Tragedy Shakes Hands with Testimony: Uruguay's Survivors Act in Antígona oriental

Debates about how to stage, film, narrate (or record in any available media) real-life catastrophe, such as mass human-rights violations or war, tend to center on the simultaneous necessity and inadequacy of any representational form to capture the real event: evidence is needed for political, legal, cultural, and historical purposes, but its framing is always conditioned by whatever a given regime of visibility leaves in or leaves out. All too familiar ethical, political, and representational challenges lurk behind the deployment of media to make visible the experience of real-life survivors—in the case I treat here, women survivors of imprisonment and torture during Uruguay's 1973-85 dictatorship. Consider the risks of revictimizing the protagonists, overwhelming or numbing spectators with images of extreme vulnerability, or, even worse, of inciting voyeuristic or sadistic pleasures in an audience passively “regarding the pain of others”—to recall Susan Sontag's famous last title (2003). Some have argued that testimonial or documentary accounts cannot represent the effects of destruction without courting these perils.