El Siluetazo: The Politics of the Event [English] (2009-2011)
Channel: Marcelo Expósito
Date: 2013-12-09

"The realisation of silhouettes is the most memorable of the artistic-political practices that lent a powerful visuality to the public space of Buenos Aires and many other cities of the country on the demands of the argentinian human rights movements in the early 1980s. This consist 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 prisioners who 'disappeared' during the last military dictatorship" (Ana Longoni, http://www.sarai.net/publications/readers/07-frontiers/176-186_longoni.pdf).

This video by Marcelo Expósito includes interviews with the art historian and researcher Ana Longoni, and Guillermo Kexel (one of the three artists who originally conceived 'El Siluetazo', before this practice was adopted and pushed forward by Madres de Plaza de Mayo in 1983), as well as original photographs by Guillermo Kexel and Eduardo Gil. This video is part of the collective research project: "Images of 'El Siluetazo' and other creative strategies of the human rights movement in Argentina", carried out by Fernanda Carvajal, Marcelo Expósito, Cora Gamarnik, Ana Longoni and Jaime Vindel, within the framework of the Red Conceptualismos del Sur / Southern Conceptualisms Network, produced by Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid (2010-2011). Further readings suggested on 'el Siluetazo': http://www.afterall.org/journal/issue.25/photographs-and-silhouettes-visual-politics-in-the-human-rights-movement-of-argentina (English), http://marceloexposito.net/pdf/exposito_siluetazo.pdf (Spanish), http://www.adrianahidalgo.com/web/libro/255/ (Spanish) /