Florencia Marchetti

"Haunting Presences" is a video documentary that goes beyond the usual narratives of torture and disappearance to represent the diversity of experiences and interpretations of life under military rule in an effort to provide a better understanding of the complex social labors of memory and fear in Latin America’s stumbling democracies. BIOGRAPHY I was born, lived and worked in Córdoba, Argentina almost all my life. After studying Social Communication and Anthropology, I decided to combine both and began exploring ways to bring together participatory social research, audio/visual tools and alternative political practices. Before coming to live in the United States in 2005, I worked documenting different struggles for social justice as a photographer and ethnographer, using oral histories, photographs, puppetry and video to construct collaborative portrayals of everyday life and politics in disenfranchised communities. My current work explores silenced memories of state sponsored terrorism between people living in the margins of the city of Cordoba, under the worst environmental and economic conditions, and in intimate coexistence with two sites where repression was executed during the Argentine Dirty War: a public cemetery where the bodies of the desaparecidos were thrown in open mass graves during the Dirty War; and a former military prison employed as a secret detention, torture and execution center, currently housing two public schools and a kindergarten for the kids of the nearby slums.