Memory and Testimony of the Argentinean Military Dictatorship in the Documentary Theatre My Life After (2009) by Lola Arias

Abstract

More than 40 years after the end of the Argentine dictatorship (1976-1983), the traces of extreme violence remain latent in Argentina´s social memory. They also permeated the second generations of the dictatorship, which have recognized the need to question the discourse and the silences that interweave and make up the dictatorial legacy, in order to evoke, (re)think and question their past to inscribe it within a narrative. In the case of Lola Arias and the actors of Mi vida después, we are dealing with daughters and sons of the Argentine dictatorship who advocate for a process of assimilation and reinterpretation of all inherited discourses, all assumed versions (however contradictory they may be), in order to verbalize the deliberately silenced events of a traumatic past. In an ever-changing attempt to give all inherited discourses/narratives/objects/files a place on stage to, they are rewriting, reinterpreting and reconstructing in a gerund impossible to close, creating a polyphony of materials and voices, with the firm aim of bridging the existing gap between the present and the past, so that the present (and thus the future) becomes more comprehensible through a (possibly mediated or fictional) memory.