Madres de Plaza de Mayo durante su habitual ronda / Mothers of Plaza de Mayo during Their Customary March, 1981, Eduardo Longoni, gelatin silver print.
Courtesy of and © Eduardo Longoni
Transcript
Male narrator This pair of images by photojournalist Eduardo Longoni place you in the middle of a protest march. In 1976, Argentina’s democratic government fell to a military dictatorship. Within a year, these women banded together to oppose it. They were called “Madres de Plaza de Mayo”: the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo. Curator, Judith Keller.
[wistful music begins]
Judith Keller The group of mothers made their practice of marching every Thursday in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, in front of the Presidential Palace. It was a circular march around the plaza. They dressed in their normal garb for housework, but also always wore white scarves over their heads.
[music ends]
Male narrator Over and over, they returned to the same gesture. They brandished photographs — images of family members who had been kidnapped in secret by the military police. These missing people, called Los Desaparecidos, the “disappeared,” were held without trial, tortured, and often killed; as many as 30,000 people never returned.
Judith Keller The Mothers defied the soldiers who were called in to try to stop them. And because they were women, they were there because they cared deeply about their missing loved ones. This became really something without precedent. They got their pictures into not only the newspapers of Argentina but internationally. And, it worked.
Male narrator The dictatorship came to an end in 1983. Yet the mothers continued marching.
[music resumes]
How do politics, protest, and art come together here?
Judith Keller The Mothers, though they didn’t think of it as performance art, their protests were most definitely staged and contrived. And the photographers collaborated with them in photographing them, and then making their photographs part of international news.
[music ends]