Re-cycling: Materialising Militancy at the exESMA

Abstract

This article proposes a visit of the artistic interventions held at the current Espacio Memoria y Derechos Humanos (exESMA) in Buenos Aires, Argentina, considering the central role that militancy has gained recently in human rights discourses. This way, the article will seek to move away from readings of the exESMA as a space of violence, horror, or even memory, in order to understand it as a space of embodied experiences of militancy that find continuities with the recent past. Thus, the article reads the ex-ESMA as an agent and participant of the exercise of militancy, especially through the materiality and inter-materiality of the space itself as well as the artistic interventions carried out there. Specifically, the article considers an aesthetic of recycling so as to analyse the ways in which these interventions materialise the junction between art, militancy and human rights. Using an interdisciplinary theoretical framework that reflects our object of study, the article will focus on the material and aesthetic intersections in works by Grupo de Arte Callejero (GAC) and other aspects of the site that represent and enact such experiences of militancy and their continuities with the past.