Memories of Light in Apparitions of the Disappeared: Impressions on the Latin American Landscape by Visual Artist Gabriel Orge

Abstract

The visual turn recovers new pasts. With education as its theme, this book seeks to present a body of reflections that questions a certain historicism and renovates historiographical debate about how to conceptualize and use images and artifacts in educational history, in the process presenting new themes and methods for researchers. Images are interrogated as part of regimes of the visible, of a history of visual technologies and visual practices. Considering the socio-material quality of the image, the analysis moves away from the use of images as mere illustrations of written arguments, and takes seriously the question of the life and death of artifacts ? that is, their particular historicity. Questioning the visual and material evidence in this way means considering how, when, and in which régime of the visible it has come to be considered as a source, and what this means for the questions contemporary researchers might ask.Chapter 2:According to some commentators, we live in a time of an excess of images, where everything can and has to be made visible. If prior visual regimes worked through censorship or subtraction, digital visual culture operates through hyperabundance or excess. This shift is reconfiguring the relationship between the visible and the invisible, and images lose their quality as records of memory and become ephemeral, disposable goods ? as can be seen, for example, in the rapidsuccession of social media posts. How, then, can images still work as carriers of memory in our digital times? How can images of the past be made visible in this ocean of pictures and goagainst the tide of oblivion and historical amnesia? I want to address thesequestions through an analysis of the work of the Argentinean visual artist Gabriel Orge, whose interventions in public space bring into the open images of the disappeared and the marginalized in Latin America. He calls these interventions apparitions, playing on and referring to the desaparacidos (disappeared people and bodies) during several South American dictatorships. Through these apparitions, or appearances, in urban or rural landscapes, Orge points to theneed to stop and look at images of the disappeared so that they continue to live.His apparitions constitute a public pedagogy that plays with light and pictures to produce new memories.In the first section of this chapter, I will briefly outline the context of the struggles for memory in the Southern Cone as well as some theoretical assumptions about pictures and visibilities, drawing mostly on the work of French theorist Roland Barthes. In the second and third sections, I will present some examples of the work done by Orge in Argentina and other South American countries anddiscuss how images can become acts of memory and nurture collective claims for justice.