2024-04-16 03:01:00
“Transfiguration means modify the essence of something,” he says. the artist Gabriela Cassano while touring his own homonymous exhibition in the Belgrano Otamendi Palace, in San Fernando. As if opening the doors of his home, the thickness of time materializes in his father’s love letters, in family photographs, in white handkerchiefs, on a rag doll, on her mother’s wedding dress Ophelia Cambiaggio, with an unmistakable Shakespearean name, which she rescues and reconstructs. Alicia, Ana Lía and Gabriela, She and her two sisters are three girls in black and white who look at the future without suspecting that The oldest, Alicia, would be kidnapped and murdered by the civic-military dictatorship in 1977. Cassano’s work, again and again, condenses the vibrations of the past into the present because now there are two sisters and an absence that always hurts.
If the murders were atrocious – death flights and shootings – the impossibility of mourning, in the absence of the bodies, is inhuman. Alicia’s body, buried as NN in the Lomas de Zamora cemetery, It was identified by the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team in 2010.
Cassano began working with the national flower, the ceibo flower. “At a time of so much denialism we have to continue talking about Memory, Truth and Justice,” highlights the artist, who studied at the Prilidiano Pueyrredón National School of Fine Arts and completed her pictorial training with the masters Aníbal Carreño and Carlos Cañás. “Anahí was a little Guaraní Indian who was captured by the Spanish. She wanted to escape because she was rebellious and didn’t want to be subdued, and that’s why she killed the guard. Then they tied her to a tree and set her on fire. Anahí had a beautiful voice and when they were setting it on fire she started singing. The next morning the ceibo flower appeared, which is the tree of resistance and struggle,” summarizes the legend and reflects on the themes that appear in her work.
Just as he spoke of birth of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, that went from the private to the collective struggle in Like a stone in the pondthe exhibition she presented in 2023 at the Avellaneda Municipal Art Center (CMA), is now convinced that there is an urgency that cannot be ignored.
“If we don’t know our history, we will never move forward. The new generations have many difficulties with history. It happens to me with my children when I start to tell them something and they say: Mom, that’s over! There is no such thing as already happened because the past leaves a sediment in us and that wound is fundamental. If people didn’t have history so erased, Milei wouldn’t be president.” Cassano’s voice, far from stridency, is modulated by concern for a political present that is overwhelming no matter how you look at it.
Upon entering the first room, a video about the books “The Right” preludes the Transfiguration, exhibition curated by Jorgelina Girotti in the Belgrano Otamendi Palace, one of the architectural jewels most important in the province of Buenos Aires, built by the Belgrano family in the 19th century, which passed through many hands, was abandoned and vandalized, Macrismo threatened to demolish it to make the land a real estate business and It was able to be recovered thanks to the activism of the neighbors.
Books closed with padlocks are spread out on an old blanket, books cut out, with holes in them and partially destroyed. “The military was the armed arm of economic power who wanted to impose a change in Argentina’s politics because the workers had rights and lived well. I was born 69 years ago and I saw how my father was able to study at a public university and received his doctor’s degree, even though he was the ninth child in an immigrant family. There was Social Mobility and people had rights. That’s what I lived; It is not a story that they told me,” he clarifies in his role as a witness to that upward social mobility.
“The repressors are dying and they are not ending the pact of silence. When they say you have to forget, how are you going to forget? Are you going to forget that you had a son and that you never knew what happened to him again? How can you forget something like that? What are they asking of us?” asks Cassano and adds that they also managed to implant the prejudice that militancy is a “bad” word. “We have the right to complain if we do not want to be left without culture and science.” Through her work, the artist warns about the danger of destroying rights that were distinctive in the country’s constitution. “Science and education are what made us different in Latin America. People could go to school, high school and college, and that changed everything.”
“Giratoria” is an openwork metal sheet with young men and women who are floating or dancing, as if in limbo. The painting “Suspended” takes up the characters from “Giratoria”. Untamed, a word that stands out on one of the walls, is the opposite of tamed. Cassano thinks of that word to express the fight of the missing militants. The technique with which the word untamed is marked is embossing. The fifty mothers’ handkerchiefs, those white triangles with figures suspended in the air, the same ones seen at the beginning of the route, are concentrated in a kind of “handkerchief stand.”
“Exvotos” is a beautiful installation. As if they fell from the sky, they appear hanging that kind of pagan offerings, small pockets where there are family photos and other treasured objects, such as the love letters that her father wrote to Ofelia. “My dad was a poet,” Her daughter defines it in a posthumous recognition not without nostalgia for a world in which she had not yet been born.
The second major installation in the exhibition is “The Thickness of Time”. Two sublimated gual fabrics contain black and white images of Ofelia, at age 18, with a bouquet of muguet, a small, campaign-shaped, white flower. The scarf she wears on her head is the one that young woman used to go to church in the summer. “My God, it makes me hot!”; “They went to church dressed as if they were going to a wedding,” the daughter compares. Further back he is hanging her mother’s wedding dress, intervened with different texts and drawings. “My mother got married early because they didn’t have money; To get married in church you had to pay for a long time, instead she spoke to the priest and told him that she wanted to get married and after mass he married her,” the artist recalls.
A lithograph with the ceibo flower embroidered with red threads refers to the blood of Anahí, the blood of Alicia and the 30,000 disappeared detainees. Cassano confesses that it causes him “a lot of anguish” that Vice President Victoria Villarruel is a vindicator of the dictatorship. “How did we get to this?” I ask myself. I talk to people who tell me that they voted for Milei because they have hope. There is nothing new; José Alfredo Martínez de Hoz already did this, Mauricio Macri tried to do it and now Milei is carrying it out in a fierce way. The horror happened to all of us as a society. What worries me most is that we are very close to it happening again.”
*Transfiguration It can be visited from Monday to Saturday from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. at Sarmiento 1401, corner of Lavalle, in San Fernando, until April 30, with free admission.