Speaking to disappearance, Marcelo Brodsky shares how his passion for photography and art blossomed amidst the painful realities of Argentina's last military dictatorship. Exiled and grieving the loss of his brother and friends among the 30,000 victims, Brodsky's return home saw him channeling sorrow into impactful artistic activism. Projects like Buena Memoria and Parque de la Memoria—Brodsky's works—grapple with scars of state-sanctioned violence; assert memory, reflection and art as societal salves. Art is action, Brodsky holds. Under oppressive regimes, what must creative expression do to resist? To reclaim liberty? To chart new worlds?
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Marcelo Brodsky is an artist and human rights activist from Buenos Aires, Argentina. Brodsky’s art practice began to take off in the late twentieth century following Argentina’s last military dictatorship, a horrifically violent time during which he was forcibly exiled to Spain. Situated on the border between installation, performance, photography, monument and memorial, Brodsky’s pieces blend text and images, often using figures of speech, to delve into the themes of disappearance and memory surrounding the over 30,000 victims of state-sanctioned terrorism during that time. In addition to his extensive work as an artist, Marcelo Brodsky is an active member of the human rights organization Asociación Buena Memoria, and he is a member of the Board of Directors of the Parque de la Memoria, the memorial park in Buenos Aires that honors the victims of the dictatorship. His work is part of major collections, including but not limited to, the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston, TX), the Tate Collection (London), Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Argentina), Museo de Arte Moderno (Argentina), Center for Creative Photography (Tucson, AZ), and Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos (Chile).”
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Anya Miller is a student at the University of Pennsylvania studying Sociology and Design. More importantly, she is a student of life—on a radical journey of learning and unlearning, each and everyday. As a human and as a scholar, Anya is passionate about the intersection of art and activism; public art and spatial production; ethnographic research, podcasting, and photography; social justice curation; and intersectionality. She hopes to continue gathering knowledge from the animate and inanimate environment that surrounds her in hopes of, one day, utilizing her energetic passion for humanity to leave this world a better place than she found it.
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English Translated Script
Anya Miller (AM)
An artist and political activist, Marcelo Brodsky was forced into exile in Barcelona in 1976 following the rise of El Proceso de Reorganización Nacional, Argentina’s last military dictatorship. This regime is characterized by how it suspended Congress and democracy, banned political parties, limited the civil liberties of the people and, and most importantly, disposed of any individuals who it deemed as a threat to its power.
Welcome to season 2 of Reckoning and Repair: The Art of Resistance in Argentina. In this season, we explore the stories and legacy of art activists from Bueno Aires and beyond. This is your host, Anya Miller, a lifelong scholar, activist, and admirer of art. I invite you to be present as we dive in.
Marcelo Brodsky (MB):
I’ve been a photographer—or rather, I’ve taken photos—since childhood, since I was very young.
My mom was an artist. She passed three years ago, but my mom was an artist and she transmitted to me her love for art, visiting exhibitions and museums. I had always been interested in art since my childhood.
But it was in exile in 1978 when I had to leave Argentina. I went to live first in San Pablo and then Barcelona, and it was there that I became a photographer. I dedicated myself to photography, I learned more about its history, and there I began my formal training as an artist.
AM
Working across media from photography to text to sculpture, Marcelo Brodsky has used his art practice as a way to confront the atrocities of the dictatorship and to memorialize the over 30,000 victims of state-sanctioned violence from 1976 to 1983, including many near and dear to his own heart. In our conversation today, we discuss Marcelo Brodsky’s path to becoming an artist and how his works display an undeniable commitment to grappling with the themes of disappearance, of memory, and of public reflection.
MB
I returned to Argentina in 1985, more or less, when the dictatorship ended—already a photographer. Then I went back to Spain for a few years in the early ‘90's. I lived there, two of my children were born in Madrid and later I returned to Argentina for good around 1995.
When I returned, that’s when I was able to dive into the topic of the disappearance of the victims of the dictatorship—of my brother and my friends—for the first time. It was a time in Argentina when this topic was rarely discussed. There was a center right government led by Carlos Menem, which somewhat denied the issue of disappearance altogether. The dictatorship had no justice.
And at that moment, I decided to create works about my missing brother and schoolmates at a time when disappearance was not a common subject in the art world. And I did it through my project, Buena Memoria.
