EL LAMENTO DE LOS MUROS
On March 31st 1977, Paula Luttringer, a 21 year-old pregnant botany student was kidnapped by police of the Argentine military junta and detained in an extrajudicial prison. During her five month detention, she gave birth to her eldest daughter.
Released abruptly during what she thought was transfer to a regular prison, she was forced to leave the country immediately to avoid another “disappearance.” She went first to Uruguay, finally settling in France. (Source)
During the Dirty War (1976-1983) hundreds of secret detention centres were established across Argentina for the purposes of interrogation and torture.
In 1995, Paula returned to Argentina and took up photography as a means to explore the memories, mental scars and the crimes against her and other women. El Lamento de los Muros (The Wailing of the Walls) is the result.
Three years ago, I met Paula. She had just enjoyed acclaim at the 2006 Houston Fotofest, and was searching for further funding to travel the exhibition and expand on the educational lessons attached to the project.
The Wailing of the Walls is about the violence brought against women and the continuing means by which those women cope and live in the aftermath. Paula was adamant; she only wanted funding from women. 100 donors to fund the gathered testimony of 100 survivors. This was a project by a woman, for women supported by women. The funding initiative was named 100×100.
PAULA’S WORDS
I have twice heard people urge Paula happiness in that she survived. Paula is unequivocal; having survived does not make her happy, living in a world in which people didn’t have to be survivors would make her happy. The violence once it is done, cannot be undone.
For more on Paula’s motivations for the project read this interview, this articleand listen to this audio interview.
RECOGNITION
Wendy Watriss and Fred Baldwin, of Houston Fotofest must be singled for special praise in bringing Paula’s work to a larger audience and consciousness.
The statements that accompany each of these images have been co-opted from Fotofest’s feature and from the George Eastman House page on Paula’s work.
‘THE WAILING OF THE WALLS’ IMAGES AND TEXT
“Walls that served to stifle the desperate screams, the cries of those tortured and raped, and the indescribable, agonized moans of those who, although they were freed, remain aware of their open wounds—who feel that they will never get out of that hole.”
Juan Travnik, Buenos Aires in the FOTOFEST2006 catalogue.
“It is very hard to describe the terror of the minutes, hours, days, months, spent there. At first when you’ve been kidnapped you have no idea about the place around you. Some of us imagined it to be round, others like a football stadium with the guards walking above us. We didn’t know which direction our bodies were facing, where our head was, where our feet were pointing. I remember clinging to the mat with all my strength so as not to fall even though I knew I was on the floor.”
Liliana Calizo was abducted on September 1st, 1976 in Cordoba. She was then taken to the Secret Detention Center “La Perla”
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“I went down about twenty or thirty steps and I heard big iron doors being shut. I imagined that the place was underground, that it was big, because you could hear people’s voices echoing and the airplanes taxiing overhead or nearby. The noise drove you mad. One of the men said to me: so you’re a psychologist? Well bitch, like all the psychologists, here you’re really going to find out what’s good. And he began to punch me in the stomach.”
Marta Candeloro was abducted on June 7, 1977 in Neuquen. She was then taken to the Secret Detention Centre “La Cueva.”
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“And this marks you, it’s a wonderful feeling that stays with you the rest of your life. You’re left with this dual task: you have to be constantly working out what comes from the trauma and what from normal life. I have this dual task in life. I have to decide which feelings are the result of the trauma and what there is beneath of less intensity, more diluted, which is that what comes from normal life. So I talk to someone who has never been in a clandestine prison and then I play the role of a normal person and I realise what that involves, I step into normality. These things that happen to all of us who were victims of repression …”
Liliana Gardella was abducted on November 25, 1977 in Mar del Plata. She was then taken to the Secret Detention Center “ESMA”
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Ants used to come in and out, and I would watch these ants because they were coming in and then going out into the world. They were walking across the earth, the outside world, and then coming back in again, and watching them I didn’t feel so alone.
Ledda Barreiro,” La Cueva” Illegal Detention Centre
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“Something strange used to happen at night, the screams of torture were different than those during the day. Even if the screams of torture are always the same they sound different at night. And it’s also different when they come to get you at night. The noises and the screams are not with me always, but when I do remember them, it makes me very sad. I am paralyzed by those screams, I’m back in that time and place. As somebody once said — and I’ve given this some thought and I think it’s right — although life goes on, although some of us were freed, you never get out of the pit.”
Isabel Cerruti was abducted on July 12, 1978 in Buenos Aires. She was then taken to the Secret Detention Center “El Olimpo.”
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‘EL MATADERO’
It is worth noting an earlier project too.
The images below are from Luttringer’s earlier series El Matadero (The Slaughterhouse) for which she won the best Portfolio Prize at PhotoEspana (1999). The manhandling of carcasses through rooms designed for dismemberment is a shocking precursor to The Wailing of the Walls. Luttringer’s work echoes themes of mortality and the manipulation (herding, processing) of flesh.
Many people are gripped by the psychological charge of Roger Ballen‘s work, but the photography of Outland, Shadow Chamber and Boarding House obscures reality and fuses it with imagination. Luttringer’s work, on the other hand, is an attempt to mobilise our understanding of the historical moment. Photography is a tool for Paula, but the real import of this exercise is the oral testimonies recorded and written and the associated benefits that may have arisen for the women having shared their memories.
For me at least, the visceral images of El Matadero, are a solemn counterpoint to Luttringer’s work on kidnap and detention from Argentina’s Dirty War.
BIO
In 1999, Luttringer was chosen by the National Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires as one of the twenty photographers of the ‘New Generation’. In 1999, she won the best Portfolio Prize at PhotoEspana, for her project “El Matadero”. In 2000, she was awarded an artist`s grant by the National Arts Fund of Argentina for her project “El Lamento de los Muros”. In 2001, she was made a Guggenheim Fellow for her project “El Lamento de los Muros”. Luttringer’s photography is part of the permanent collections of both The National Museum of Fine Arts (MNBA) and the Museum of Modern Art (MAMBA) in Buenos Aires; the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston (MFAH); the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY; Portland Art Museum in Oregon; La Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris; and the Portuguese Photography Centre in Portugal. She currently lives and works in Buenos Aires and Paris.
Prison Photography 