Male narrator The two images here are part of contemporary artist Hugo Aveta’s series on the remains of the sites where crimes were committed under the last dictatorship.
[somber music begins]
In one, burned medical records obscure the floor of a hospital; in the other, shafts of hazy daylight filter through what was once a detention center.
Curatorial Assistant, Fabian Leyva-Barragan.
Fabian Leyva-Barragan Aveta focuses on the emptiness of these spaces, and the emptiness relates to the disappeared people of the dictatorship of 1976 to ’83. There are no explicit markers or explicit images of the disappeared, but rather the emptiness in the photographs is what highlights the violence that happened in these locations.
[music ends]
Male narrator Thousands of people kidnapped, detained, tortured, killed – Aveta chooses to refer only indirectly to this violence. Despite the palpable atmosphere and expressive details in the images, these spaces are not real; rather, they are scale models of the locations, constructed by the artist and then photographed.
Fabian Leyva-Barragan Aveta plays with this idea of creating liminal spaces where it is challenging for the viewer to discern between what is real and what has been constructed. He makes the viewer question what he sees.
[music resumes]
Male narrator It’s a technique that mimics memory itself: half-remembered fragments of a traumatic past come back to us, part truth, part psychological construction.
[music ends]
