Outlining the Victims of the Holocaust and the Argentinian Dictatorship: Jerzy Skąpski’s Każdy Dzień Oświęcimia and Rodolfo Aguerreberry, Julio Flores, and Guillermo Kexel’s “El Siluetazo”

Abstract

In this article, I examine two case studies of spatial representation of atrocity and trauma: Jerzy Skąpski’s poster Każdy Dzień Oświęcimia (Every Day at Auschwitz) (1974), published in the October 1978 edition of The Unesco Courier, and the aesthetic/activist action known as “El Siluetazo” (1983), which was created by Rodolfo Aguerreberry, Julio Flores, and Guillermo Kexel, and carried out as a memory-activist intervention by the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo and the Argentinian public on 21–22 September 1983. To examine the interconnections of Holocaust memory within these two case studies, I follow Michael Rothberg’s notion of multidirectional memory and Astrid Erll’s conceptualization of transcultural and travelling memory. In particular, I analyze how Skąpski’s use of silhouettes to spatially depict the victims of Auschwitz is adopted and transformed by the Argentinian artists and public to denounce the disappearance of 30,000 of their compatriots. I argue that in outlining the figures of the victims of the Holocaust and the Argentinian dictatorship, respectively, these creative works exemplify the transcultural use of silhouettes originating in Holocaust memory and the multidirectional influence, derived from their organic connection, of spatial visualizations of absent bodies as they commemorate and make present the victims of these traumatic histories.

1. Introduction

Beginning with the memory boom of the 1980s and continuing in recent decades, Holocaust memory and aesthetics have travelled across the globe as this historical trauma has been examined from transcultural and globalized perspectives.1 With such efforts, commemorative tropes and aesthetics, in particular those pertaining to spatial representations of Holocaust memory, have been adopted and transformed by numerous artists and scholars as they reflect on the destruction of European Jewry during the Nazi regime and on other traumatic histories. This is highlighted in this article as I examine two case studies of spatial representation of atrocity and trauma: one depicting the victims of the Holocaust, in particular those of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, and the other portraying a different historical trauma, the victims of the Argentinian dictatorship (1976–1983), in particular the 30,000 detained-disappeared. The works I reference are Jerzy Skąpski’s poster Każdy Dzień Oświęcimia (Every Day at Auschwitz) (Skąpski 1974), published in the October 1978 edition of The Unesco Courier, and the aesthetic/activist action known as “El Siluetazo” (1983), which was created by the visual artists Rodolfo Aguerreberry, Julio Flores, and Guillermo Kexel, and carried out as a memory-activist intervention by the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo and the Argentinian public on 21–22 September 1983.2 Throughout the dictatorships of the 1970s–1990s in the Southern Cone of Latin America (in particular in Argentina and Chile, as well as in Uruguay), abductions, torture, long-term imprisonment, and/or disappearances became prevalent and characteristic of the military regimes, with so-called subversives being disappeared by state forces, and the latter denying their involvement in these crimes (Crenzel 2011, pp. 1–2).3 In our contemporary context, the term “desaparecido has become paradigmatic in the politics of memory until this very day” (Baer and Sznaider 2017, p. 29), as Baer and Sznaider (2017) contend in Memory and Forgetting in the Post-Holocaust Era. With the two works examined in this article, I analyze how Skąpski’s use of silhouettes to spatially depict the victims of Auschwitz is adopted and transformed by these Argentinian artists and the public to denounce the disappearance of their compatriots. In placing both works in dialogue with one another, the direct connections and influences, as well as differences, are highlighted. This leads to a fruitful discussion of multidirectional and transcultural memory representations of the Holocaust and the Argentinian dictatorship.

These cross-cultural connections begin with the pieces themselves, as Skąpski’s publication of the poster in the internationally circulated and multilingual magazine, The Unesco Courier, gave the work a global audience and reception.4 This is a magazine which aims to “[bring] its readers local perspectives on global issues from some of the world’s leading thinkers” (UNESCO n.d.). The poster was then seen by the three artists in Argentina in the final years of the dictatorship as they sought a way to represent the country’s detained-disappeared (Flores 2008, p. 91). Directly influenced by Skąpski’s silhouette aesthetic, a fact Aguerreberry, Flores, and Kexel have publicly discussed on multiple occasions, the Argentinian “Siluetazo” adopts the silhouette aesthetic to represent the absent presence of the 30,000 disappeared persons across the center of Buenos Aires.5 In doing so, “El Siluetazo” also adds an activist dimension to the initial commemorative layer depicted in Każdy Dzień Oświęcimia. Moreover, what becomes evident when placed in dialogue with one another is how both works focus on the space occupied by the bodies of the victims, emphasizing their absent presence to commemorate and denounce their persecution. Thus, I argue that in outlining the figures of the victims of the Holocaust and the Argentinian dictatorship, respectively, these creative works exemplify the transcultural use of silhouettes originating in Holocaust memory and the multidirectional influence, derived from their organic connection, of spatial visualizations of absent bodies as they commemorate and make present the victims of these traumatic histories.

To examine the interconnections of Holocaust memory and the silhouette aesthetic utilized in both case studies, I follow Michael Rothberg’s (2009) notion of multidirectional memory as defined in his seminal work Multidirectional Memory and Astrid Erll’s (2011) conceptualization of travelling and transcultural memory, introduced in her article, “Travelling Memory.” Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory encourages us to understand memory, and Holocaust memory in particular, not as competitive, but rather as a tool that can highlight other histories of trauma. As he argues:

far from blocking other historical memories from view in a competitive struggle for recognition, the emergence of Holocaust memory on a global scale has contributed to the articulation of other histories—some of them predated the Nazi genocide, such as slavery, and others taking place later, such as the Algerian war of independence (1954–62) or the genocide in Bosnia during the 1990s.

