The impossible focusing Reframing the memory of the missing women

Abstract

From an aesthetic-political point of view, I examine the representation of political disappearance in the context of the Chilean dictatorship. Such reflection assumes the point of view of sexual difference at the moment of problematizing the rhetoric of a photo of Paz Errazuriz, the one that appeared
in some media under the name Viuda (Widow). In October 1985, Diamela Eltit and Lotty Rosenfeld managed to insert the photo in magazines such as Análisis, Apsi, Cauce and the newspaper La Época, as part of an art action
whose purpose was to evoke the drama of the disappeared by focusing on the face of the widow of a settler who died in 1983. The problem is that by reflecting the missing man from the face of his partner, this photo ignores
the existence of the missing women. In this way, the visual scene of the photo is a dispute over the political meaning of memory from the point of view of sexual difference.