Paula Luttringer, Argentina
Lamento de los Muros
[The Wailing of the Walls]

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was not unusual to see in Cabinets de Curiosités stones on which strange patterns could be observed. It was thought that these patterns were created when the stones absorbed imprints of violence which had taken place nearby. I have a collection of these stones because they provide me with a metaphor for the marks I feel are inscribed in my own body and in the bodies of other Argentine women who, like me, suffered enforced disappearance and torture during Argentina’s Dirty War thirty years ago. We lived through a storm of history that changed our lives. We have built our lives on the scars of that trauma, scars that left recognizable patterns on our lives and the lives of our children and loved ones. Since 2000, I have been going back to Argentina, returning to the Secret Detention Centers and photographing walls that still bear witness to the violence enacted on our bodies, searching for other women who lived through enforced disappearance, asking them to talk with me about memories that have lasted for thirty years. My project, called El Lamento de los Muros [The Wailing of the Walls], is the result.