Sonorous memory in Jonathan Perel’s El predio (2010) and Los murales (2011)

Throughout his filmic production, Argentine director Jonathan Perel has demonstrated strict adherence to a unique aesthetic programme in which human agents appear to have only a minimal role. Each film contains only diegetic sounds and consists of fixed shots of architectural spaces and objects closely associated with the most recent Argentine military dictatorship (1976–1983) and recent attempts to memorialise the atrocities they committed. Through the close analysis of Perel’s first two films – El predio (2010) and Los murales (2011) – this article focusses on Perel’s highly distinctive use of environmental sound and argues that they are, in fact, uniquely musical works. Drawing on the work of John Cage, Michel Chion, Deleuze and Guattari, and Doreen Massey, the article proposes that Perel manipulates sound in order to situate debates over the memorialisation of recent atrocities in a perpetual present and thus critique contemporary abuses of power in Argentina

Constructing Memory through Television in Argentina

La televisión representa el pasado reciente de la Argentina a través de vínculos específicos con la memoria social: como un “emprendedor de la memoria” definiendo las agendas públicas, como un vehículo de transmisión intergeneracional sobre el pasado y como un creador de significados por medio de imágenes, sonidos y palabras, esto es, un “escenario para la memoria”. Un análisis de los vínculos entre televisión y memorias, construido alrededor de la desaparición forzada de personas durante la dictadura militar de 1976 a 1983, revela la manera compleja en la cual los obstáculos para relatar ese periodo trágico se combinan con el intento de vender un producto y entretener al espectador.Television represents Argentina’s recent past through three specific links with social memory: as an “entrepreneur of memory,” shaping public agendas, as a vehicle of intergenerational transmission of past events, and as a creator of meaning through images, sounds, and words, a “stage for memory”. An analysis in terms of the links between television and the memories constructed around the forced disappearance of persons during the 1976–1983 military dictatorship reveals the complex way in which the obstacles when narrating an extreme experience are combined with the attempt to sell a product and entertain the spectator.Fil: Feld, Claudia Viviana. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Parque Centenario. Centro de Investigaciones Sociales. Instituto de Desarrollo Económico y Social. Centro de Investigaciones Sociales; Argentin

New Beginnings between Public and Private: Arendt and Ethnographies of Activism

We explore Arendt’s idiom of ‘new beginnings’ which, for her, constitute the very heart of the political in the light of two case studies. Drawing on examples of political action in the human rights organization of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and among sex workers in London, this article engages with the complex and productive interface of what Arendt calls praxis and poiesis. We suggest that it is precisely through this interface that these women activists have articulated ‘a new beginning’. Their actions call into question the distinctions that Arendt also makes between private and public insofar as these are given beforehand or assumed independently of such action. They also, we hope, contribute to a broader consideration of activism and ethnography