Manipulating television broadcasts of the 2001 attacks on New York’s Twin Towers, and of the military coup that overthrew the Chilean president Salvador Allende, em 1973, the piece discusses different possibilities of memory agency. Two historical events of major historical import – both of which took place on a September 11 – are superimposed, juxtaposed, and confronted to evince the different significations that can be attributed to them. The key to this comprehension resides in the ways memory becomes inscribed in the body and life experiences, from whence the words emerge that make sense of the narratives embedded in the images. The cyclical process that builds history is thus revealed, through the relationships between body, word, image, and contamination from the environment. The voice-over narration (a recurring device in the artist’s career) sheds light on different narrative planes and on the intertextuality that the cohesion of media accounts strives to conceal at all costs. However, the often emotional private reading proves effective as a metanarrative, collaborating for the deconstruction of the discipline of history itself, a feature of more urgent contemporary productions. Here, the traumas of Latin American political life remain paradigmatic to its social realities.
