CHAPTER 11

The Role of Art in Restoring Human Dignity at

the Threshold of Forgetting Traumatic Pasts

Caterina Preda

Abstract This chapter analyzes the role artistic renderings of a traumatic past play
in restoring human dignity after dictatorships with specific examples from the Chil-
ean and Romanian experiences and at the threshold of forgetting the past. Although
after the Second World War human dignity was established as a foundational con-
cept for human rights, several dictatorial regimes did not respect this assertion.
Moreover, while human dignity is often considered inalienable, several artworks an-
alyzed in this chapter have the goal to restore human dignity to the victims of dicta-
torial regimes, thereby illustrating that human dignity can be violated. Anchored in
cultural memory studies, this chapter analyzes the role art plays in restoring human
dignity of the victims of dictatorships. I argue that artistic strategies aspire to restore
dignity to the victims of dictatorships through a personalization of victimhood, and
by giving victims “visual dignity,” or as a form of symbolic reparation.

11.1 Introduction

This chapter engages two very different examples of artistic memorialization,

which invoke the restoration of the human dignity of the victims of dictatorships.
The first case I consider is in Eastern Europe, in the Romanian context, and refers to
the memory of the victims of the communist regime. The second case is in the South
American, specifically Chilean, context and considers the memory of the victims of
the Pinochet dictatorship. Both cases illustrate how artists respond to dictatorships
30 years after their end, to remember the victims, to restore their dignity. This hap-
pens at what I call the “threshold of forgetting,” when sufficient time has passed
since the end of the regimes, and in the absence of proper public policies to deal
with the traumatic past.
The regimes in Romania and Chile serve as oppositional case studies for a broad-
er phenomenon in the two regions: non-democratic regimes which appeared in the
second half of the 20th century, after World War II. They represent contrasting ex-
amples of how countries in Eastern Europe and South America, respectively, deal
The Role of Art in Restoring Human Dignity 197

with the past, illustrating what has been called “the third wave of democratization”
(Huntington 1991), countries that witnessed transitions to democracy in the 1970s
and 1980s. According to the theorization on Transitional Justice (TJ), the process of
dealing with the past should encompass in the case of the countries of the third wave
of democratization three stages: truth, justice and reconciliation (De Brito 2001).
Following this approach, the new democratic regimes should identify what hap-
pened in their recent pasts, send to trial those identified as guilty, and then proceed
with societal reconciliation.
These two cases can also work as theoretical landmarks that could be further test-
ed in the same regions, or across other regions. On the one hand, Romania witnessed
a bloody revolution in 1989, which ended the harsh personal dictatorship of Nicolae
Ceaușescu (1965-1989) leading to a democratic regime that has not been able to
confront its recent past. On the other hand, the Chilean regime represents a good ex-
ample of dealing successfully with the past and consolidating a democratic regime
after a traumatic dictatorship (1973-1990). In this chapter, I argue that the analysis
of artistic discourses which confront the recent dictatorial pasts in these countries
shows the limits of the processes of TJ and brings forward a more in-depth under-
standing of how societies deal with their traumatic experiences. In art emerging
from Romania and Chile in the 1990s and 2000s, artists contradict the forgetting the
past (Romania), or the official memory that emphasized reconciliation with the past
(Chile), showing there are unresolved issues connected to the wrongdoings of the
dictatorships.
The chapter explores, how artworks can help restore human dignity through their
mediated experiences and examines which aesthetic strategies artists use to achieve
this restoration.
Human dignity has been defined both as “the source from which all the basic
rights derive their substance” (Habermas 2018, 54) and in a “post-Kantian tradition
as an unconditional feature of the human condition, inherent in and owed to every
human being irrespective of race, gender, age, status, profession or nationality, and
as such dependent on mutual recognition and thus other-regarding demeanour”
(Pless, Maak, Harris 2017, 223). Some authors stress how human dignity is both the
“premise and the practice of human rights” (Garnsey 2016, 86).
After the Second World War, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)
established human dignity as a foundational concept: “a statement against the Shoah,
against totalitarianism, and against the atrocities of the war” (Düwell et ali, 2014,
xix); however, several non-democratic regimes, organized in the second half of the
20th century, failed to adopt this notion of human dignity. Authoritarian or totalitari-
an regimes inspired by both right wing and left-wing ideological projects emerged in
Europe and the Americas committing several forms of human rights violations. Hu-
man dignity was denied to the citizens during the dictatorships in Eastern Europe
and the Southern Cone of South America in several ways: citizens were incarcerated
in terrible conditions, arrested without any warrant, tortured and, in the case of the
dictatorships of South America many remain disappeared (that is their families do
not have any information of their whereabouts).
198 Preda

