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Male narrator Julio Pantoja’s series Los Hijos, or The Sons and Daughters, shows young adults holding family photographs of their parents, who were kidnapped and murdered by the military some twenty years earlier.
Brandishing a photograph of the disappeared is part of a tradition of defiance that began during the dictatorship itself. Curator, Judith Keller.
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Judith Keller The attack of the military was carried out in a very clandestine way. They would kidnap people at any moment, often during the night, and making these people visible again through the photography, through these family portraits, served to undermine the military’s strategy to a great degree.
Male narrator Madres de Plaza de Mayo famously created this gesture. Here, instead of the mothers of the disappeared, we see the children. In this new context, the gesture takes on added meaning.
Judith Keller The parents of these young people were themselves at the beginning of their academic studies, their college years; or, they were just beginning their careers, when they were disappeared. His intention is to make you think not only about these young people who lost their parents at a very young age but about their parents, who disappeared and whose lives were cut short at a young age.
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Male narrator Though the photographs are part of a series, each one is individually titled. Pantoja includes not only the names of the sitters, but also their ages and what careers they are beginning – creating a kind of bridge between child and parent. The work is about the present as much as it is about the past.
The series was inspired by a 1995 election in Pantoja’s home province of Tucumán. General Antonio Bussi, who had played a key role in the dictatorship’s crimes, became governor. Pantoja, horrified, embarked on this project to remind people of the dictatorship and Bussi’s legacy.
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