Spectres and Spectacles of Disappearance: The Figure of the Doll in Argentina’s Memoryscapes

Abstract Scholars interested in post-dictatorship culture in Argentina have focused mainly on two modes of representing ‘disappearance’, namely the photographs of the victims exhibited in commemorations and the silhouettes that originated during the 1983 event called the siluetazo. In this article I focus on a third visual strategy of memory: the figure of the doll. I analyse photographs, paintings and performances which, during and after the 1976–1983 dictatorship, have used dolls to represent the nation’s unburied bodies. I present photographs, silhouettes and dolls as all being part of an aesthetic of the Doppelgänger, characterized by similar issues of replication and phantasmagoria. I look at dolls’ spectral quality and also at their role in performances that were considered by some to be controversial ‘spectacularizations’ of terror. I argue, however, that these works were never just provocative but played an important role in discussions about play, memory and visual culture in Argentina and beyond.