Although many conceptualizations of human dignity consider the value intrinsic

to human beings (Gewirth) and impossible to be taken away, I argue artists see hu-
man dignity eradicated in victims of dictatorial regimes who were abused and killed
by the dictatorships. In response to this removal, artists in each context attempt to
restore human dignity through the use of different visual strategies.
My approach in this chapter lies at the intersection of cultural memory studies
and research that explores the role of art in TJ, a topic of increasing interest in the
last decade (Rush and Simić 2014, Atencio & Gates-Madsen 2014, Bahun 2015).
Cultural memory is an interdisciplinary study that associates history with political
science, philosophy, psychology, media or literary studies; it is a term that encom-
passes social memory, material memory and mental or cognitive memory (Errll
2010). According to Alexander Etkind, cultural memory includes two types of
memory, which mirror the memory system of a computer: soft and hard memory
(2013 177). “Soft memory” is formed by texts (literary, historical and other narra-
tives), while “hard memory” is primarily shaped by monuments (177); if sites of
memory structure cultural hardware, then events, or what Etkind calls “memory
events,” constitute its software (178). Moreover, the new memory studies, starting
with the 1980s, have increasingly dwelt into cultural memory practices, which are
understood here as the residues of dictatorships.
The studies that analyze the role of art in TJ have considered it from the point of
view of its therapeutic, or healing role for the victims of atrocities. In this analysis I
want to rather focus on the role of contemporary artists in showing the limits of the
TJ processes (truth commissions, reconciliation practices, memory policies). In cer-
tain cases, such as the Chilean one, which is considered to have had an exemplary
transition to democracy and has organized truth commissions to work toward recon-
ciliation, there are limits to the process of dealing with the past. Contemporary Chil-
ean artists indicate these limits by acknowledging the difficult memory of the dicta-
torship and by evoking those that are still missing, the disappeared.
Furthermore, while there are studies in cultural memory and TJ that analyze how
artistic expressions deal with traumatic experiences, the link to how human dignity
connects to this focus remains largely unexplored. Only limited research that studies
the role arts have in restoring human dignity after traumatic experiences has been
produced, although the link between the development of human dignity and the arts
has been illustrated. As Pless et ali. (2017, 223) acknowledge, visual and performing
arts … can play a crucial role in the actualization of dignity. Theatre and music
served as a means for Holocaust victims to endure suffering and helped them to ex-
perience dignity and pride under dehumanized conditions (Audhuy 2015). More
contemporary examples of the role of the arts in promoting dignity include the visu-
al arts produced in indigenous communities [for example in] Australia.
In this sense, a scholar of the role of art in TJ studies, Garnsey (2016) analyzed
the role artworks play in relation to human dignity in the context of the “visual ju-
risprudence” of the art collection of the Constitutional Court in South Africa. For
her, the artworks “serve as reminders of past violations of human dignity, under-
scored by a norm of nonrepetition” and function “as a kind of symbolic reparation –
memorializing… and returning a sense of visual dignity which … death denied”
The Role of Art in Restoring Human Dignity 199

(2016 84, 95). Thus, “the value of individual human dignity is preserved through
these acts of resistance and in the commemoration of these acts. …While the value
of human dignity is preserved in the artwork” (95). Garnsey underlines how “each
artwork offers a perspective on human dignity and probes the notion of what human
dignity as the promise of human rights means and entails” (2016 97).
Drawing on Garnsey (2016, 84), in this chapter, I examine how artworks realized
after dictatorships in Romania and Chile help us conceptualize how artists evoke
human dignity, contributing to its development after traumatic experiences. The art-
works analyzed in what follows grant a form of poetic or symbolic reparation to the
victims, which were denied human dignity, giving them visual dignity and therefore
serving as a form of symbolic, poetic reparation.
Because the dictatorships denied human dignity to their victims, I contend artists
seek to return dignity to the victims through a personalization of victimhood; they
recreate “the biographies of the victims and thus break the decades of silence and
grant them, even if only symbolically, their human dignity” (Brodsky 2015, 11).
They address personal histories that help avoid the abstract depiction of the victims
by other TJ mechanisms such as the Truth commissions’ reports. Artists through
their “pensive images” (Rancière) can produce a form of dissensus of the memorial
consensus.
The first section of the chapter briefly explores the Romanian situation concern-
ing the process of dealing with the communist past, and the second section looks at
the role contemporary artworks have played in providing a more complete outlook
onto the communist regime in Romania. To show that artists contribute to the miss-
ing memory of the victims of the communist regime, I will analyze two artworks
that employ documentary forms to discuss restoring human dignity through the per-
sonalization of suffering; this includes the artistic documentation of the extensive 12
interviews with victims of the communist regime in The Archive of Pain (Ștefan
Costantinescu, 2000) and the dignified portrait of the imprisoned artist Lena Con-
stante realized by Thomas Ciulei in The craziness of the heads (1997). In the third
section of the chapter, I turn to Chile focusing on the process of dealing with the Pi-
nochet dictatorship. The fourth section analyzes the role of two artworks from Chile,
Geometry of Conscience (2010) by Alfredo Jaar and the video-triptych by Enrique
Ramirez formed of Breezes, Pacific and The Sleepers (2014), in contradicting offi-
cial memory. I argue the artistic gaze forces the acknowledgement of what the dicta-
torship wanted to be erased: the memory of those killed in illegal, unknown condi-
tions and who up to today remain disappeared. Through their work, Ramirez and
Jaar grant the victims a form of visual dignity.

