HAND TO HAND

In November of 1999, in Nuenos Aires, the last meeting was held for the panel of judges to select the sculptures for installation in the Parque de la Memoria (Memory Park) on the banks of the River Plate in homage to the victims of State terrorism in Argentina.

While the panel of judges was deliberating, it came out that the Province of Buenos Aires Police Intelligence Department was in possession of a file that had remained hidden for twenty years behind a double door in a police station in La Plata (the Province capital). Heads of Human Rights Organizations and member of Commission for Memory went right away to examine the file. The Commission members also acquired copies of the photographs taken during that visit, the only one allowed. The file was later closed to any further consultation, and it now continues in the custody of the Federal Court in the city of La Plata, which is the forum for the “Trials for the Truth” in the Province of Buenos Aires. The representatives of Human Rights Organizations involved in that single viewing brought the images to the panel of judges for the Memory Park project. They started passing the photos hand to hand amongst themselves. As the efforts were being made to pay homage to the casualties of the dictatorship, these secret documents of the repression had surfaced, documents that could shed some light on the fate of the disappeared. Memory and history, recollection and document coincidentally come together in these images.

The photographs of a file impounded by the Justice system continue to be passed around, “hand to hand”. And with every new disclosure, the same questions are reiterated: Where are the disappeared? What became of them?