(Rothberg 2009, p. 6)

Rothberg’s theorization particularly speaks to the reciprocal encounters and effects between memories of diverse historical traumas and the Holocaust, and in this case, the Argentinian dictatorship.6 Following this perspective, multidirectional memory not only furthers our understanding of “El Siluetazo” and the Holocaust memory aesthetic derived from Skąpski’s poster, which the Argentinian artists adopted, it also prompts us to re-interpret Każdy Dzień Oświęcimia from a decentered or non-Eurocentric perspective, and allows us to re-envision the impactful piece of this Polish Christian artist.

Moreover, Erll’s theorization of transcultural memory also aids our understanding of how the silhouette aesthetic, as depicted in Skąpski’s poster, travels across geographical and cultural landscapes and is adopted and transformed in the Argentinian dictatorial context.7 Erll conceives transcultural memory as “the incessant wandering of carriers, media, contents, forms, and practices of memory” and focuses on “their continual ‘travels’ and ongoing transformations through time and space, [and] across social, linguistic and political borders” (Erll 2011, p. 11). Following Erll’s transcultural perspective, this article encourages us to think about space and Holocaust memory differently, focusing on the space that paper can provide (in diverse formats and as memory carriers), and how these particular aesthetic forms travel as artists utilize them to represent the absent bodies of the victims of both the Holocaust and the Argentinian dictatorship.

Here, I will add a caveat. Even when placing two works in dialogue through the lens of multidirectional and transcultural memory, it remains crucial to remember that each historical context has its own specificities and should not be conflated with other historical traumas, as Debarati Sanyal (2015) points out in Memory and Complicity. She argues:

Memory’s entanglement of distinctive and asymmetrical sites of trauma (slavery, the Holocaust, colonialism, or terror) can shake up established traditions of remembrance and belonging, allowing new ones to emerge. Yet it can also drive us to dangerous intersections, where difference is eclipsed into sameness, where identification leads to appropriation, or where political uses of memory collide with the ethical obligations of testimony. The recognition of proximity and connection between different histories can function as both a structure of engagement and an alibi for abdication.

(p. 2)

What Sanyal emphasizes in her examination of complicity and the migrations of Holocaust memory, specifically in French and francophone literature and film, but which can be applied across the globe, is how these connections between different historical traumas can have positive impacts (as transcultural and multidirectional memory conceive), but can also lead to “dangerous intersections”, where one historical trauma appropriates elements of another and discourages constructive dialogues of commemoration. This is not to say that Sanyal does not agree with Rothberg’s concept, as she does use it as a point of reference in her text and is open to the “‘multidirectional traffic of memory’” (Sanyal 2015, p. 7). However, she makes us aware of the problems intrinsic to such cross-cultural approaches. As she contends: “If memories travel around our global cultural landscape, I see their confluence as a dangerous intersection as well as a productive multidirectional site” (p. 7). Sanyal reminds us that these dialogues can also lead to negative outcomes, with “collisions and conflations” and tensions between ethical representations and appropriations (p. 7). With the two case studies examined in this article, I argue that there is a multidirectional and dialogical encounter between these two memory cultures as a result of the organic connection between the Argentinian artists’ action and the Polish artist’s depiction of the victims of the Holocaust; however, I also aim to highlight their distinctions and unique characteristics to avoid unintentional appropriations and tensions between the two historical traumas that these artistic and activist works represent and reflect on.

2. Każdy Dzień Oświęcimia: Spatial Representation of Absence through Silhouettes

Polish artist Jerzy Skąpski’s 1974 poster Każdy Dzień Oświęcimia (Every Day at Auschwitz) was published in the October 1978 issue of The Unesco Courier, “Teaching human rights: education’s fourth ‘R’”. This quarterly magazine first emerged in 1948, just three years after the end of the Second World War and two years after the creation of UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), with the general aim “to promote UNESCO’s ideals, maintain a platform for the dialogue between cultures and provide a forum for International debate” (UNESCO n.d.). Its structure included articles, artworks, letters to the editor, and news from UNESCO. In 1978, the magazine was published monthly, except in August and September, when it was published bi-monthly, with a subscription rate of 35 French Francs per year or 3.50 per issue (UNESCO 1978b, cover and p. 3). It was available in 19 languages (including Spanish, English, and French), in more than 100 countries (including Argentina and Poland) (UNESCO 1978a, p. 35; 1978b, p. 35), and considered “a best-seller as a periodical, with more than two and a half million readers around the world” (UNESCO 1978b, pp. 32). That year’s October issue was “devoted to the problems of the teaching of human rights” as a way “[t]o mark the 30th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights” (UNESCO 1978b, p. 3). It is in this issue that we find Skąpski’s poster, which depicts the victims of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp by outlining 2370 silhouettes and reproducing them 1,688 times in each copy of the magazine’s edition. Analogous to the days the camp was operational and representing what was then thought to be 4 million victims murdered at Auschwitz, Skąpski uniquely utilizes both the space of the page and the reproducibility of the print medium to commemorate the victims of the destruction of European Jewry during the Nazi regime. In doing so, he abstractly and spatially portrays the victims of the Holocaust and demonstrates the scale of suffering to a global audience.8 A few years after its publication, the Argentinian visual artists Aguerreberry, Flores, and Kexel, were directly inspired by Skąpski’s spatial depiction of death to create life-size paper silhouettes in order to denounce the 30,000 disappeared persons during the country’s fascist dictatorship (1976–1983).9 These were pasted by the public throughout the Buenos Aires city center during the third annual Marcha de la Resistencia (Resistance March), a 24-hour protest march held on 21–22 September 1983.10 With this new iteration of the silhouette aesthetic, originally found in Skąpski’s poster (and Polish Holocaust art more broadly), a memory-activist dimension was added to the spatial representation of absence.11 In doing so, the Argentinian project points to a transformation in the travelling silhouette aesthetic. It also nuances the viewer’s interpretation of Skąpski’s commemorative poster, when read from a multidirectional and transcultural memory perspective. Let us examine the silhouette aesthetic of Holocaust commemoration in Skąpski’s piece and Polish Holocaust art more closely.

