It is common to say that there are no photographs of the disappearance of people executed by the last Argentine dictatorship (1976-83). However, there are some: they are not photographs of before or after the disappearance, but photos of the “during”. They were part of the repressive bureaucracy, which despite its illegal and clandestine procedure, continued to regularly record arrests, confessions snatched through torture, and even the final fate of its victims. And they are not secret thanks to the courage of some surviving prisoners, who confiscated them from the terror archives and made them public through complaints to human rights organizations and lawsuits. This is the case with the photographs taken by the School of Mechanics of the Navy (ESMA, one of the largest clandestine detention and extermination centers in Buenos Aires) by Víctor Melchor Basterra (1944-2020). This conference aims to investigate the circulation of this set of photos, marked by invisibility and aestheticization.

Ana Longoni is a writer, researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET) and a professor at the University of Buenos Aires. He has been working on the intersection of art and politics in Latin America since the mid-20th century. Author of numerous publications, her latest book is Tercer oído (2021).
Since its founding in 2007, it has promoted the international platform Red Conceptualismos del Sur. He has curated, among others, the exhibitions “Roberto Jacoby. Desire is born of collapse ”(2011),“ Losing human form ”(2012) and“ Oscar Masotta. Theory as action ”(2017). Between 2018 and 2021, she was director of the Public Activities Department at the Museo Nacional Centro de
Art Queen Sofia.