11.2 “Communism never happened”: Official Memory in Romania

Eastern Europe was dominated for over four decades by communist regimes, im-
posed by force and using different types of repression to remain in power until 1989.
Ruled by a communist regime from 1948 to 1989, Romania had become one of the
200 Preda

most closed-in countries in Eastern Europe. It was dominated by a personal dictator-

ship established by the Nicolae Ceaușescu regime (1965-1989) that developed an
exaggerated cult of personality; the government allowed no freedom of expression;
food and energy shortages abounded, and travelling abroad was a practical impossi-
bility for most Romanian citizens.
Evidencing of the most dramatic ends of the communist regimes in December
1989, Romania had a revolution, which started in Timișoara on December 16th, 1989
and then extended to the entire country including Bucharest. As a result, the
Ceaușescu regime ended, and Nicolae Ceaușescu, and his wife Elena Ceaușescu
were put on trial and condemned to death. Both were shot on December 25,, 1989.
During the events of that fateful December, 1,104 people were killed, and 3,352 per-
sons were wounded.
Subsequently, the approach of the Ion Iliescu regime (1990-1996, 2000-2004)
which was formed of the second echelon of the Romanian Communist Party nomen-
klatura, and that established its legitimacy on the revolutionary moment, emphasized
the need to move forward, to not interrogate the recent past and focus on the future.
It was only in the mid-2000s, that a different approach of the communist past was
put forward by an alliance of the right-wing parties formed by the National Liberal
Party and the Democratic Party. Thus, in December 2006 the Romanian president
Traian Băsescu (2004-2014) condemned the “communist dictatorship as a criminal
regime” on the basis of the report prepared by the Presidential Commission for the
Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania (2006) also known as the
Tismăneanu Commission. This report was criticized for its lack of rigor, and legal
consequences, and Băsescu’s assembling such a report was questioned because he
has been accused of having collaborated with the former secret police, the Securi-
tate.
One of the criticisms of the Tismăneanu Report refers to the number of victims of
the communist dictatorship it put forward. Because there was a lack of access to the
archives from the former secret police as well as from other state institutions, such
as the militia or the Ministry of Internal Affairs, that dealt with the repression of
those opposing the regime, the Tismăneanu Commission estimated the number of
victims of the communist regime totaled between 500.000 to 2 million. As Lavinia
Stan (2012) observes, other civic organizations investigated the number of the vic-
tims and evoked smaller numbers. For example, the Civic Academy mentions the
93.000 penal transcripts of detainees from a larger number of documents, which
were lost (Memorial to the Victims). Stan (2012 142) also recalls the numbers given
in the Dictionary of Victims of Communist Terror by the former prisoner Cicerone
Ionițoiu, which identifies 100.000 victims “who were arrested, tortured, jailed and
killed during the 1945-1989 period.”
As a result of both this imposed forgetting of the past and the lack of information
on the communist regime’s crimes, opinion polls have registered appreciation from
nearly half of all Romanian citizens for the regime. The percentages of those who
consider communism good for the country, vary between 53% of the population in
2006, to 61% in 2010, 44% in 2014, and 40% in 2018 (Besliu 2014).
The Role of Art in Restoring Human Dignity 201

Both public memory projects supported by the Romanian state, and the memory
of the victims are expressed through monuments or memorials, or what Alexander
Etkind (2013) calls “hard memory.” While there still is no Museum of Communism
as in other countries of the region (Hungary, the Czech Republic), there are several
museums that offer a space for the memorialization of different aspects of com-
munism in Romania, from the commemoration of its victims to the nostalgic ap-
proach to the communist period. The Memorial to the Victims of Communism and
to the Resistance in Sighet (1993), inaugurated by the Foundation the Civic Acade-
my on the site of a former prison, commemorates its victims. Another site of
memory is the Ceaușescu House (2016) in Bucharest, which was the former resi-
dence of the Ceaușescu family (1970-1989), and which safeguards part of their per-
sonal effects and showcases their lifestyle. Several private initiatives also display
symbols of communism, such as the Museum of the Communist Consumer in
Timișoara, the Museum of the Dacia Car in Satu-Mare, or Ferestroika, the com-
munist apartment in Bucharest.
In fact, nostalgic practices have multiplied in Romania. Music bands use com-
munist reenactments such as Romarta to invoke a positive attitude toward the com-
munist past; ads that use symbols of the past (the chocolate Rom) to sell their prod-
ucts, while bars and parties employ the specific attire of the pioneers calling their
guests to dress as during communism and promote an ironic perspective on the past.
Recent films have also discussed nostalgic practices. The collective work Tales from
the Golden Age (Cristian Mungiu, Hanno Höfer, Constantin Popescu, Ioana Uricaru,
Răzvan Mărculescu, 2009) presents a collection of urban myths popular during the
last period of communism to encourage spectators to use laughter as a strategy of
remembrance. Several contemporary artists such as Ciprian Mureșan (Communism
never happened 2006), Mona Vătămanu and Florin Tudor (Long live and thrive cap-
italism! 2009) have also engaged with nostalgia for the communist regime. In his
work Communism never happened (2006), Ciprian Mureșan cut the words of this ti-
tle from propaganda music discs of the Ceaușescu regime; this artwork ironically
questions the approach of the postcommunist regime in Romania in relation to the
communist past.
Thus, in the Romanian cases, there is no comprehensive public policy of memo-
rialization of the communist regime. This lack of policy has provoked nostalgic re-
actions that have been reinterpreted by several artistic means. The artists whose art-
works that use documentary forms, I analyze further, react to this absence of a
memorial consensus in what regards the communist past.

