Blue Planet

I ask to the lands that contained the hidden bones of three victims of State terrorism during the last military dictatorship in Uruguay. With the land that hid their bodies for more than three decades, I plant a garden in the Museum of Memory in Montevideo.

With an old and manual photographic technique, I make large-scale blueprints. I look for the energy that remained on earth, generating a series of images that are a collective gear.

Eduardo Bleier Horovitz, a Jew, a communist, kidnapped in 1975, and a friend of my grandfather, was found in 2018. From then on I began to investigate the concept of land as a memory archive and after two years of bureaucratic and judicial requests, the The Human Rights Institution of Uruguay gave me land from Eduardo's grave, Julio Castro's grave and Ricardo Blanco's grave.

Blue Planet is the name of the garden that I plant in the Museum of Memory in Montevideo, a site specific, an artistic laboratory in a place of memory, a garden that is proposed as a space for active contemplation, where we can sit and watch, plant, feel the embrace of the flowers that they could not cut.

Each plant that is integrated is a collective performative act, each one contains a land of those lands, which are an archive. Relatives of victims, human rights defenders, girls and boys from schools and the neighborhood, bring their plant, perform their ritual. I take care of each plant, I make a herbarium. With those flowers, leaves, earth, I create images by direct contact between the photographic emulsion and the botanical objects, creating traces.

Using one of the first photographic techniques, cyanotype, without a camera and by direct contact, I create traces of the land and its garden. Cyanotype is a technique from 1840, widely used for copying plans in architecture and engineering, I choose this technique because I propose memory as the foundation of our society. The lines generated by the light drawings of those botanical traces impose their beauty before oblivion, those lines of memory whose origin are the stems of the plants grown in the garden, sustain our freedoms.

In Uruguay, this is the first space in homage to our found disappeared, remembering them planting flowers with the land of the excavations is to plant a future. They are proof of clandestine burials, this land kept them hidden but also spoke, and may still have a lot to say and it is necessary to ask them, with all possible languages. Although art does not ridicule through aesthetic experience, remembering is a vital action, as is planting.