The use of relics, negative spaces, shadows, and silhouettes to depict the absence left by the murder of the victims of the Holocaust has come to characterize a distinct aesthetic of Holocaust art, as numerous artists have adopted these elements to represent the victims of the Nazi destruction of European Jewry.12 Different artists (survivors, Jewish, non-Jewish, German, second generation, etc.) have utilized diverse aesthetic approaches in their work to emphasize this trope.13 Silhouettes and figures in particular are used to represent the physical absence of victims and the presence-of-absence trope, which is an aesthetic approach that emphasizes the loss of an individual’s life by depicting how they are no longer there.14 This trope can highlight the physical absence of a person by employing shadows, figures, or negative spaces to evoke their presence; in doing so, it allows the artist to represent the unrepresentable, the loss of 6 million Jewish people, and provides a way to commemorate their absence. As Ziva Amishai-Maisels (2005) explains in Absence-presence:

One of the more complex new strategies for remembering the Holocaust is the evocation of “ghosts” to suggest that its victims remain with us, shadowing our existence with their own. Artists first used Holocaust “ghosts” to express a sense of loss: the victim’s disappearance left behind only a spectral image, relics, smoke, or holes in the collective memory. Building on this early approach, contemporary artists attempt instead to represent continuing memory.

(p. 123)

What Amishai-Maisels highlights is how the use of spectral images, ghosts, figures, and relics to represent those who were murdered during the Holocaust evokes their absent presence. This is a presence which is no longer visual or tangible (except in material remnants) but can still be felt as it remains in the memory of those who survived (p. 123). In particular, Amishai-Maisels focuses on the use of ghosts, which can be distinctive from silhouettes, not only in their form but also in their role. Ghosts can connote a haunting, or an ever-lingering spirit. They are often times represented as floating, disembodied, and in white or human form (pp. 125–40); the author explains that while silhouettes can evoke a haunting (p. 131), they do not always do so and are mostly depicted as outlined figures (p. 128–29). I will also add that silhouettes distinctly portray the physical form of the human body and do not necessarily evoke a spiritual presence, but rather the reminder that someone was once there. Moreover, Amishai-Maisels also notes that “[a] different manner of expressing the same type of unreal presence [aside from using ghosts or figures in the human form] while adding to it a heightened sense of loss and absence is to negate the image or call it into question” (p. 128). By “negating the image”, the artists remind the viewers of the irretrievable loss experienced as a result of this atrocity and differentiate in their work the living from the dead (p. 128). For instance, the author describes silhouettes that outline the figure but leave “an inner void” (p. 128) as a method of portraying this aspect. This allows the artist to also represent the loss experienced through the Holocaust with “suggested but not always present images” (p. 150) and commemorate its victims.

As mentioned, we can observe the use of silhouettes and figures to evoke the absent presence of Holocaust victims in concentrationary, post-war, and contemporary representations of Holocaust art, both by Jewish and non-Jewish artists; for example, the works of Polish artist Józef Szajna (1922–2008), who was imprisoned as a member of the Polish resistance in both Auschwitz and Buchenwald, as well as those of the Polish realist painter Jerzy Krawczyk (1921–1969). Numerous of Szajna’s (1970, 1976, 1990, 2006) works depict the victims of the Holocaust through the use of silhouettes as well as material relics.15 These include, just to name a few: the piece Wall of Shoes (1970) (Figure 1), which was an installation for his famous play Replika (1973); his 1976 piece Silhouettes, featuring outlined figures popping from the cardboard (Figure 2); his 1990 painting Appeal (Figure 3), which depicts several rows of people standing side by side—similar to Skąpski’s depiction in Każdy Dzień Oświęcimia; and his 2006 collage, Figures, which combines the abstract shape of the silhouette with photographs of the prisoners of the camps (Figure 4). In addition, Krawczyk’s (1962) Aufpassen, Mutti! is particularly striking, as it depicts a black shadowy figure with a yellow star of David painted over several German newspaper clippings (a resemblance to the life-size silhouettes of “El Siluetazo”).16 Jerzy Skąpski’s (1974) Każdy Dzień Oświęcimia (Every Day at Auschwitz), as we will see below, also speaks to this theme.

Jerzy Skąpski (1933–2020) was born near Kraków, in the village of Hebdów in Southern Poland. He was a renowned painter and stained glass and graphic artist. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków from 1952 to 1958, under the guidance of Emil Krcha, Maciej Makarewicz, and Ludwik Gardowski (Skąpski n.d.a). He is best known for his stained glass windows designed for numerous churches in Poland, as well as Sweden, Russia, and France (Laureates n.d.). In total, he created over 800 stained glass windows (Skąpski n.d.a). Of particular importance are those he designed for the Roman Catholic Parish of St. Maximilian the Martyr in Oświęcim (Rzymskokatolicka Parafia Św. Maksymiliana Męczennika w Oświęcimiu n.d.), whose “[p]resentation of the martyred[sic] in the glory of heaven also has a simillar overtone to the poster [Każdy Dzień Oświęcimia]” (Agnieszka Skąpska, pers. comm., 26 December 2022).17 He also created the coat of arms for the Archbishop Karol Wojtyła, which became the basis for the coat of arms for Pope John Paul II (Skąpski n.d.a). Furthermore, in 2020, he was awarded The Pontifical Council for Culture’s Per Artem ad Deum Medal, honoring his artistic work (Laureates n.d.).