11.3 Restoring Visual Dignity through the Artistic Memoriali-

zation of the Victims of the Communist Regime in Romania

Romanian contemporary art discourses have tackled the communist past in sever-
al ways. Along with a critical perspective on the nostalgic approach, which chal-
lenges the positive outlook on the recent past, artists have focused on portraying Ni-
202 Preda

colae Ceaușescu and have presented the complexity of this historical figure. Moreo-
ver, they have engaged extensively with the end of the communist regime, the De-
cember 1989 revolution. A smaller number of artists have confronted issues related
to human rights violations, or the mistreatments suffered during the communist re-
gime such as those related to forced labor, the loss of (property) rights, censorship,
or the lack of the freedom of movement, etc.
The memory of the victims of communism has not been an official topic of me-
morialization except for the NGOs of the victims. One of the best known is the doc-
umentary series Memorialul durerii/The memorial of pain (Lucia Hossu Longin,
1991). In 36 episodes it documents the repression of opponents of the Communist
regime in Romania, showing prisons, enforced labor camps, and the persecution by
the secret police, the Securitate. The series emphasizes the recuperation of a part of
history, which was largely unknown during the communist regime, that of the fate of
its victims. At the same time, the documentary has been criticized because it show-
cases among the heroes of the anti-communist resistance members of the fascist or-
ganization the Legion of Archangel Michael (Iron Guard), which was influential
during the inter-war period. Thus, the different traumatic history strata come togeth-
er in the post-communist period and render the memory of suffering more complex
than how it is remembered at the official level.
The artwork The Archive of pain (2000) is a collective work to which Ștefan
Constantinescu participated together with the director Cristi Puiu and the graphic
designer Arina Stoenescu. It documents through archive images, propaganda materi-
al and interviews with former political prisoners the period 1945-1965.1 The video
installation formed of four screen projections includes interviews with twelve former
prisoners, who are shown sitting and talking about their experience. The former
prisoners are both women (3) and men (9) recounting their experience of pain both
during the imprisonment and afterwards. The artwork constitutes a supplementary
source of information about the communist regime in Romania as it was realized at a
time when interest in the past, and especially in the regime of the first communist
leader of Gheorghe Gheorghiu Dej (1948-1965), was rather absent. The approach of
the artistic project, which has as a subtitle, “Testimonies of the Red Terror,” is open-
ly anti-communist and focuses on the criminal character of the regime.
One of the students portrayed is Aurora Ilie Dumitrescu, who was a philosophy
student, born in 1932 and sentenced in 1952 to 6 years in prison for “the crime of
sedition.” As she recounts:
the most awful moment seemed to me when I realized, I became aware and it was a strong
feeling that in fact I was nobody, when the human condition I professed no longer existed,
that I was like a hunted animal in their clutches (…) I did no longer exist as a human being.
They had completely destroyed us. (…) We were…as I said our generation was raised in a
particular kind of dignity, a certain respect for human values, and man himself, and when I

1
http://www.stefan-constantinescu.com/index.php/work/archive-of-pain/.
The Role of Art in Restoring Human Dignity 203

got there I saw the status they enforced upon me: you did not mean anything to them. (…)
when a human being was turned into an animal…they would treat you as a kind of beast. 2

Fig. 1. Ștefan Constantinescu, The Archive of Pain (2000)

Aurora Ilie Dumitrescu’s prison experience was terrible because, as she articu-
lates, she was treated as sub-human. She recounts her trial as a farce because prior to
it a decision was already made by the Secret police (the Securitate) to keep her un-
der house arrest for two years.
The testimonies of the former prisoners that we witness in the video-work of
Constantinescu are all frontal portraits of now older persons, but all recount their ar-
rest at a young age, their sentencing to hard labor and imprisonment, and their diffi-
culties after being released, including the efforts to reorganize their lives. The artist
does not intervene in the interviews, which last more than 15 hours (with every in-
terview between 40 minutes and one hour). The absence of any guidance by the art-
ist alongside the length of the testimonies accomplishes a sort of reenactment of the
whole experience for the spectator. In this process, Constantinescu grants human
dignity to his interviewees who are given ample time to recount their story in full,
without being disturbed or interrupted.
The second artistic example I want to focus on is the documentary film The Cra-
ziness of the Heads (1997) by the film director Thomas Ciulei in which he focuses
on the portrait of the Romanian artist Lena Constante (1909-2005). A visual artist,
Lena Constante interprets herself in the film, inspired by her personal prison experi-
ence. She was arrested as part of the “Pătrășcanu batch” (1948), condemned by the

