Two Times Mary

  • Dates
    2019 - Ongoing
  • Author
  • Topics Portrait, Social Issues, Archive
  • Location Morelos, Mexico

The starting point is July 21st of 1976, the night the armed forces broke into my maternal grandparents house in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

The starting point is July 21st of 1976, the night the armed forces broke into my maternal grandparent's house in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The message was clear: if they found my mother they would kill her. She was then forced to go alone into exile at the age of 21. Uruguay was her first stop, then Brazil and finally she arrived in Mexico.

Time tends to deceive us. But it happens the exact opposite if we assimilate and study the past as a time we need to rummage and put in front of us. Walter Benjamin once wrote that "it's the ones before us who invokes us to make justice". But the question is who can and should grant it?

This project retrieves corporal and emotional memory from what detonated that night within my family. Some kind of -micro- "sociology of absences". A process in which I try to transform impossible objects into possible objects, absent objects into present objects, and silenced and repressed stories in told and known stories.

In what ways and manners do we think about one another? How does that pain, which we're not conscious of but it's there, impregnate our corporal memories? What kind of pain is kept in the archives of remembrance? How do you organize the memory and who purposefully omits and distorts it? Even more, are memories a possibility of the politicization through which empathy is rooted in those long pains?

© Valeria Arendar - First photograph of my mother after going into exile. Brazil, 1977.
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First photograph of my mother after going into exile. Brazil, 1977.

© Valeria Arendar - Image from the Two Times Mary photography project
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The Death Flights were a method of extermination consisting of throwing people into the ocean from an airplane, used by the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983, with the aim of murdering disappeared detainees and eliminating evidence of the crime.

© Valeria Arendar - Image from the Two Times Mary photography project
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At 6.30am, on the morning of 24 March 1976, the "Operativo Piloto" (Operation Pilot) was already underway. The area around the Pan-American Highway was completely militarised. The "Campito", which operated between 1976 and 1983, was the most brutal of all clandestine concentration camps: there, the army experimented with new torture techniques such as the electric cattle prod, sexual abuse was also systematically carried out and dogs were used to intimidate people.

© Valeria Arendar - Image from the Two Times Mary photography project
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The siluetazo was an artistic-political action that managed to symbolise the disappearance and, in an emblematic way, to articulate art with a collective social demand: the alive appearance of thousands of people who disappeared during the military dictatorship.

© Valeria Arendar - Image from the Two Times Mary photography project
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Gerardo Álvarez was my mother's partner during the dictatorship. He was arrested and disappeared in the streets of Buenos Aires in December 1977. To this day his whereabouts remain unknown.

© Valeria Arendar - Image from the Two Times Mary photography project
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The dictatorship assumed that the sporting triumph of the 1978 World Cup would bring them eternal glory. More than seventy thousand people filled the stands. But the joy was historically overshadowed as they tried to hide murders, disappearances and torture with the goals of Mario Alberto Kempes.

© Valeria Arendar - The burning of books was one of many methods of a systematic plan to censor and control.
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The burning of books was one of many methods of a systematic plan to censor and control.

© Valeria Arendar - This story is dedicated to those who remain unnamed.
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This story is dedicated to those who remain unnamed.

© Valeria Arendar - Image from the Two Times Mary photography project
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On the 30th of April of 1977, a group of mothers and grandmothers appeared in the Plaza de Mayo in the city of Buenos Aires, in front of the Casa Rosada, the seat of the Executive Power of the country. The so-called "madwomen" of Plaza de Mayo will forever be an example of mental health because they refused to forget in times of compulsory amnesia" - Eduardo Galeano.

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