AM
In the first chapter of his work, Buena Memoría, Marcelo put forth a photographic intervention using one of his very own class portraits that was taken in 1967, a portrait of 32 boys and girls seated on bleachers, mostly all smiling. Looking at this grainy black and white image, Marcelo Brodsky and his classmates appear to be in their early teenage years—no older than 15 years old, I’d estimate.
Superimposed on this image, Marcelo Brodsky has added symbols in colored pencils and markers: circles around the faces of some, slashes through the faces of others. He also intervened by adding small blurbs of evocative text in Spanish to illustrate what had become of each of his classmates—things like who was still alive, who disappeared during the dictatorship, and so forth.
MB
These texts that I added to the photograph are very emotional, very short, very direct. They are easy to understand and cut straight to the heart. But at the same time, they are dense and they tell a story; it’s a form of literature.
This piece was done over 25 years ago. We hardly even had the Internet, let alone Twitter or Facebook. So this was a completely new gesture of documentation. It was a gesture of memory—a gesture of narrative. It was a way of showing the future generations in that school what had happened. And on the 20th anniversary of the military coup, when they began to count how many deaths and disappearances occurred in each place across Argentina, we did the same thing in that school: counting and remembering. And it was in that context that I executed this image intervention in October of 1996.
At that time, this work simply didn't have a place in the art market. Yes, it was a product of activism, but it had no value in the art world. That happened later; now it does. Today, it has a new reading and has a greater meaning because it was done at a time when this was outside of custom, outside of the main currents of the art world. Today, political art is one of the ways in which contemporary art is constructed and created—in which meaning is formed.
AM
Using the disappearance of your own brother and classmates as your entry point to exploring disappearance is immensely powerful, and I thank you for sharing that in this space.
I want to talk more about the idea of memory, shifting from your project, Buena Memoria, to your efforts around the foundation of the Parque de la Memoria, a monument to the victims of state terrorism.
MB
For me, the park was a manifestation of the work that I had done with the project Buena Memoría, which ended with a photo the Río de la Plata accompanied by a text that reads,
“Al río los tiraron. Se convirtió en su tumba inexistente.” Into the river, they were thrown. It became their non-existent grave.
That gave rise to a dialogue about what had happened, with the Río de la Plata, what the Río de la Plata meant as the final destiny for the victims of the dictatorship that were thrown into the river, which at the same time is the place that gives us our name, because we are from Río de la Plata. “Somos río platense.” It is the river that gives us our name.
And that's where they threw people, including my brother. And so, when we finished the work of Buena Memoria, a group of former students from the school got together with the idea of making a monument; we first did it at school and then we proposed to do it in the city.
Together with the other human rights organizations, the organizations pitched their idea of making a monument, we contributed the idea of making a park with a sculpture, next to the river. The project was approved by the city, and that is how the park came to be, which is a fundamental place of memory for Argentina and for Buenos Aires, because the monument holds the names of all of the victims of the dictatorship—those who died in disappearance, those who died confronting the dictatorship, and those who were assassinated.
And it is the only place where those names and those bodies that were not found or even were found are preserved. And it is a place where symbolically, we remember the victims of the dictatorship in a public space financed by the state. In other words, the state takes care of its own victims. It is not like a memorial in which the state honors its heroes, those who defended its flag. In this case, the state funds a monument for its own victims, the victims of state terrorism.
In that sense, it is something different. It is a public institution that watches over the memory of the victims of the dictatorship, and it does so through art. El Parque de la Memoría has a space for exhibitions that investigate what happened to the lives of each of the victims and a place where families can simply go to toss a flower into the river in memory of the people they lost, and where a parent can tell their children what happened during the dictatorship while walking through it.
It is a place of reflection, a public place of knowledge and recognition of our history and a very important place that has somehow changed the contour of our city—being on its shores, interacting with the river, interrogating why citizens of Argentina were murdered and thrown there. In this way, the park contributes to healing and understanding. That is to say, art and culture helps to heal the wounds of our past as much as possible.
AM
In centering our conversation on how your works confront the dictatorship, I also wonder about how you view the connection between art and liberty, more broadly...
MB
The artist can only work if there is liberty, if there is freedom. Freedom is essential for one to be able to do their work. There can be no censorship. There can be nothing that prevents you from doing what you want to do, from expressing what you wish to express.
