A genealogy of affective politics
Visual practices of dissidence in post-dictatorial South America
Similarly to the Siluetazo movement (or Silhouettes), the Tupamaros performative practice eventually enters into political activism history and not into art history. Ana Longoni and Gustavo Bruzzone analyzed Siluetazo’s history and its positioning in political activism history, claiming an acknowledgment of this movement into art history in their book El Siluetazo (Longoni and Bruzzone 2007
(* 8 )).
“The realization of silhouettes is the most memorable of the artistic-political practices that lent a potent visuality to the public space of Buenos Aires and many other cities of the country on the demands of the human rights movements in the early 1980s. This consists of a simple design in the form of the outline of a man-sized body on paper, later pasted on the city walls as a way of representing the „presence of an absence of the thousands of prisoners who disappeared during the last military dictatorship.” (Longoni 2007 (* 9 ))
The Siluetazo and Tupamaros practice witness a shift between art and political activism. In the case of Siluetazo the movement can be characterized by a slip of artistic practice into political activism, whereas in the Tupamaros case the opposite movement seems to take place, since political practice shifts into artistic production.
Besides an epistemological question regarding the boundaries of each discipline, this dialectic arises, more importantly, a reflection on the historicization moment which ultimately implies the legitimization of one single practice within a precise field: in this case political history or art history (which generally has a hard time to recognize such practices due to the implicit re-questioning of its own specificities).
Thus, on the one hand we are witnessing an attempt to reflect and legitimize interventionist art as such into the hegemonic narration of art history which is reluctant to acknowledge them (for sure structural difficulties arise also when the mainstream system agrees to legitimize them, most of the time by trying to assimilate them). On the other hand, we also witness the opposite phenomena, trying to decode an artistic value into political activism.
It seems, at least in the post-dictatorial, South American context, that artistic and political tools and methodologies have a strong tendency to intertwine. In addition, this interaction is more likely to entangle under critical political conditions.
This article focuses its analysis on the Argentinean case, which might be considered as the clearest and most illustrative example of affective politics. Therefore I will trace a possible genealogy on the basis of this study case. The main reason behind this choice resides in the fact that nowadays Argentina is the only country that abolished the amnesty law and opened trials (juicios) against the military junta. This achievement was only possible thanks to society’s endurance demonstrating during the past decades.
The purpose of this article is to trace (or rather to imagine) a possible genealogy of those different paths to articulate cultural dissidence, in order to make visible where they met and are inextricably bound together.
In the following sections I will further elaborate on the question of affective politics; from the guerrilla movements to the struggle of the relatives of the disappeared and their specific use of visuals as well as the collaboration with art collectives.
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Giulia Cilla ( 2013): A genealogy of affective politics. Visual practices of dissidence in post-dictatorial South America. In: p/art/icipate – Kultur aktiv gestalten # 02 , https://www.p-art-icipate.net/a-genealogy-of-affective-politics/
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