IN DECEMBER, Argentina commemorated 30 years since the ending of military government and the restoral of democracy. It was an anniversary that should have been a welcome distraction from the country's present problems of spiralling inflation and bitter social unrest. But it also dredged up memories of a brutal past that most Argentines would prefer to forget.

Marcos Adandia, a celebrated photographer whose work has featured in  Rolling Stone  magazine, remembers the effect this era had on artistic expression. “In the early years of democracy, artists approached their subjects with their own, internal fear,” he says. “Today, there is a state of total creative freedom.”

The Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires is hosting an exhibition of Mr Adandia's work that is testament to the changes in a country where artists can now say what was previously unsaid. “Madre” consists of photographs of the mothers of the so-called “ desaparecidos ”—the thousands who “disappeared” in the Dirty War of 1976-83. Up to 30,000 Argentines are estimated to have gone missing during the military dictatorship, many of them condemned as socialist sympathisers and political threats to the junta. Their remains are still being uncovered and identified: a mass grave at Arsenal Miguel de Azcuenaga, a former secret detention centre in the northern province of Tucumán, was unearthed in 2011.

Many of the mothers still walk around the Plaza de Mayo, the square in front of the presidential palace in central Buenos Aires, once a week. They began their walks in 1977 to protest against the abductions; now they are motivated by more specific concerns, such as the bringing in of legislation to help them find their children's remains. Mr Adandia's large, black-and-white portraits of these women are accompanied by a single line of text giving their names, the name of their children, and the dates when they went missing. Grief is etched into their lined faces, along with defiance, hope and curiosity. And there is something less definable too, the suggestion that they are in some way greater than the viewer, as though Mr Adandia has put them on a pedestal, made them into heroines.

Over the course of 13 years Mr Adandia travelled all over Argentina to photograph the women—some now in their 90s—and hear their tragedies. One woman's entire family died in a Nazi concentration camp in the second world war. Fleeing to Argentina as a young girl, she married, had a child and began a new life. But tragedy followed her across the Atlantic and her child disappeared.

Other artists have found ways to mark the passing of Argentina's pain. Roberta Bacic, a Chilean, brought some colourful yet politically charged patchwork tales, known as arpilleras , to another smaller exhibition held in Buenos Aires.  Arpilleras  became notorious during the 17 years Augusto Pinochet ran Chile. Chilean women made thousands to depict the harshness of life under the dictator, and they became an international symbol of women's resistance.

And Marta Minujin, a conceptual and performance artist, had 25,000 books made containing musings on peace, friendship and freedom. She used them to build a 42-foot-high "temple" in the middle of Buenos Aires which—in an echo of a "Parthenon" she built in 1983 out of books banned by the military junta—she called the "Agora de la Paz" (the agora of peace). The public were allowed to take the books away when the monument came down.

Her temple conveys some of the joy that comes from freedom and the relief of escape. It is a comfort that may never come to Mr Adandia's mothers.

 

http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2014/01/30-years-argentine-democracy