So freedom is absolutely essential to be able to work within the art space. Of course, when there is no freedom in the place where one lives, one can still make art—art of resistance. But freedom is an essential and fundamental ingredient of art and its creation, its distribution, and its diffusion.
AM
Absolutely, and to bring our conversation full circle, I wanted to end by asking you: Do you see art as a revolution, as change, as action?
MB
Art is action. There is a Colombian organization of artists that’s called Más Arte, Más Acción. More art, more action.
And I agree; art is action. To paint, to draw, to write, to communicate. To make art is to act. Art is action.
AM
“Art is action.” It is memory, it is reflection, it is reclamation, and I thank you for so eloquently elaborating on all of these ideas in our conversation. I deeply appreciate you for your time today, Marcelo, and for fearlessly using your passion for art to fight for human rights.
Thank you for listening to Reckoning and Repair, a Center for Experimental Ethnography podcast. You can learn more and listen to extras at rnrphilly.com.
An artist and political activist, Marcelo Brodsky was forced into exile in Barcelona in 1976 following the rise of El Proceso de Reorganización Nacional, Argentina’s last military dictatorship. This regime is characterized by how it suspended Congress and democracy, banned political parties, limited the civil liberties of the people and, and most importantly, disposed of any individuals who it deemed as a threat to its power.
Welcome to season 2 of Reckoning and Repair: The Art of Resistance in Argentina. In this season, we explore the stories and legacy of art activists from Bueno Aires and beyond. This is your host, Anya Miller, a lifelong scholar, activist, and admirer of art. I invite you to be present as we dive in.
Marcelo Brodsky (MB):
I’ve been a photographer—or rather, I’ve taken photos—since childhood, since I was very young.
My mom was an artist. She passed three years ago, but my mom was an artist and she transmitted to me her love for art, visiting exhibitions and museums. I had always been interested in art since my childhood.
But it was in exile in 1978 when I had to leave Argentina. I went to live first in San Pablo and then Barcelona, and it was there that I became a photographer. I dedicated myself to photography, I learned more about its history, and there I began my formal training as an artist.
AM
Working across media from photography to text to sculpture, Marcelo Brodsky has used his art practice as a way to confront the atrocities of the dictatorship and to memorialize the over 30,000 victims of state-sanctioned violence from 1976 to 1983, including many near and dear to his own heart. In our conversation today, we discuss Marcelo Brodsky’s path to becoming an artist and how his works display an undeniable commitment to grappling with the themes of disappearance, of memory, and of public reflection.
MB
I returned to Argentina in 1985, more or less, when the dictatorship ended—already a photographer. Then I went back to Spain for a few years in the early ‘90's. I lived there, two of my children were born in Madrid and later I returned to Argentina for good around 1995.
When I returned, that’s when I was able to dive into the topic of the disappearance of the victims of the dictatorship—of my brother and my friends—for the first time. It was a time in Argentina when this topic was rarely discussed. There was a center right government led by Carlos Menem, which somewhat denied the issue of disappearance altogether. The dictatorship had no justice.
And at that moment, I decided to create works about my missing brother and schoolmates at a time when disappearance was not a common subject in the art world. And I did it through my project, Buena Memoria.
AM
In the first chapter of his work, Buena Memoría, Marcelo put forth a photographic intervention using one of his very own class portraits that was taken in 1967, a portrait of 32 boys and girls seated on bleachers, mostly all smiling. Looking at this grainy black and white image, Marcelo Brodsky and his classmates appear to be in their early teenage years—no older than 15 years old, I’d estimate.
Superimposed on this image, Marcelo Brodsky has added symbols in colored pencils and markers: circles around the faces of some, slashes through the faces of others. He also intervened by adding small blurbs of evocative text in Spanish to illustrate what had become of each of his classmates—things like who was still alive, who disappeared during the dictatorship, and so forth.
MB
These texts that I added to the photograph are very emotional, very short, very direct. They are easy to understand and cut straight to the heart. But at the same time, they are dense and they tell a story; it’s a form of literature.
