Counter-Amnestic Street Signs and In Situ Resistance Rhetoric: Grupo de Arte Callejero

Abstract

During the 1970s and 1980s, several Latin American countries went through U.S.-backed military dictatorships. In Argentina alone the number of people who disappeared between 1976 and 1983 is estimated to be at around 30,000. In the late-1980s activist and artistic efforts to preserve, archive and make memory visible began to take shape alongside criminal prosecutions of military perpetrators of crimes against humanity. An ongoing city-wide network of memory projects in Buenos Aires continues to function alongside the pursuit of justice and human rights in the courts. In this photo essay, I explore the activist art project known as the Carteles de la Memoria, a series of 53 street signs created by the Grupo de Arte Callejero (Street Art Group). These unsettling street signs are designed to confront passersby at various points throughout Buenos Aires with active memories of dictatorship violence. Like sentries of memory, these signs now line the edge of the very river that served as a place of disappearance for thousands of people. This open-air archive joins the network of memory projects that make willful amnesia impossible. First we kill all the subversives, then we kill their collaborators, then...their sympathizers, then... those who remain indifferent; and finally, we kill the timid. —Buenos Aires Governor Ibérico Saint-Jean, 1976 The fault line between the mythic past and the real past is not always that easy to draw— which is one of the conundrums of any politics of memory anywhere. The real can be mythologized just as the mythic may engender strong reality effects. —Andreas Huyssen Every landscape is haunted by past ways of life. —Anna Tsing, et. al. Figure 1: Grupo de Arte Callejero sign at the Parque de la MemoriaMonumento a las Víctimas del Terrorismo de Estado/Memory ParkMonument to Victims of State Terrorism, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Counter-Amnestic Street Signs and In Situ Resistance Rhetoric 163 ATD, VOL18(ISSUE1/2) Warning Signs Signs have the ability to make us stop and think. They can warn us of impending danger or offer the promise of an alternate route.1 Along a pathway that flanks Laguna Beach, near my home in Southern California, sharp-eyed strollers will notice an inconspicuous street sign directed at the flow of people rather than cars. The sign (which looks like any other mundane sign) is out of place and might be lost on the unobservant. It might also be lost on passersby looking at their phones rather than enjoying the scenery. The street sign lurks in the shrubs just off the walking path and commands strollers to take a breath and ‘be in the moment’; a message that resonates with my home state’s laid-back ethos. In Argentina, where I have spent two months out of each year for the past 28 years, there are similar out-of-place street signs, designed to direct people’s thoughts rather than traffic. However, these signs are political in nature and rooted in the context of the traffic of history. They have the power to block traffic, rather than help direct it; they resist the desire for halcyonic, amnestic historical narratives, favored by some in the wake of state-sponsored violent pasts. These signs disrupt and offer new visual vocabularies. They hint at other stories to be told. They show us how to read “landscape history” by implicating passersby in ghostly “multiple pasts” they help us to “get back to the pasts we need to see the present more clearly” (Tsing et. al., 2017, p. 2).2 They also represent the creative capacity for social action in the present, just as they speak to a different type of claim on, understanding of, or title to, public lands. In this photo essay, I explore the post-dictatorship street signs created by the Argentine Grupo de Arte Callejero/Street Art Group as examples of resistance rhetoric found in the geographies of everyday life. Grupo de Arte Callerjero, is a collective of educators, artists, and professionals, bound by a shared commitment to challenge the boundaries between art and activism, and to seek out arenas “for visual communication beyond the traditional exhibition circuit” (“Memory Signs”).3 Bringing Michael Middleton, Aaron Hess, Danielle Endres, and Samantha Senda-Cook’s (2015) notion of in situ rhetoric, as a field of rhetorical invention rooted in the everyday spaces of possibility, into dialogue with Lisa Yoneyama’s (1999) concept of “counter-amnestic” politics, I contextualize the series of photos in this essay within the decades-long, ongoing struggle to archive the experience of the most recent dictatorship in Argentina.