John:
I was going to write a witty little entry about our first trip to a Milonga (it was in the Armenian Cultural centre) that we had last night, doing the Porteño thing and coming home at 4 this morning but...it'll have to wait.

We went for a stroll this afternoon, it was a glorious day, blue sky, but not too hot. We ended up at the Recoleta cemetery where on sundays there is a big open air craft market. The usual suspects seem to be sold, leather goods, mate paraphenalia (that's mah-tay), sculptures made of wire. There were plenty of people around. We went to the Recoleta cultural centre to see the exhibition marking 30 years since the coup that put the military junta in place. The exhibition was packed, at 8pm, with a fantastic mix of young and old. The photograph is of a sculpture which deconstructs a Ford Falcon, the car that is most associated with the midnight abductions of the disappeared. Almost everything in the media this week has been about the 30 years anniversary, there were 100000 people in the Plaza de Mayo yesterday (we were in school, no holiday for us) but I was struck by the depth of feeling, the utter conviction with which the Argentines are saying Nunca mas (never again).

The exhibition included work by 30 artists, most of it was pretty strong, and it was quite tiring to look at, because there was so much emotion there. I was particularly struck by some photographs of survivors (of 'the process') that were processed using old methods so the images came out ghostly, as though the people in the photos were unreal, and it was pretty jarring. The main corridor in the cultural centre was lined with blowups of 300 articles from the newspapers of the time, each instance of words like murder, abduction, killing and torture was underlined in shaky pencil... a graphic demonstration that stops anyone saying 'but we didn't know what was going on.'

I am impressed at the way that Argentines are so committed to finding the truth about what happened between 1976 and 1983, about the disappeared and the children who were taken from their parents and given to new (and approved) families. Every day, it seems that a new set of records is unearthed. The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo still hold a vigil each Thursday and the government is committed to overturning the pardons handed out to the members of the Junta. There have been art events all over the city, we stumbled across the end of a dance troupe performing this afternoon. You can read all the history books you want but it doesn't have one tenth of the impact of a well realised piece of art.
  ¶ 1:27 AM