This piece was done over 25 years ago. We hardly even had the Internet, let alone Twitter or Facebook. So this was a completely new gesture of documentation. It was a gesture of memory—a gesture of narrative. It was a way of showing the future generations in that school what had happened. And on the 20th anniversary of the military coup, when they began to count how many deaths and disappearances occurred in each place across Argentina, we did the same thing in that school: counting and remembering. And it was in that context that I executed this image intervention in October of 1996.
At that time, this work simply didn't have a place in the art market. Yes, it was a product of activism, but it had no value in the art world. That happened later; now it does. Today, it has a new reading and has a greater meaning because it was done at a time when this was outside of custom, outside of the main currents of the art world. Today, political art is one of the ways in which contemporary art is constructed and created—in which meaning is formed.
AM
Using the disappearance of your own brother and classmates as your entry point to exploring disappearance is immensely powerful, and I thank you for sharing that in this space.
I want to talk more about the idea of memory, shifting from your project, Buena Memoria, to your efforts around the foundation of the Parque de la Memoria, a monument to the victims of state terrorism.
MB
For me, the park was a manifestation of the work that I had done with the project Buena Memoría, which ended with a photo the Río de la Plata accompanied by a text that reads,
“Al río los tiraron. Se convirtió en su tumba inexistente.” Into the river, they were thrown. It became their non-existent grave.
That gave rise to a dialogue about what had happened, with the Río de la Plata, what the Río de la Plata meant as the final destiny for the victims of the dictatorship that were thrown into the river, which at the same time is the place that gives us our name, because we are from Río de la Plata. “Somos río platense.” It is the river that gives us our name.
And that's where they threw people, including my brother. And so, when we finished the work of Buena Memoria, a group of former students from the school got together with the idea of making a monument; we first did it at school and then we proposed to do it in the city.
Together with the other human rights organizations, the organizations pitched their idea of making a monument, we contributed the idea of making a park with a sculpture, next to the river. The project was approved by the city, and that is how the park came to be, which is a fundamental place of memory for Argentina and for Buenos Aires, because the monument holds the names of all of the victims of the dictatorship—those who died in disappearance, those who died confronting the dictatorship, and those who were assassinated.
And it is the only place where those names and those bodies that were not found or even were found are preserved. And it is a place where symbolically, we remember the victims of the dictatorship in a public space financed by the state. In other words, the state takes care of its own victims. It is not like a memorial in which the state honors its heroes, those who defended its flag. In this case, the state funds a monument for its own victims, the victims of state terrorism.
In that sense, it is something different. It is a public institution that watches over the memory of the victims of the dictatorship, and it does so through art. El Parque de la Memoría has a space for exhibitions that investigate what happened to the lives of each of the victims and a place where families can simply go to toss a flower into the river in memory of the people they lost, and where a parent can tell their children what happened during the dictatorship while walking through it.
It is a place of reflection, a public place of knowledge and recognition of our history and a very important place that has somehow changed the contour of our city—being on its shores, interacting with the river, interrogating why citizens of Argentina were murdered and thrown there. In this way, the park contributes to healing and understanding. That is to say, art and culture helps to heal the wounds of our past as much as possible.
AM
In centering our conversation on how your works confront the dictatorship, I also wonder about how you view the connection between art and liberty, more broadly...
MB
The artist can only work if there is liberty, if there is freedom. Freedom is essential for one to be able to do their work. There can be no censorship. There can be nothing that prevents you from doing what you want to do, from expressing what you wish to express.
So freedom is absolutely essential to be able to work within the art space. Of course, when there is no freedom in the place where one lives, one can still make art—art of resistance. But freedom is an essential and fundamental ingredient of art and its creation, its distribution, and its diffusion.
AM
Absolutely, and to bring our conversation full circle, I wanted to end by asking you: Do you see art as a revolution, as change, as action?
MB
Art is action. There is a Colombian organization of artists that’s called Más Arte, Más Acción. More art, more action.
And I agree; art is action. To paint, to draw, to write, to communicate. To make art is to act. Art is action.
AM
“Art is action.” It is memory, it is reflection, it is reclamation, and I thank you for so eloquently elaborating on all of these ideas in our conversation. I deeply appreciate you for your time today, Marcelo, and for fearlessly using your passion for art to fight for human rights.
Thank you for listening to Reckoning and Repair, a Center for Experimental Ethnography podcast. You can learn more and listen to extras at rnrphilly.com.