Although Skąpski’s stained glass pieces follow Christian themes and aesthetics, the artist has also been influenced by Jewish themes and has commemorated the Holocaust in several of his paintings (pers. comm.), in particular, Odkrycie rodziny Szulima pod altaną (Discovery of Szulim’s Family in the Garden Shed) (oil on canvas 91 × 91) (Skąpski 2010a).18 The colorful painting with childlike aesthetics portrays twelve blue-eyed faces hiding in the shadows of an enclosure, with a tall and older man at the shed’s entrance speaking with a young boy. The painting’s description on Skąpski’s website explains that this is one of the artist’s childhood memories of the Second World War and portrays a young Skąpski encountering Szulim Strosberg and his family (acquaintances of the Skąpski family) hiding in the garden shed of one of the Hebdów gardens (Skąpski n.d.c). The piece represents one encounter with the persecution of Jewish people during the Holocaust years, in this case, the hiding place of a neighbour and his family, and shows the audience the impactful memory this moment left on the Polish Christian artist. As the description recounts:

Eight-year-old Jurek noticed that the latch closing the door to the garden shed was not closed, so he looked inside curiously, and from inside many pairs of eyes looked at the boy with horror. One of the individuals that Jurek recognized was Szulim Strosberg, who approached him and said in a gentle voice: ‘Jureczek, tell daddy that we are here—just don’t say anything to the Germans.’ Jurek complied. Then, Jurek’s father issued an outright ban on going to the attic for the next few months...

(Skąpski n.d.c; translation by Anna (Ania) Paluch)19

As an artist who often times includes himself in his paintings, see for instance Autoportret Mistyczny Łeb 69 (2003), Skąpski’s depiction of this memory of Strosberg shows a vulnerable moment of his childhood, a haunting memory he has returned to in the later years of his life, with a fuller understanding of what happened during the war and to the Strosberg family, in particular.20

However, his work Każdy Dzień Oświęcima (Every Day at Auschwitz) (1974; 1978) (poster 100 × 70) shows a more abstract aesthetic, as the artist outlines one by one the victims of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp (Figure 5). The poster, created in 1974, was published in the October 1978 issue of The Unesco Courier. A copy is also housed at Yad Vashem and the White House in Washington (Skąpski n.d.b). As mentioned, the piece depicts the silhouettes of the victims who died at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. It portrays 24 rows of side-profile silhouettes forming a continuous line, with a caption that reads: “‘Every day at Auschwitz brought death to 2370 people, and this is the number of figures represented above. The concentration camp at Auschwitz was in existence for 1688 days and this is the exact number of copies of this poster printed. Altogether some four million people died at the camp’” (Skąpski 1978, p. 22). Although the number of victims was revised in 1989 to one million, the poster nevertheless evokes the absent presence of those murdered at the camp by abstractly portraying their figures and magnifying the scale of the atrocity for the viewer. In an email correspondence with the artist’s wife, Agnieszka Skąpska, she explains the care Skąpski took when painting this poster: “Jerzy mentioned that it was one of the hardest works. As painting the silhouettes he took time to imagine who the person was, what was his/hers/its values and dreams. His aim was to pay tribute to every person martyred in Auschwitz” (Agnieszka Skąpska, pers. comm., 26 December 2022). She also recounts the difficulty of finding the materials in the then-communist country:

The poster was created during the communism era in Poland; hyperinflation caused the total breakdown of the economy—it was very hard to get anything from the material goods. Being an artist in such time was challenging. There was no art materials in the shops or it was so expensive that not everyone could afford it. For example when creating the poster Jerzy was lacking the black paper. He painted the paper with a black paint before he started to paint the silhouettes of people with the white paint.

(Agnieszka Skąpska, pers. comm., 26 December 2022)

As viewers, we can observe these details in the poster as we scan each of the 24 rows, which feature linked white lines forming the shapes of silhouettes against a black background (which we now know was painted black by Skąpski). From a distance, these might seem like a heart rhythm line detected by an electrocardiogram (EKG), or “twenty-four rows of seams or scars”, as Liam Machado describes it (Machado 2019, p. 48). However, upon closer inspection, the silhouettes become clearly distinct, each not quite the same as the other, and some varying in size in order to resemble the figures of women and children. This is how the poster evokes the absent presence of the victims of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and the Holocaust in general.

What makes the piece particularly impactful is how the artist, as a young witness of these atrocities, utilizes the space of the page and the reproducibility of the print medium to visually depict the victims’ death and invoke their lingering presence, felt even after their departure. Similar to Szajna’s (1990, 2006) Appeal and Figures, the use of multiple silhouettes to represent the dead and invoke their presence leaves the viewers with a sense of the scale of the atrocity, while also reminding them of the individual aspect and humanity of the victims; each one of these figures was a person with a name, a history, a family. Skąpski’s note in the caption of the poster about the letter he wrote to The Unesco Courier in relation to his work puts this into perspective. He states: “‘When I had finished painting this poster I was afraid to put my name on it—what meaning have names in comparison with people’s lives?’” (Skąpski 1978, p. 22). We can interpret this in line with Theodore Adorno’s ([1981] 2003a) famous statement in “Cultural Criticism and Society” that “[t]o write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (p. 280), or the post-war reluctance to represent the Holocaust in art. How can we understand this traumatic historical period and represent it artistically? What meaning do our lives have in the post-Auschwitz world? As Adorno ([1981] 2003b) would later contend in “Mediation on Metaphysics:” “All post-Auschwitz culture, including its urgent critique, is garbage” (p. 286). The artist’s attempt to focus on the significance of the silhouettes to represent individual life (including children) in each of the rows speaks to the attempt to at least try to do so. Moreover, as the artist had personal connections to the Jewish community of his village, the words allude to the feeling of mourning the loss of these victims.

