Cicatrizes da memória: Fotografias de desaparecidos políticos em acervos de museus

Abstract

Utilizing the relationship between image and presentification, the text analyzes the meanings that portraits of victims of dictatorships acquire when they are presented within museum archives. In this analysis two aspects are considered: the documentary qualities of the photograph itself, as well as the process of exhibiting the photograph within a museum. The analysis is conducted by employing concepts of memory that establish a series of relationships in which the evocation of a temporal understanding of past-present indissociability as well as the expression of unforgettable violence become combined in the portrayal of certain continuity. In this way, a photograph is understood to be a discursive practice within the space of a museum (an institution of memory), and is presented as a mark of suffering – a scar.