2
Aurora Ilie Dumitrescu as part of “The Archive of pain”, video installation and book (2000), edit-
ed by Arina Stoenescu with texts by Lucian Boia, Adrian Cioroianu and Tom Sandqvist.
204 Preda

communist regime in 1950 and released in 1961. She was jailed for 12 years, eight
of which were spent in solitary confinement. Although she was rehabilitated in
1968, she could no longer exhibit her artworks. The regime marginalized her. Still,
she discovered a way to recount her prison experience in a memoir, The Silent Es-
cape published first in French, and then in Romanian after 19903, and she explained
her choice to write about her experience by saying she wanted to talk about deten-
tion as such, perfectly knowing the facts.
Daily life in a cell. I think I lived a unique experience. A woman, alone, for many years.
Years made of hours, of minutes, of seconds. These seconds I would like to recount, these
3600 seconds in an hour, these 86400 seconds in a day, that slowly drags, along the body,
slobbery snakes that climb in spirals from your feet to your neck, without a break, without
mercy, from morning to evening and in the nights of insomnia, too often, continuing to en-
chain you without rest, and without stop, endlessly. Because I want to talk also of human
dignity. And of those women, later my prison comrades, that against everything and every-
body, remained profoundly human beings. And to affirm a hope. The hope that some far
away day, man will conquer nature. Not by changing the course of waters, or the desert, or
by conquering the cosmos, but by changing himself. Changing his heart and mind.4

The Craziness of the Heads portrays Lena Constante in very tight shots showing
only her face, where the artist reads from her memoir and evokes the “craziness of
the heads, the visual hallucinations she had following her physical and psychological
depletion.”5 Constante is filmed in her room, which, according to Ciulei is the pro-
jection of her cell outside prison, as she can never escape. Through this manner of
filming her, Ciulei wanted to force the spectator to imagine a space as Lena Con-
stante had done when she was imprisoned. Ciulei alternates the tight portraiture of
Lena Constante with images of the prison corridors, of piles of uniforms and boots
and poetic images close to the Doftana prison.6 In the film she recounts how she re-
mained sane by composing shows and reciting poems to keep her mind alive and es-
caping into her imagination as a form of surviving.7 So, Constante confirms the con-
clusion of Audhuy (2015) quoted by Pless et ali (2017, 223) and that we recalled in
the introduction, who affirmed, art can and has been a form to “experience dignity
and pride under dehumanized conditions.”
Moreover, the artistic evocation by Ciulei of Constante restores her human digni-
ty because we are confronted with the powerful story of an artist who used her imag-
ination, her inner strength to resist extreme forms of torture, among which included
the threat of being thrown into a hole with rats. She recounts the tens of thousands of

3
Lena Constante, L’évasion silencieuse: trois mille jours, seule, dans les prisons roumaines (Paris,
La Découverte, 1990).
4
Lena Constante, The silent escape quoted http://ler.is.edu.ro/~cr/index.php? page=person&id
=168.
5
Andreea Vlad, “Thomas Ciulei relansează Nebunia capetelor, documentarul Lenei Constante”, 29
November 2013. http://www.bewhere.ro/features/thomas-ciulei-relanseaza-nebunia-capetelor-
documentarul-lenei-constante-5058/ (accessed May 30th 2019).
5
Ibidem.
6
Ibidem.
7
Ibidem.
The Role of Art in Restoring Human Dignity 205

seconds of loneliness that passed through poetic recitation and artistic creation. Vis-
ual dignity is conveyed to Lena Constante’s dramatic experience through the gra-
cious portrayal Ciulei creates of her, by recapturing how together with her fellow
women prisoners, they refused to concede to their torturers.
The two artistic projects discussed, The Archive of pain (Stefan Constantinescu,
2000) and The Craziness of the Heads (Thomas Ciulei, 1997) portray victims of the
Romanian communist regime who were imprisoned in the 1950s and whose experi-
ence has been largely erased from the public space after the democratic transition of
1990, as if communism never happened. Through their documentary gestures, both
Constantinescu and Ciulei restore dignity to the victims. Constantinescu offers visu-
al dignity to the prisoners as a sort of symbolic reparation for their experiences by
not intervening at all in the interviews, whereas Ciulei’s portrayal of Constante poet-
ically accentuates her unique worldview. So, in the Romanian case, despite the offi-
cial willingness to forget the communist past as if it never happened, artists such as
Constantinescu and Ciulei, through their artworks, document the suffering of the
victims of communism, insert a missing history into the public realm and grant vic-
tims visual dignity.

11.4 The Official Memory Policy in Chile: (Partial) Truth and (Im-
posed) Reconciliation after the Dictatorship

In the 1960s-1980s South America was marked by a wave of authoritarian coups

by an alliance between the military and civilian sectors, which took power and gov-
erned by force. Chile witnessed the most violent intervention by the Armed forces
on September 11th, 1973, which led to the gradual domination by the General Au-
gusto Pinochet U. between 1973 and 1990 with the help of the secret police DINA
(National Intelligence Directorate). At the same time, the country was transformed
not only with repression against opponents, but also, beginning in 1975, through a
neoliberal revolution, with a state giving up its role in most of the areas from educa-
tion to pensions.
Several Truth Commissions organized after the return to democracy documented
human rights violations in the region during Pinochet’s rule, detailing how human
dignity was denied to those arrested and detained.8 The reports of the two Truth
Commissions concluded that there were around 40.000 victims of the dictatorship:
1.100 disappeared, 2.116 persons executed for political reasons, and 38.256 victims
of prison and torture in 1.132 detention and torture centers (Cardenas Hernandez
8
The National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation (Rettig Commission, 1990), the National
Corporation of Reparation and Reconciliation (1992), the Table of Dialogue for Human Rights
(1999), the National Commission about Political Prison and Torture (Valech Commission, 2003),
which included a second stage, the Consultative Commission to the Presidency for the Qualifica-
tion of Disappeared Detainees, Political executed and victims of political prison and torture (Valech
Commission II, 2010).
206 Preda

