The figure of Videla as a state terrorism paradigm. Reflections among two technopoetic works of art

Abstract

This paper arises from the recognition of a group of works of art that, since the 1960s, critically captured the authoritarian and repressive sign of the Argentine political culture, through the representation of military figures. When being sequenced in this visual matrix, the investigation addresses two contemporary technological works of art that use Jorge Rafael Videla as a paradigmatic figure of such tradition that, for this part, finds its maximum expression in State terrorism, namely: the video-sculpture Sin Título (2006) by Alejandro Schianchi and the single-channel video Subversion Loop (2016) by Hernán Khourián. Thus, this work is aimed to understand how Videla's figure ?between the exemplarity and the singularity? shapes a memory dispositive. Moreover, it seeks to describe and analyze some axes of poetic and political inscription in which these pieces are located. It is understood that this aesthetic production not only allows to tackle ominous aspects of the recent past, but also to specify how the very present provides a definition to concepts through which perpetrators are thought and visual shapes through which their memory turns operational.