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This study analyzes one of the most active memories of state repression during democracy in Argentina : the memorial advertisements (recordatorios ) of those disappeared by the most recent military dictatorship (1976 -1983 ) , which are published on a daily basis in the newspaper Página /12 . In this thesis , I focus on the pictures of the victims of state repression that appear within the frame of these memorials as the expression of both cultural and personal memory .
The leader of Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo , Estela de Carlotto , published the first recordatorio on the tenth anniversary of her daughter’s death , in August 1988 . During that same year , 20 relatives of disappeared people went to the newspaper and followed Carlotto’s footsteps , publishing advertisements themselves . Currently , more than 20 years after the first advertisement was published , three to five recordatorios appear in the newspaper every day .
The emergence of the recordatorios inaugurates a new discursive genre as contradictory as the disappearance itself . On the one hand , they are connected to the announcements related to the search for missing people (serving the goal of finding a person alive ) . On the other hand , the recordatorios also resemble obituaries (making a tribute to someone that has passed away ) . The recordatorio thus emerges as an impossible reality , following the logic of both genres , thus performing both functions in a paradoxical way .
This study focuses on the family pictures that appear in the recordatorios and sheds light on how they illustrate the entanglement of the family and the public sphere , and contribute to the debate on the role of personal subjectivity in the construction of collective memory . From a multidisciplinary perspective , the present thesis aims to capture the complexity surrounding these texts and the familial imagery they include , looking at the inherent tension between the private tragedy of a family that has lost one of its members and the public character that stems from their publication in one of Argentina’s national newspapers . |
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