Furthermore, the decision to create this aesthetic piece as a poster to be printed and re-printed, as opposed to a painting, also speaks to the intention behind the work, and to the innovation in such a commemorative piece. Walter Benjamin’s ([1936] 2008) understanding of mass media, as described in “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”, clarifies this approach: “It might be stated as a general formula that the technology of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the sphere of tradition. By replicating the work many times over, it substitutes a mass existence for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to reach the recipient in his or her own situation, it actualizes that which is reproduced” (p. 22). Michael W. Jennings (2008) further reiterates this argument in the preface of the 2008 edition of The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media: “Reproducibility is thus finally a political capacity of the work of art; its very reproducibility shatters its aura and enables a reception of a very different kind in a very different spectatorial space” (p. 15; emphasis in original). By utilizing the print medium to reproduce his artwork 1688 times to match the days the camp was operational, Skąpski offers a dynamic commemorative work that utilizes the space of the page and the print medium in a unique manner to represent the victims of the Nazi destruction of European Jewry while paying special attention to how each of the victims was portrayed and commemorated in the piece.

3. A Multidirectional and Transcultural Remembrance: Każdy Dzień Oświęcimia and “El Siluetazo”

The spatial representation of absence through silhouettes in Każdy Dzień Oświęcimia is particularly important to keep in mind as we observe a transcultural adoption of Skąpski’s poster in the Argentinian dictatorial context with “El Siluetazo”, an aesthetic/activist action that sought to represent the 30,000 detained-disappeared by means of life-size paper silhouettes that were pasted by the public across the Buenos Aires’ city center. The action was also strikingly captured by Argentinian photographer Eduardo Gil, whose images have been circulated globally.21 As mentioned, the artists of “El Siluetazo”, Rodolfo Aguerreberry, Julio Flores, and Guillermo Kexel, came across Skąpski’s work at the time when they were working on visually representing the detained-disappeared in Argentina in the early 1980s. Specifically, they struggled with how to emphasize the number of people who were taken by military forces. Skąpski’s poster provided inspiration on how this could be done. As Flores states in the “Podcast Arte y Memoria” by Espacio Memoria y Derechos Humanos: Ex ESMA (Espacio Memoria y Derechos Humanos: Ex ESMA 2020):

We started looking for a way to represent it. And so, we concluded that not only is the sign important, but also the quantity, and the real physical dimension occupied by 30,000 bodies. Searching, trying to build that imaginary, among other things we found, and I brought to one of our meetings, a poster made by the Polish designer Jerzy Skąpski, which represented the disappeared in a day in the Auschwitz concentration camp. And the poster said that there was a certain number of copies of that poster that represented the days in which the concentration camp was operational. That showed us the idea of the dimension. That was the temporal dimension, we lacked the physical dimension. And that’s where the idea appeared of representing [the detained-disappeared] with bodies, with life-size human silhouettes. This was the key to the idea.

(Espacio Memoria y Derechos Humanos: Ex ESMA 2020, 3:10–4:22; my translation and transcription)22

For the artists, Skąpski’s piece depicted the spatial and temporal dimensions of absence as the silhouettes evoked the absent presence of the victims. As Vincent Druliolle (2009) notes in “Silhouettes of the Disappeared:” “What Aguerreberry, Flores and Kexel learned from this work [Skąpski’s] is the idea of representing visually and in space the overwhelming scale of the repression” (p. 87). According to Flores, then came the idea to further add the physical dimension by reproducing 30,000 life-size paper silhouettes (Espacio Memoria y Derechos Humanos: Ex ESMA 2020, 4:10–4:22; my translation and transcription). The question of “¿Cuánto espacio ocupan 30.000 cuerpos humanos?” (“How much space do 30,000 human bodies take up?”) thus became the driving principle behind the project (1:22–1:25; my translation and transcription). In responding to this question, the artists realized the spatial dimension of such a project, along with the necessity of carrying out the endeavour. As Flores explains in his chapter for Longoni and Bruzzone’s (2008a) edited volume, El Siluetazo:

Then we began another reasoning: if an adult person measures on average an area of 1.75 × 0.60 m 30,000 people, what area do they occupy? Positioned one next to the other it would be 18 km (from the National Congress to the city of Ramos Mejía) and positioned lying in a row—head to toe—52.5 km (Congress-Luján). The idea then began to be formalized: we would make all of the disappeared. Conceptually, it would be a spatial dimensioning that would help understand the magnitude of the event.

(Flores 2008, p. 92; my translation; emphasis in original)23

Aguerreberry, Flores, and Kexel then adopt from Skąpski’s work the aesthetic of the silhouette to represent each of the victims and magnify it so that the absence of the detained-disappeared is depicted on a 1:1 scale. This allows them and the Argentinian public to emphasize the number of disappearances while also making the absence of those people visually present in the urban landscape of Buenos Aires.

The silhouettes were posted around the Plaza de Mayo, the central square of Buenos Aires, located near various monuments and sites of power—including the Metropolitan Cathedral, City Hall, and the Casa Rosada, the country’s House of Government.24 The Plaza de Mayo is particularly significant, as it is the place where Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo (the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo) marched every Thursday to protest the disappearance of their children. As Flores (2008) explains, “the Plaza de Mayo was in those days, and continues to be the space of highest manifestation, where recent history and the origin of our collective identity coexist. It is a place loaded with practical meanings of a vernacular, psychological, social, historical, cultural, ceremonial, economic, political, and historical nature” (p. 93; my translation).25 With such a central and significant location, the objective of the project was not merely to commemorate the detained-disappeared, but rather was intended as a “performance protest” (Taylor 2003, p. 165), as Diana Taylor defines it.26 The action sought to bring attention to the state’s involvement in the disappearance of 30,000 so-called “subversives” and give voice to the general public’s demand to have them return home safely (what the Mothers called “Aparición con vida”).27 This transformed the visual aesthetic—initially inspired by Skąpski’s spatial depiction of the victims of the Holocaust—into a memory-activist performance, as the protestors lay down on roles of paper and used their bodies to create silhouettes, demarcating the absent presence of the detained-disappeared and spatially depicting their absence. People of all ages participated in creating the silhouettes, including the youth and children.28

