The clothes in the machinery of extermination: dressing, undressing, investing. The onslaught over the bodies (Argentina, 1974-1983)

Abstract

In Argentina, the works and politics of Memory, Truth and Justice have made possible heterogeneous significations around the limit situation imposed by the concentrationary power of State terror. Different materialities are part of the weave of their semiosis, historical legibilities and visibilities: photographs, oral testimonies, writings, sounds, objects, building structures, textiles, among other texts where the traces and their meanings are inscribed.
In this article, we are particularly interested in exploring the status that clothing has assumed in the clandestine detention centers, its meanings, indexical condition and
functions inside the machinery of extermination.
But we also ask ourselves about the disruptive forms of textiles in the camp, their interweaving in the practices of resistance built by the kidnapped. Survivors’ testimonies will be the surfaces where we will trace and analyze these traces.
In these coordinates, we will approach the functions and forms of clothing as a trace and as a remainder, in the narratives of memories, in the unveiling of the clandestine, in the presence of absences, in the weaving of affects that reverberate, insistent and irreducible, in the present time of enunciation.