2017, 8). The reports include descriptions of the types of human rights violations
suffered by the victims (children, women, men) described during the hearings of the
commissions. The 1.100 disappeared remain unaccounted for until today despite the
efforts of the families and of the victim led NGOs to receive answers from the au-
thorities. Human dignity was denied to those that became victims of the dictatorship
in Chile, as the military took people from their homes and from the streets, detaining
them illegally; many disappeared without a trace.
After the end of the dictatorship, memorial practices include a “hard memory” in
the sense of Etkind (2013) that incorporates the Museum of Memory and Human
Rights inaugurated in Santiago in 2010. Of the 1.132 detention centers recognized
by the truth commissions, only twenty have been acknowledged as historical monu-
ments, and not as sites of memory (Lawner 2017, 19). Such an example is the house
of the street Londres, 38 in the center of Santiago, which was the first center of tor-
ture used by the secret police, DINA, and which was recuperated as a memory site
in 2010; it is now administered by an NGO, “Londres 38, Espacio de Memorias”
(London 38 Space of Memories) that organizes several activities of memorialization
(Patrimonio 2017, 99). One of the most emblematic sites of memory is Villa Gri-
maldi or The Park of Peace Villa Grimaldi. Called Cuartel Terranova during the Pi-
nochet regime. Between 1973 and 1978 it served as a detention center holding more
than 4.500 people, 226 of whom disappeared, and 18 were executed (Patrimonio
2017, 81). Villa Grimaldi was a former restaurant for the elite in the 1950s, taken
over in 1973 by the Chilean Secret Police, the DINA. In 1987 the Secret Police
(called at the time CNI) sold it to a firm that demolished the villa in preparation for
building new residences. In 1990, the association “Corporación Parque por la Paz
Villa Grimaldi” requested to retake the site, and in 1997, it was inaugurated as a
park of memory. In 2004, it became a historical monument.
Despite the official efforts of dealing with the past, the memory of the Pinochet
dictatorship is not settled and is contested by those still supporting the former dicta-
tor. As such, in Santiago de Chile there is also a site of memory, hosted by the
Foundation President Pinochet (1995), that celebrates the positive memory of the
dictatorship. It includes a small museum that portrays the military dictator as a hero
who saved Chile from communism.
Thus, the artworks, films, theater works that deal with the memory of the victims
of the dictatorships in Chile are important because they insert into public discourse
the topic of the memory of the wrongdoings of the dictatorship that is otherwise be-
ing marginalized by the new democratic regime. These artistic recollections use dif-
ferent types of media (from archives, performance, photography, film, or sounds),
and the artworks that participate to this effort of memorialization discuss several
topics. One of the recurrent themes of these artistic renderings is that of the detenid-
os desaparecidos (detainees that were illegally arrested and became disappeared).
Chilean artists underline their humanity and try to individualize their pain showing
us their portraits, their stories. In fact, even during the dictatorship, artists who were
personally concerned by the phenomenon of “disappearances” or simply reacted to
their specific social context created artworks related to this issue. For example, the
artist Luz Donoso in Support Action in a Commercial System (1979) inserted images
The Role of Art in Restoring Human Dignity 207

of those disappeared on the television screens of a commercial street in downtown

Santiago, and in another work, Endless Band (1978) she put together photographs
and repeated the phrase “Where are they?” together with pamphlets, flyers from the
protests against the dictatorship (Giunta 2017, 255). After the return to democracy,
Chilean artists like Donoso continued to insist on displaying the portraits of those
disappeared. Works by Guillermo Cifuentes (Rumor, 2000, Rumors, 2012), Claudio
Pérez (Saying Goodbye Love Before Forgetting, 2007), or Carlos Altamirano in his
series of Portraits (1989-2007) reflect the insistence of exposing images of the dis-
appeared.
Connected to this artistic focus on the disappeared, I will now analyze in more
detail, the artworks Geometry of Conscience (2010) by Alfredo Jaar which deals
with the memory of the victims as part of the general experience of Chilean society,
and the artworks of Enrique Ramirez’s, The Sleepers, Pacific and Breezes (2014)
which offers a poetic understanding of the weight of the memory of those that are
still disappeared.

11.5 The Permanent Presence of their Absence: The Memory of

the Disappeared in Chilean Visual Art Discourses as Poetic Repa-
ration

The artwork Geometry of conscience (2010) by Alfredo Jaar is part of the corpus
of artworks that are concerned with the victims of the dictatorship. His installation
creates an infinite illuminated afterimage of the victims that brings together both the
silhouettes of those that were killed, and those that are still alive. Housed in the un-
derground gallery of the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, Chile,
inaugurated in December 2010 by president Michelle Bachelet (2006-2010, 2014-
2018) in a powerful gesture by a former detainee and a victim of torture during the
Chilean military dictatorship, Jaar’s piece has to be descended into from the plaza
that surrounds the museum down a stairway.
After going underground, the visitor enters a room. The door closes eliminating
the possibility of exit and, the visitor experiences complete darkness for three
minutes. 462 white silhouettes, multiplied infinitely by the mirrors situated on the
walls on the right and on the left side of the room, break the darkness. The silhou-
ettes belong both to victims of the dictatorship, as well as to persons living at the
time of the creation of the artwork in 2010. The visitors’ mirrored image accompa-
nies this infinite row of white silhouettes emerging from complete darkness. After a
minute, the darkness returns, the doors open, and the visitor can walk back up the
stairs to the plaza. Jaar’s artwork intentionally
[makes] visible the human rights violations committed by the state during the period 1973-
1990, to give back dignity to the victims and to their families and stimulate reflection and
debates on the importance of respect and tolerance so that this kind of events don’t repeat
themselves. It participates to the ethical imperative of the obligation to remember (Mora
2016, 33).
208 Preda

