Escrache
One of the most striking expressions of contemporary political performance are the escraches—the acts of public shaming staged by the Argentinean activist group H.I.J.O.S in collaboration with the visual artists' collective, Grupo de Arte Callejero [Street Art Collective]. The escraches' targets are the infamous Dirty War Centros de detención clandestina [Clandestine Detention Centers]. and they also denounce crime perpetrators—military and police torturers and murderers who, after being taken to court and condemned, were pardoned by state order under the Full Stop [Punto Final] and Due Obedience [Obediencia Debida] laws.
H.I.J.O.S escraches are performances of visual recognition and storytelling that rely on images and structured action to restore missing bodies in the public sphere thus contesting the official mandate of silence and forgetting. The "concentrated spectacle" (Debord) carried out by the Argentinean military government of 1976-1983 added a new layer to the official administration of life and death that scholar Diana Taylor, following Argentine psychoanalyst Juan Carlos Kusnetzoff, calls "percepticide" (Taylor 1997). Percepticide makes what is "obviously visible" appear as "seemingly invisible and resistant to critique" through "the self-blinding of the general population" (ibid). Within this visual regime, "looking away" was a surviving strategy for many Argentineans who were passively witnessing the abductions of their fellow citizens from the public sphere. Taylor (2002) analyzes how, in the escraches, H.I.J.O.S return to "the scene of the crime" and through storytelling they recompose the quotidian stage in which, this time, spectators are asked to actively "bear witness."
In addition to their call for memory and witnessing as a central part of their human rights campaign, H.I.J.O.S escraches are enhanced by the work of Grupo de Arte Callejero (GAC) who employs visual artifacts as vehicles for denunciation. Quoting the official traffic- sign code and intervening the landscape of "real" street visual instructions, GAC maps out the escrache space, providing information about distances to and from the target site, In this way, the artists situate the individuals' disconnected bodies in physical relation to the escrache's site. GAC turns passers- by into active participants when the group invites them to traverse the space by following the signs.
This active cartography restores the system of correlation between people and spaces that was erased under military rule, and silenced under democracy. By mimicking "normal" street signs such as "Dead End 1 mile away," GAC signs frame the escrache as a sort of pilgrimage, as they simultaneously build suspense. Although this form of activism clearly necessitates the figure of the antagonist, be this a space or a person (the escrachado), the escrache works as a performance of communal recognition. In this sense, the presence of "live" bodies coming together to listen and to comment on the events, sharing memories and being in the scene, is more important than enacting violence on the space or person that are being signaled out.
It goes without saying that escraches are fundamentally local and situated, honoring performance's main characteristic of being in situ. The presence of "live" bodies breaking out from conditions of passive spectatorship and defying notions of "dangerous seeing," marks the importance given by human rights activists to the act of bearing witness but it also communicates the value of civic autonomy in a performance of social justice.
One of the central mottos of the escraches is "Si no hay justicia hay escrache" (If there is no justice there is escrache). This gesture situates the failure of formal law to regiment the case's closure through unjust and arbitrary measures (pardoning those who were found "guilty"), and the force of bodily presence to enact a social, non-violent condemnation. Thus, H.I.J.O.S escraches recall not only the activists' parents' missing bodies but they also mark the bodies of those who, sheltered behind the historical alienation imposed by the spectacle, pretend to remain unnoticed.
H.I.J.O.S escraches are performances of visual recognition and storytelling that rely on images and structured action to restore missing bodies in the public sphere thus contesting the official mandate of silence and forgetting. The "concentrated spectacle" (Debord) carried out by the Argentinean military government of 1976-1983 added a new layer to the official administration of life and death that scholar Diana Taylor, following Argentine psychoanalyst Juan Carlos Kusnetzoff, calls "percepticide" (Taylor 1997). Percepticide makes what is "obviously visible" appear as "seemingly invisible and resistant to critique" through "the self-blinding of the general population" (ibid). Within this visual regime, "looking away" was a surviving strategy for many Argentineans who were passively witnessing the abductions of their fellow citizens from the public sphere. Taylor (2002) analyzes how, in the escraches, H.I.J.O.S return to "the scene of the crime" and through storytelling they recompose the quotidian stage in which, this time, spectators are asked to actively "bear witness."
In addition to their call for memory and witnessing as a central part of their human rights campaign, H.I.J.O.S escraches are enhanced by the work of Grupo de Arte Callejero (GAC) who employs visual artifacts as vehicles for denunciation. Quoting the official traffic- sign code and intervening the landscape of "real" street visual instructions, GAC maps out the escrache space, providing information about distances to and from the target site, In this way, the artists situate the individuals' disconnected bodies in physical relation to the escrache's site. GAC turns passers- by into active participants when the group invites them to traverse the space by following the signs.
This active cartography restores the system of correlation between people and spaces that was erased under military rule, and silenced under democracy. By mimicking "normal" street signs such as "Dead End 1 mile away," GAC signs frame the escrache as a sort of pilgrimage, as they simultaneously build suspense. Although this form of activism clearly necessitates the figure of the antagonist, be this a space or a person (the escrachado), the escrache works as a performance of communal recognition. In this sense, the presence of "live" bodies coming together to listen and to comment on the events, sharing memories and being in the scene, is more important than enacting violence on the space or person that are being signaled out.
It goes without saying that escraches are fundamentally local and situated, honoring performance's main characteristic of being in situ. The presence of "live" bodies breaking out from conditions of passive spectatorship and defying notions of "dangerous seeing," marks the importance given by human rights activists to the act of bearing witness but it also communicates the value of civic autonomy in a performance of social justice.
One of the central mottos of the escraches is "Si no hay justicia hay escrache" (If there is no justice there is escrache). This gesture situates the failure of formal law to regiment the case's closure through unjust and arbitrary measures (pardoning those who were found "guilty"), and the force of bodily presence to enact a social, non-violent condemnation. Thus, H.I.J.O.S escraches recall not only the activists' parents' missing bodies but they also mark the bodies of those who, sheltered behind the historical alienation imposed by the spectacle, pretend to remain unnoticed.
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