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  • Missing Identity
  • Silvia Levenson (bio)

I was born in Buenos Aires in 1957.

I was part of a generation that fought to change a society that seemed to us terribly unjust. I was nineteen years old when, in 1976, the military gained power with a coup d’état, and in August of that year my daughter Natalia was born. She is now the same age as the youth born during the dictatorship, from whom the military government stole biological identities. With inconceivable cruelty, pregnant female prisoners were assassinated after having given birth, and newborns were illegally put up for adoption and treated as “war booty.”

What happened between 1976 and 1983, throughout the military dictatorship, changed my life as it did to the majority of Argentinians, and it certainly influenced my artwork. As an artist I have always been interested in interpersonal relationships and in the relationship between family and society. In this case, those who brought to conclusion the illegal adoptions had to keep the family secrets sealed, while counting on the complicity of those who chose not to look or search further.

“Revealing,” making visible that which is normally hidden or cannot be seen, is an integral part of my work. I use glass to represent this metaphor—a material we use daily to preserve foods and beverages, and in containers and bottles to preserve over time the integrity of fruits and vegetables. In my artworks I use glass to preserve the memory of persons and objects for future generations. I am not interested in the potential beauty of the glass material but in its function to preserve and protect. To me glass embodies the idea of resilience. Glass artifacts of thousands of years ago are retrieved today. Some are whole while others are in pieces, and they require time and dedication to be put together again, but in the end each artifact speaks to us of the person who created it and brings us back to that person’s time. [End Page 41]

The story of the desaparecidos [disappeared] can also be pieced together again in its entirety once the endeavor of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo is concluded, and all those still missing in the head count will have responded. Until now, after extensive research, the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo have identified at least five hundred cases of children stolen from their parents or born in captivity, and who were subsequently put up for adoption illegally. Interviewing doctors, nurses, lawyers, social workers, officials, neighbors, and prisoners, the Grandmothers, during and after the revolution, continued to search for clues to find their nieces and nephews. Throughout the years they created a campaign, inviting children born between 1976 and 1983 who had doubts on their identities, to do a DNA test. And thanks to them, today one hundred and thirty young people reclaimed a basic human right, the right to an identity.

The title of my exhibit—Identidad desaparecida [Missing Identity]—alludes to the emptiness that those children, who are now adults, left in their biological families and in society. It is an absence that weighs as much as a boulder in the history of Argentina. The military and their civil accomplices—doctors, priests, and corrupt officials—wanted to make a generation and their descendants disappear from the face of the earth. Using institutionalized methods of terror, they tried to silence the mothers who every Thursday assembled in front of the government headquarters in Plaza de Mayo, in Buenos Aires, asking for the liberation of their disappeared children or the return of their bodies. Untamed, the mothers, who with the passing of time became grandmothers, moved the center of their protest to the desaparecidos nieces and nephews, starting the search.

The central installation of the exhibit—one hundred and thirty infant pieces of clothing in colored glass—are made with the technique of kiln casting that reproduces real textile items. I started to fabricate them in 2014 and completed them in 2018. My intention has been to add new baby clothes to the installation as other grandchildren recuperate their own identities. This work is a reminder of the resolved cases of the Abuelas de Plaza de...

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