Usually, the disappeared are represented as absent, and artists use their black and
white photographs to evoke their loss. In this case, the artist refers to the absence by
showing the shapes of both the detained and persons alive in 2010 and supports the
idea that the dictatorship affected everybody because, as Jaar said, “we have all lost
something with the dictatorship” (Mora 2016, 34). Surpassing the traditional form of
memorials, which are consecrated exclusively to the victims, Jaar proposes a memo-
rial that includes the entire Chilean society, not only the victims and their families
(Mora 2016, 34). By choosing to eliminate portraits and including only their silhou-
ettes, the identification of the spectator with the artwork is achieved Mora 2016, 35)
through the use of the mirror. As Alfredo Jaar himself recognized: “I wanted to cre-
ate a sort of geometry, of symmetry between the ones alive and the dead, to suggest
with that that we can understand ourselves, the past, and the future only if we are il-
luminated by both: those alive and those dead” (Mora 2016, 35). Rancière considers
Jaar’s images “pensive” as they lie “outside of the system of information,” becom-
ing “post-images of human rights that have left their memory…in a sort of aesthetic
unconscious where the duty of the human being is to see a reality that nobody wants
to see” (Gomez-Moya 2012, 50).
In the total darkness concerning the dictatorial past, Jaar intervenes using aesthet-
ic strategies such as the use of light to emphasize the silhouettes of those that consti-
tute the Chilean society, that is both those that were killed and remain disappeared
and those that are still alive and must remember those that are no longer here. Visual
dignity in this case translates into the use of light as a metaphor to disrupt the dark-
ness of the past.

Fig. 2. Alfredo Jaar, Geometry of conscience (2010)

The Role of Art in Restoring Human Dignity 209

The second Chilean example is that of Enrique Ramirez’ works that deal with
forgetting and insists on how “memory does not forget anything” (Breezes). In
Chile, 1.100 persons are still considered disappeared by the reports of the Truth
commissions. According to the information received by the Chilean government in
1999, 200 bodies of those illegally detained were thrown by the military into the Pa-
cific Ocean. The artist has reflected in his artworks this horrendous fact, and in three
video-works titled Breezes, Pacific and The Sleepers9 (2014), he links his work to
that of the TJ mechanisms in Chile, as the artist says in his statement presenting the
latter work:
The second objective [of the Table of Dialogue of 1999], was to obtain information about
the fate of the arrested missing people (officially around one thousand cases). These disap-
pearances have clouded the national collective imagination. The army took over the brutality
of the past: first there was a real admission of guilt, but the most striking in this confession is
that the Army insisted on the inevitable disappearance of the bodies. The sentence « thrown
into the sea » is written along most of the names that were in the list (list that was incom-
plete). This is the most recent image that the Army offers to the nation to settle a common
vision of the history: the Chilean sea the only place that is not one: the Pacific Ocean.10

The Sleepers evokes “a particularly abominable episode of the Chilean dictator-

ship: victims—some still alive— were thrown into the sea from helicopters, tied to
railway ties.”11 We see three stages of their story on a triptych. The video at the cen-
ter shows an older man that carries a fish, while the video on the left displays images
of the ocean, and the video on the right side accompanies them with images of the
crosses in the ocean. A voice that accompanies the images tells us:
Look at how things fall apart (…) a train, the oblivion, the silence, The salty mouth, Eyes
open under the water, The life we have never seen, Leave a trace in the sea, Search for
something that is not seen, there where the history is silent, there where the history would
seek silence.

A younger man who continues to walk along the ocean replaces the old man, and
the voice continues to tell us: “Fabricate the silence, fabricate forgetting, fabricate
fear, fabricate the return, fabricate the search, fabricate the time.” The two men meet
and embrace each other. On the screen to the left a helicopter appears, and we hear
the sound as the two men reach water, while the screen on the right shows the cross-
es in water decorated with the flag of Chile. The video Pacific also part of this trip-
tych shows us the waves of the ocean, the final point for the victims of the military
dictatorship in Chile.
In these video pieces, Ramirez recalls how the military used train rails to make
the bodies they threw into the ocean stay on the bottom of the ocean. Through the
speaking narrator, the artist emphasizes how the military enforced silence, and how
families continued to search for their missing relatives. Ramirez’ video works poeti-
cally to reinsert into the public realm terrible acts of the dictatorship that have been

