The same heaven

The primary operation of Claudia Missana's work consists of the marking of spaces. Her work identifies places that are laden with connotations. It interferes with them in a way that, by dislocating briefly their landmarks and positions, discovers faults in their terrain that allow us to glimpse at their subterranean links to other areas. These intrusions reveal imperceptible sides: adjacencies between public and private spaces, fissures that open up memories, erosion produced by steps, by the dark winds of time and by everyday life. As reference marks, this unexpected damage allows for the drawing up of new cartographic diagrams from which to re-space or minimally dislocate space to leave room for an event.

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In places where the overwhelming weight of history and memory has fractured the sustenance of the image, such operations of interference are forced to the extreme of their resources. They must sharpen them, perhaps even diminish them. They must have a lateral approach to this space, exhausted by such excessive weight (that non-existing place, that emptiness). This is the challenge that Claudia Missana assumes when, in the exhibition titled The Same Heaven, she confronts the disproportionate but also desolate spaces that occupy the memory of the File of Terror (and its associated campaign, the Cóndor Operation). Both are figures that leave us without words, without figures. This paralysis of the image is both a symptom and problem of contemporary art in addressing a catastrophe.

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Using reflecting tape, Claudia traces two systems of figures on the walls. On one hand, she delineates three schemes of squares: each exact figure contains the other four in its lower part. These discreetly represent the cases of the Files of Terror, the secret documentary history of repression in Paraguay; records of kidnappings and tortures, military imprisonments and deaths. These empty squares, these silhouettes of niches or graves, enlighten their exact forms, inflamed by the work of memory and ignited by the fluorescent aura that instills fear and forces us to turn our eyes aside.

On the other wall, she draws up the silhouette of a corpse: a political prisoner, who like so many others in Paraguay and Chile, would have been put in a bag to be thrown into a river or into the sea. The lines are drawn up with reflecting tape, arranged not in continuous form, but in an irregular manner, with a spiny border line made of tiny reticules which allude to the form of pixels. The combination of cold light / darkness produces a kind of flashing figure which appears, electrified and spectral, suspended in the vacant space of the white-painted walls. "The authentic image of the past only appears like a flash", says Benjamin.