The project’s memory-activist dimension is particularly evident in Flores’s adamant statement that “El Siluetazo” is not a work of art, but a tool to fight (injustice), and the artists’ preference to call the project “La Silueteada” (The Silhouetted) instead of “El Siluetazo” (“The Silhouetazo”).29 This is significant because the former highlights the action of making the silhouettes through a public performative intervention (i.e., the process) versus the latter, which places emphasis on the silhouette as an object (i.e., the result). As Flores explains:

We say silueteada (silhouetted) because we believe that the act of making the silhouette is more important than the silhouette object. Although the object is later installed, at the time we understood that it was to be anonymous, that it was not to be known who had made it. But later to affirm continuity and ensure that it continues to be done in that way in the future, in making the silhouettes, we began to announce, to tell the story behind it and to explain that it was not a work of art, it is a tool to fight. And as such, it was taken in each place, in each country, in each region, on each continent where there are disappeared. This sign and the way of doing it have been taken up again. A partner lays down and occupies the place that a body would occupy and another outlines it. At that time the silueteada was an action that tried to draw attention to the one who is not there.

(Espacio Memoria y Derechos Humanos: Ex ESMA 2020, 6:41–7:45; my translation and transcription)30

This already marks a stark difference between the Holocaust memory and commemoration depicted in Każdy Dzień Oświęcima, which does not have the same activist component. Although its publication in The Unesco Courier makes the art piece publicly accessible, and as Jennings argues, changes the “political capacity” of the work, I contend that Skąpski’s poster did not have the same activist intention as “El Siluetazo” did at its conception. As Flores emphasizes in the statement above: “empezamos […] a explicar que no era una obra de arte, que es una herramienta de lucha” (we began […] to explain that it was not a work of art, that it is a tool to fight”), further adding that “la silueteada era una acción que trataba de llamar la atención sobre el que no está” (“the silueteada (the silhouetted) was an action that tried to draw attention to the one who is not there” (Espacio Memoria y Derechos Humanos: Ex ESMA 2020, 7:06–7:15, 7:38–7:45; my translation and transcription; emphasis added). According to Martín Zícari (2018), “El Siluetazo” can be read as a “remediation” of Skąpski’s work, as “[f]irst, the object of grievance changed from representing the dead of Auschwitz to the disappeared of Argentina, and second, it evolved from a poster reproduced in a magazine to a graphic action in the street” (p. 4). However, adding to my point above, I argue that this project does not only “remediate” Skąpski’s memory form, but most importantly transforms it into an even more powerful visual aesthetic action that has itself become iconic in Latin America. As Ana Longoni (2017) argues in her workshop for MACBA (Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona):

The creative strategies of the human rights movement during the last dictatorships in Argentina (1976–83) and in Chile (1973–90) may be recognised and contrasted by two great matrixes of visual representation of the disappeared: photographs and silhouettes. Both arose (almost) in parallel and have a long history that has turned them into signs referring unequivocally to the disappeared, even outside Latin America.

(Longoni 2017)

Today, silhouettes and photographs of missing persons continue to be used in different contexts to fight against forced disappearances and human rights violations across the continent.31

The impact of Skąpski’s Każdy Dzień Oświęcimia on the artists of “El Siluetazo” during the final years of the Argentinian dictatorship also needs to be contextualized in relation to the prevalence of Holocaust memory in Argentina’s collective and cultural memory landscapes. The direct connections to the Holocaust and Nazi Germany are rooted in the historical contexts surrounding the Second World War, the Cold War period, and the Holocaust “memory boom” of the 1980s, not only due to the significant Jewish and perpetrator presence in the country after the war, but also because of the considerable role that Holocaust memory had in how the dictatorship was understood on a collective and cultural level during that period.32 Why is Holocaust memory so significant in the Argentinian context in particular? First, we can consider the significant Jewish presence in Argentina since the early 19th century when the Constitution and Immigration and Colonization Law in 1853 (forty years after Spanish independence) set the way for Jewish settlement in Argentina (Avni 1991, p. 20).33 We must take into account collective and cultural memories of the Holocaust during the postwar period (Baer and Sznaider 2017, p. 28), the prevalence of anti-Semitism during the military regime of 1976, and the large numbers of Jewish detained-disappeared.34 Second, we can highlight the presence of Nazi criminals in the country. In the 1940s, there was a significant perpetrator presence as many Nazis fled to Argentina after the end of the Second World War. Although the numbers vary, Raanan Rein (2010) explains in Argentine Jews or Jewish Argentines? that between 19,000–40,000 Germans and Austrians immigrated to the country in the first decade following the war (p. 80). This also included fifty war criminals and one hundred and thirty collaborators of the Nazi regime, most notably “Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele, ‘the angel of Death of Auschwitz,’ who used children, young twins, and dwarfs as guinea pigs for his ‘medical’ experiments” (p. 81).35 Third, we can also point to the fascist roots of the Argentinian dictatorship and the role of Nazi Germany as a model for the military Junta. As Federico Finchelstein (2014) explains in In The Ideological Origins of the Dirty War: “Fascism provided the background for the principles and practices of the violence that the Argentine government unleashed against a group of its citizens in the 1970s” (p. 1).36 These connections between Argentina, European fascism, Nazi Germany, and Jewish diasporic collective and cultural memories of the Holocaust provided the framework for the Argentinian population to understand the atrocities during the dictatorship of 1976–1983.