9
This translates in Spanish as both sleepers and railway ties.
10
https://enriqueramirez.net/portfolio/pacifico/.
11
https://enriqueramirez.net/portfolio/los-durmientes/.
210 Preda

erased from the public memory, and this video piece grants victims a form of sym-
bolic or poetic reparation: the dignity of being remembered.
Finally, in the video artwork Breezes, which lasts eleven minutes, the viewer ac-
companies a man dressed in a costume with water dripping on his clothes as he
walks in downtown Santiago towards the presidential palace of La Moneda. He en-
ters the building crossing the interior yard, to exit on the other side. The voice over
that accompanies the man’s walk reflects on the memory of the past mixing personal
memories with more general ideas. “Healing takes time, Curing takes time (…) The
history is ours; History is mine (…) Is it possible to look back at the past? How can
we understand what we were? (…) The memory does not forget anything.” The art-
ist as narrator asks these questions, and others, reflecting on how the memory of the
past makes people grey, in a grey city, and how this overflow of memory in this
place influences their lives still today.

Fig. 3. Enrique Ramirez, Breezes (2014)

Thus, the first artwork, the installation by Jaar illuminates the geometry of the
conscience of those that are alive by including in the societal narrative of those that
are missing. This type of aesthetic strategy of memorialization of the Chilean dicta-
torship disrupts official policy, highlighting the necessary reconciliation with the
dictatorial past, and implicit forgetting, as a way to move forward, of avoiding con-
flicts of interpretation of the past. Jaar acknowledges those missing and places them
next to those that remain alive as a form of poetic reparation, emphasizing their
permanent absence as a lasting scar in the collective narrative.
In his artwork The Sleepers, Ramirez choses to represent the killing by the mili-
tary of those who were detained illegally, tortured, and thereafter thrown from heli-
The Role of Art in Restoring Human Dignity 211

copters into the Pacific Ocean. The artist recreates in a very cinematic approach the
violence used by the military dictatorship, and by transforming its protagonist from
an old man to a young man, he personifies the memory of those killed in terrible
conditions. Finally, in Breezes, Ramirez reflects on the relationship the Chilean so-
ciety, shown in the video through the emblematic image of the presidential palace
(where the former president Salvador Allende was killed on the day of the military
coup of September the 11th, 1973), has with the memory of the suffering of victims
during the dictatorship. Ramirez reflects on the status of the memory of the suffering
in a poetic, cinematic approach.

11.6 Conclusion

30 years ago, two regions of Eastern Europe and South America avoided confron-
tation with the dramatic past through officially imposed policies of forgetting and
reconciliation. Yet, unresolved issues, related to restoring Human Dignity to the vic-
tims, remain.
This chapter highlights the role artistic renderings of the dictatorial past can play
in restoring human dignity to the victims. I argued, visual artists in Romania and
Chile question the official memory, which emphasizes forgetting (in Romania), or
reconciliation (in Chile), and use different aesthetic strategies to grant human dignity
back to the victims of the dictatorships. This symbolic reparation is possible through
offering victims a form of visual dignity, with each artwork providing a perspective
on the human dignity of the victims (Garnsey 2016, 97).
Artists use the personalization of suffering by showing us specific portraits of the
victims; artists constitute a collective narrative which includes not only the victims
but also the survivors to offer a form of poetic reparation to those forgotten, whose
dreadful deaths have been erased from collective memory.
In Romania, remembering the victims of communism is not and has not been a
priority for the postcommunist regime. Through the documentation of the individual
stories of the victims of repression during communism, Constantinescu in The Ar-
chive of Pain (2000) and Thomas Ciulei in The craziness of the heads (1997) restore
visual dignity to the victims. Their suffering is now part of the memorialization of
communism through an artistic documentation.
In Chile, Alfredo Jaar’s underground installation, Geometry of Conscience (2010)
proposes an infinitely illuminated series of white contoured silhouettes of both the
victims of the Chilean dictatorship and the survivors. Jaar’s aesthetic strategy of us-
ing the endless white silhouettes dignifies the victims by inserting their story in the
collective history and supports the idea that everybody was affected by the dictator-
ship and thus there is a responsibility in remembering.
By recreating in a poetic light, the Chilean state’s approach to the memory of the
victims in his video triptych (The Sleepers, Pacific, Breezes), Enrique Ramirez
grants back human dignity to the victims, to those otherwise forgotten, ignored by
the democratic regime by reinserting their story into public discourse. Ramirez’s
212 Preda

video works provide additional information on what happened to the victims, specif-
ically to those that were killed by the military by being thrown into the Pacific
Ocean. Ramirez reflects on the erasure of memory and on the imposed silence, as
well as questions if we can look back at the past.
To conclude, in this chapter I have argued that these two cases, although opposed
extreme cases, represent models of how contemporary visual discourses engage with
a traumatic past, which is otherwise marginalized or erased by official policies. I ar-
gue artistic evocations such as those analyzed help us remember the details of a past
that the official memory would like us to forget. Artists in different post-dictatorial
contexts employ poetic instruments such as metaphors, or on the contrary use brutal
images of a recent past to conjure remembrance of those victims whose dignity was
taken by the predatory states. At the threshold between forgetting and remembrance,
artists in Romania and Chile insist on the memory of those that were victims of their
respective dictatorships and stress the need to recall their experiences as an obliga-
tion.

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