Gestures, objects and photographs. Notes on an encounter or chronicle of what shines in its (im)possible semiosis

Abstract

These notes arise from the encounter with photographs of the Crónica newspaper, taken between 1971 and 1972 during Alejandro Lanusse's dictatorship, and the diverse questions that arose around their historical legibility and their relationship with visual memories. These photographs were taken in scenes prepared by the Armed and Security Forces for the purpose of being recorded by the media -. That is to say, they were produced at the call and demand of the dictatorship's own operators. In this sense, we ask what treatments and uses of the image have been deployed in the discursive community of the Forces, in the planning and execution of State terror in Argentina?, how have certain objects, images, signs been signified in a matrix historically configured by the repressive State?, but also what are the possible significations for the gestures that interpellate us in the surviving images? We propose to address these questions based on the semiotic-political analysis of the images, paying attention to their conditions of production and circulation, to their traces, to what insists on their irreducibility and their subversive potency.