As mentioned, Holocaust memory and commemoration in particular became significantly prominent in the cultural landscape of the country and a way for people to make sense of their own experiences of persecution and repression. As Baer and Sznaider (2017) argue:

The number of this regime’s victims cannot, of course, compare with its role model, Nazi Germany. But Nazi crimes became an important source of the images, symbols, and representational models that were used to shape and understand state terror in Argentina in the 1970s. Human rights activists, writers, artists, filmmakers, scholars and victims themselves portrayed the crimes of the Juntas as analogous to the crimes committed against the Jews by the Nazis. Similarities and equivalences were drawn between the comparable characteristics of the two historical periods of terror … Even the term ‘Holocausto’ came to symbolize an Argentine national catastrophe.

(Goldberg 2001; Senkman 2011). (p. 28)

The way in which Argentinians looked back to the Holocaust to reflect on their current circumstances, mainly through the use of aesthetics, imagery, and cultural sources, hints at the significant role this historical trauma played for both the Jewish and non-Jewish population of the country. Scholars observe that both in the dictatorial and post-dictatorial periods “the prism of the Shoah brought in by Jewish survivors and writers also conditioned the perspective of non-Jewish survivors and relatives in their retelling and retrospective making sense of the events” (Baer and Sznaider 2017, p. 55). This was the case, for instance, with Jacobo Timerman’s ([1981] 2004, [1981] 1982) famous written testimony Preso sin nombre, celda sin número (Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number). As a well-known Jewish journalist, Timerman was imprisoned from 1977–1979. His testimony directly compares Nazi Germany with fascist Argentina and had a cultural impact on the national understanding of the dictatorship.37 Thus, the resonance of Nazi crimes in the Argentinian collective and cultural landscapes highlights another significant aspect to consider when placing in dialogue Każdy Dzień Oświęcimia and “El Siluetazo.” It helps us understand how the creators of “El Siluetazo”, Aguerreberry, Flores, and Kexel, found inspiration in an artwork such as Jerzy Skąpski’s, which depicted the victims of the Holocaust, and why they would adopt the presence of absence trope and the silhouette aesthetic associated with Holocaust commemoration as a conscious choice to protest against the atrocities occurring in their own country.

If we read both Każdy Dzień Oświęcima and “El Siluetazo” from the perspective of multidirectional memory, this dialogical approach changes our interpretation of both works, as Rothberg (2009) views the potentiality of understanding one historical trauma through the lens of another. In particular, he discusses the role of the Holocaust as a “screen memory” (p. 12). However, this is not in the assumed Freudian sense, in which it “stand[s] in for and distract[s] from something disturbing …” (p. 16), which can displace conversations on other traumas. Rather, Rothberg emphasizes how Holocaust memory can “open up lines of communication” (p.12) and function in ways other than “as a barrier to remembrance” (p.16). We can consider this in relation to “El Siluetazo.” For Aguerreberry, Flores, and Kexel, Każdy Dzień Oświęcima did not displace conversations about the detained-disappeared in Argentina, acting as a “screen memory” as mentioned, or a “barrier” to commemorate the detained-disappeared. On the contrary, the poster inspired the Argentinian artists to find their own aesthetic approach to visually and spatially represent the victims of the dictatorship and the magnitude of the atrocities occurring in their country. With “El Siluetazo”, they then added their own interpretation of how the silhouette aesthetic could be used and even transformed the presence-of-absence trope as the project was carried out as an activist intervention in the Argentinian dictatorial context. This gives us a perspective on how Holocaust memory, and in particular Skąpski’s spatial representation of the victims of Auschwitz, gave a mode of expression and public presence to the detained-disappeared in Argentina, an aesthetic that has now become iconic as it has engrained itself in the collective and cultural memories of the dictatorship and post-dictatorship periods in Argentina. In my doctoral dissertation, I emphasize the memory-activist dimension of the project and I argue that Skąpski’s silhouette aesthetic, as depicted in his poster, had a tremendous effect on Argentinian cultural memory in relation to the detained-disappeared, and in Latin America more widely, as it was transformed with “El Siluetazo”.

Moreover, the time period in which both Każdy Dzień Oświęcima and “El Siluetazo” were created also influence our multidirectional and travelling memory perspectives. As I mentioned, in the early 1980s, there was a memory boom in which we saw a proliferation of Holocaust memory. In Argentina specifically, Holocaust memory provided the framework from which to understand the dictatorial present. As Kahan and Schenquer (2016b) argue in “The Use of the Past During the Last Military Dictatorship and Post-Dictatorship:” “the resonance of the memory of the Holocaust penetrated the very origins of the most recent military dictatorship. As early as 1976, external voices could be heard around the world denouncing the regime for perpetrating genocide” (p. 132). The Argentinian collective and cultural understandings of the Holocaust in relation to the dictatorship played an important role in why the artists would be inclined to adopt a Holocaust artwork for their own context. In addition, the fact that Aguerreberry, Flores, and Kexel created the “Siluetazo” during the final years of the dictatorship adds another layer of significance and differentiation, particularly when compared to Skąpski’s poster, which was created almost thirty years after the end of the Second World War and the liberation of the concentration camps by Allied forces. Skąpski was working with a distant past and personal childhood memories of the war, while the artists of “El Siluetazo” were living in the atrocity they sought to represent and protest. These differences become evident as the Argentinian artists recount, for instance, that maintaining anonymity was a key priority to protect their safety. As Flores (2008) explains: “Another issue -which was not minor- was that of the authorship of the project, which from the beginning we wanted to be diluted among the militancy, with the double objective of merging ourselves in the activity so that it would belong to everyone and also to preserve our personal safety in order to carry it out” (p. 94; my translation).38 It was only in the post-dictatorial period that the artists claimed their authorship, as people were misattributing the project to other groups (p. 104-105). The artists also had to deal with the changing political climate and the fear of police retribution during the action. It is for these reasons that the aesthetic aspect took on a central role as well. As Roberto Amigo Cerisola states: “la toma política no se podría haber dado sin la toma estética” (“the political take could not have occurred without the aesthetic take”) (quoted in Flores 2008, p. 99; my translation). It was also through collaboration with the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo and the Abuelas y Familiares (Grandmothers and Relatives), as well as the Argentinian public, that the intervention was successful. Through the efforts, for instance, of university students from the fine arts, architecture, ontology, and pharmacy departments who brought rolls of paper (Espacio Memoria y Derechos Humanos: Ex ESMA 2020, 6:20–6:30; my translation); and the everyday person that helped. As Guillermo Kexel (2008) notes: “The one who put his vehicle in when necessary, the one who went out to paste silhouettes one night and was arrested, the one who put the last pesos he had in his pocket to buy a paintbrush, the one who ruined the only clothes he had to go to work, full of paint or paste” (p. 112; my translation).39 These characteristics and contextualizations of both Skąpski’s commemorative poster and the Argentinian memory-activist action mark key differentiations in the works and impact our reading of the travelling and multidirectional memory aesthetic they highlight.

