Furious exercises for small truths Travestis and mapuche memories in argentine post-dictatorship

Abstract

According to Silvia Schwarzböck's reading, the Argentine post-dictatorship (which began with the “return of democracy” in 1984) is what remains of the dictatorship after the triumph of terror disguised as defeat. The post-dictatorship is also an era of terror because it is the result of the triumph of the economic project and of right-wing life as the only possible life. It is for this reason, the philosopher points out, that this era must be entered through aesthetics, that is, through the philosophical discipline that can deal with the non-truth of judgements and with the appearance of the inconceivable but absolutely representable. Following these premises, I propose on this occasion to reflect on the poetic work of two artists of the memory of colonial, dictatorial and post-dictatorial violence with the aim of analyzing the aesthetic resources that account for the continuity of terror in democratic Argentina and the need for a constant art of memory that cannot be reduced to official archives. Firstly, I will work on the poetics of Susy Shock, especially her poem “Hojarascas”, a travesti cry of tenderness and fury that invites us not to “step on our memory”. And, secondly, I will analyze the kind of art of memory at stake in “El sueño del sonido”, the text resulting from Dani Zelko's verse transcription of the narratives of the Mapuche singer Soraya Maicoño, where the territory becomes the very subject of that art.