for photos taken before their loved ones went missing that included the missing person. In each pair, the first photograph is a picture taken before the dictatorship, while the second one had been taken just recently. The second photograph recreates the scene and composition of the first, except that the desaparecidos are not in them. In the images below, the left photograph shows two brothers running down a hill. In the photograph on the right, we see the same scene, minus the brother on the left. The empty space and the gray hair of the remaining brother show the passing of time and the losses in Argentina’s history. Only through the duality of this exhibition, through past/present, presence/absence and remembering/forgetting, do Germano’s photographs work to bring the ‘piercing’ memories of the “past into the present of absences.”