We must also recall that Rothberg’s (2009) multidirectional memory emphasizes the dialogic encounters of memory, as it "is not simply a one-way street” (p. 6). How, then, does the organic multidirectional and transcultural connection change our perspectives of Skąpski’s poster? How does “El Siluetazo” nuance our understanding of Skąpski’s work, or Holocaust memory more broadly? I argue that this Argentinian project allows us to re-interpret Każdy Dzień Oświęcima from a decentered/non-Eurocentric lens. Personally, I encountered this piece through the perspective of “El Siluetazo.” For this reason, my view of Skąpski’s poster depicting death at Auschwitz has always been infused with the context of the detained-disappeared and the memory-activist dimension inherent in “El Siluetazo’s” enactment during the Marcha de la Resistencia on 21–22 September 1983. The Argentinian iteration has also provided Skąpski’s work further visibility across the globe, in Latin America in particular, and encouraged viewers to re-examine the piece and nuance their interpretation of Holocaust memory and aesthetics; especially, as Aguerreberry, Kexel, and Flores have openly spoken about the direct influence of Skąpski’s poster when creating “El Siluetazo” (information which is available to the viewers if they watch interviews and/or read articles about the memory-activist action). In addition, Skąpski’s choice of the print medium to circulate the commemorative work takes on a different light when we analyze the poster from a memory-activist dimension. Here again, Benjamin’s theorization of art and reproducibility can guide our perspective.

4. Conclusions

In conclusion, with these two case studies, we can observe how the spatial representation of absent bodies, in particular the use of silhouettes to evoke the presence-of-absence trope, evolves as it travels from the Eastern European context into the Latin American one during the early 1980s. It has followed a geographical and transcultural journey, commencing with its use in Polish Jewish, non-Jewish, and survivor art (such as with Józef Szajna and Jerzy Krawczyk), and in particular with the publication of Polish Christian artist Jerzy Skąpski’s (1974) Każdy Dzień Oświęcima in the October 1978 issue of The Unesco Courier. In the poster, the artist utilizes the space of the page to evoke the absent presence of the one million people (thought to be 4 million) murdered at Auschwitz, alluding both to the scale of the atrocity and to each individual life through the silhouette aesthetic. The Argentinian visual artists and creators of “El Siluetazo”, Aguerreberry et al. (1983), then enacted the same travelling memory form in 1983 to denounce the disappearance of 30,000 people during the final year of the country’s fascist dictatorship; in doing so, they transform the silhouette aesthetic and Holocaust memory trope of the presence of absence. A key component of this transformation is the memory-activist layer, which was added as the action was carried out by the public who lent their bodies in order to create life-size depictions of the absent presence of each of the 30,000 disappeared. Although the action was inspired by the silhouette aesthetic depicted in Skąpski’s poster, this marks a stark difference between the Polish artist’s work, which only sought to commemorate the Holocaust, and “El Siluetazo”, which was conceived as “a tool to fight” injustice and later became an iconic Latin American visual activist aesthetic.

In reading both works through the lens of multidirectional memory, as well as transcultural and travelling memory, we as Western readers can nuance our interpretation of both Skąpski’s poster Każdy Dzień Oświęcimia (Every Day at Auschwitz) and “El Siluetazo” in Argentina. By placing in dialogue Holocaust memory artworks and the silhouette aesthetic in particular with this Latin American iteration, we can re-visit Skąpski’s impactful piece. The powerful link between memory and activism in the Southern Cone of Latin America fuels such re-interpretations. It encourages us to reflect on the transcultural approaches Holocaust memory can take when examined from a decentered perspective. In this article, I argued that in outlining the figures of the victims of the Holocaust and the detained-disappeared of the Argentinian fascist dictatorship, the two case studies illustrated the multidirectional and two-way transcultural use of spatial representations of absence. In particular, we see how the abstract depictions of figures and absent bodies can evoke the presence of the victims of diverse historical traumas and atrocities. However, it is important to keep in mind that notwithstanding the organic connections that came from the direct inspiration of Skąpski’s poster in “El Siluetazo”, when examining very different representations of historical traumas, we must also consider the dangers of appropriations and conflations, as Sanyal warns us. We should continue investigating the particularities of each piece in order to not make inadequate assumptions or generalizations. As more questions emerge in relation to these works, further research will continue to nuance our understanding of them, of Holocaust memory aesthetics, as well as multidirectional and transcultural perspectives on other atrocities, such as the Southern Cone dictatorships of Latin America. For now, these two case studies show us how organic multidirectional connections can emerge as transcultural memory forms travel across time and space and directly or indirectly influence artists in their aesthetics, commemorative projects, and/or memory-activist actions.