The (in)Visibility of Bodies in Aesthetic-Political Narratives in Public Manifestations. Learnings and Concerns in Argentine Contemporary Democracy.

Occupying the street means politicizing it, transforming it from a place of transit to an active space for denunciation. The street is the meeting point of different social actors, a space that allows the flow of demonstrations and the dispute of meanings in relation to a multiplicity of dimensions of social life. In this logic, public space becomes a space of visibility for social actors and their agendas.

This work analyzes the occupation of Argentine public space from two different experiences: on the one hand, the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, an icon of resistance to the last dictatorship and defense of human rights, and, on the other, Catholic neoconservatism, which organized different public demonstrations during the parliamentary debates to legalize abortion in Argentina between 2018 and 2020.

The strategies they have developed to materialize constitutive elements of their narratives will be analyzed, identifying which arguments they prioritize and how they materialize them visually in public space.

In the trajectory of Madres, the effort to embody absences in public space is evident, whether through silhouette shots or the use of photographs with the biographies of their detained-disappeared sons/daughters. On the other hand, Catholic neoconservatism makes a strategic suppression of pregnant bodies in its visual narratives, which generates the strengthening of the idea of autonomy of the fetus.

Madres' experience shows that the invisibility of bodies must be understood as a form of violence, since it denies the existence of the other. The democratic parameters for discussing human rights issues force us to humanize absences in incomplete narratives, which implies making visible in the public space what we want to silence.