This article suggests an oblique reading of The Headless Woman (2008), the latest film by Lucrecia Martel, a founder member of the so-called New Argentine Cinema and one of the major stylists of contemporary cinema. Unlike the many memorial films that surround the trauma of the disappeared in Argentina, The Headless Woman 'countersigns' the genre, proposing a hallucinatory experience of immersion within the affects of guilt, complicity and denial unleashed by the last dictatorship . By presenting the existentialist drama of an upper-class woman involved in a seemingly minor car accident on a deserted provincial road, the film manages to stage a counter-narrative of the traumatic past that affected the whole of society beyond obvious sites of suffering. Through an engagement with Judith Butler's account of mourning, this article argues that the film bears the traces of a collective mourning, an experience of grief that permeated the Argentine citizenry and challenged blood as the only form of kinship. The article contends that the affects explored in Martel's film may be crucial in confronting the new faceless, that is, those whose social exclusion persists unnoticed during the current democratic regime, and whose lives are in a sense 'ungrievable'. By proposing an entanglement of temporalities, the analysis suggests that the 30,000 lives made to disappear during dictatorial times cannot be grasped except in conjunction with the silence surrounding poverty, the new spectre of the present. In Martel's film each viewer becomes a witness and also a survivor and is thereby subtlety compelled to respond. In this way, The Headless Woman also suggests an ethical key to future possibilities.

In the wake of Argentina's dictatorship , this article revisits the activism developed by the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo as a singular experience of live architecture. Over the last 30 years, this group of women has become the figure of an endless trauma, much like a monument, that has colonized the landscape of the central square of Buenos Aires in the name of the 30,000 missing. Assuming an experimental ontology that blurs the boundaries between the living and the non-living, I argue that the stubbornness attached to the Mothers' performance could be grasped in tune with Spider, a massive installation designed by the artist Louise Bourgeois. As Spiders, the Mothers have captured the viewers in their webs while transforming the personal losses into a collective experience of grief. Ultimately, the affective entity co-enacted by the Mothers-Spiders can teach us how memory is experienced and transmitted in the tremors of the spectatorial body, both as a shelter and a trap.

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This essay reflects on the different spectatorial, political, cultural, affective and bodily experiences of attending Lola Arias's MINEFIELD/CAMPO MINADO, both at the Royal Court in London and at a university auditorium in Buenos Aires. Drawing upon the 1982 Malvinas/Falklands War, the Argentine internationally recognized director's production featured six former soldiers who used to be enemies on the battlefield telling real stories about the conflict. Although there was almost nothing that could be called traditional theatre onstage, the production received standing ovations on both sides of the Atlantic. But what was applauded at the end of each performance? The audiences’ reactions, including my own, were very different at the two venues. I argue that Arias's production hinged upon a high-risk, highly exposed public encounter that envisioned a change of perspectives, not only for the ex-soldiers involved but also for the spectators. Rather than staging veterans as war heroes, Arias's social experiment exposed both teams on a common ground of vulnerability. MINEFIELD constructed a spectacle of intimate power that delineated a naked form of transnational citizenship.

Argentina’s neoconservative backlash (2015–2019) has rather paradoxically been marked by an unprecedented entanglement of ongoing memory struggles and a recent feminist awakening. A critical reading of this entwining traces the queer reworking of dictatorship trauma during the Kirchnerist administrations (2003–2015) and explores the way the post-2015 cycle nurtured a feminist irruption that contested long-standing forms of patriarchy. The feminist movement Ni Una Menos has transitioned from victimization to joy. Albertina Carri’s lesbian-porn fictional film Las hijas del fuego (2018) can be read as an expression of a novel amalgam of disappearance, sexuality, and politics. The spirit of contagion radiated by the film sheds light on the “revolution of the daughters” now taking place in the streets. La reacción neoconservadora de Argentina (2015-2019) se ha visto paradójicamente marcada por una vinculación sin precedentes entre las luchas de memoria en curso y un reciente despertar feminista. Una lectura critica entrelaza una reelaboración queer del trauma de la dictadura durante las administraciones kirchneristas (2003-2015) a la vez que explora la forma en que el ciclo post-2015 alimentó una irrupción feminista impugnó viejas formas del patriarcado. El movimiento feminista Ni Una Menos ha pasado de la victimización a la alegría. La ficción pornográfica lésbica Las hijas del fuego (2018), de Albertina Carri, se puede leer como la expresión de una nueva amalgama de desaparición, sexualidad y política. El espíritu de contagio irradiado por la película arroja luz sobre la “revolución de las hijas” que tiene lugar en las calles.