“I bury maps and cover them with pigments using the same tools for exhumation–brushes and spoons. The process of making the artwork “to become” is not easily achieved–the result is a cause and effect, of scraping layers to reveal surprises, resembling a chaos, she says, similar to her life in Argentina. Pressing pure powdered pigments into wet paper with a printing press, as the base of her frescoes on paper, Bernardi ensures the pigments remain in their purest intensity on the paper while knowing there’s little she can plan as they settle. Establishing the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, he tried and sentenced the heads of the former junta regime and Bernardi’s 21-year-old sister, Patricia, was part of the EAAF Team that worked on exhuming mass graves.Ĭlaudia Bernardi creating frescoes on paper. In 1983, Argentina’s “father of modern democracy” lawyer turned statesman, Raúl Ricardo Alfonsín Foulkes, was democratically elected–ending the military junta. “I cried because they took away all our books in Argentina.” I lived in a censored world in Argentina,” Bernardi remembers crying the first time she set foot inside Doe Library at UC Berkeley, beholding countless collections of books. “Coming to Berkeley after having lived through the fractured years in Argentina was what I coined a ‘brain transplant’. “with a catastrophic foreign policy in Latin America” was not her first choice. Claudia BernardiĪfter spending time in Europe, Bernardi arrived at U.C. BerkeleyĬontemplando la Ruta - Contemplating the Route - By Claudia Bernardi. We remain hostages of our own memory, even when what precedes us has taken the shape of a continent of sorrow.”īernardi exhumes Argentina as “a country wounded by state terror” with a military dictatorship that “produced the death of the country.” The country which committed “a suicide risking its future” forever tinted by the “unavoidable repercussion of moral, legal, economic, political and spiritual corruption.” A Brain Transplant At U.C. There are “no amendments, no healing to genocide,” she writes, “assumptions of the past” can’t be changed “so easily or so willingly. of California Press, 2011), Bernardi writes about returning to Argentina and running into an old classmate at a bus stop who assumed she had “disappeared.” She puts history before the present to celebrate survival. In her chapter The Tenacity of Memory / La Tenacidad de la Memoria, in the essay collection, Transforming Terror/ Remembering the Soul of The World, edited by Susan Griffin (U. The Stains of Life Leave Marks In the Continent of the Soul - 1999. While we continued to study and work, the sense of fragility that military junta brought upon us was enhanced and modified by the economic dis-quietness,” Bernardi says the “simultaneously alarming” human flexibility that acclimates and adapts amazes her–much like adapting to a new life amidst a pandemic. “When we heard about “ los desaparecidos” (the disappeared) it was a new word–we didn’t know what it meant. Students had to carry three forms of ID, one of which “the certification of good behavior” was issued at the neighborhood police stations–where many of the “disappeared” were taken. It is always an open wound that never, never closes.” She recalls how Argentina’s universities’ open, agile space for political expressions dramatically changed with junta appointed deans. The history she shares in her art is “unmasking the worst that happened in Argentina. government support, the regime systematically persecuted over 30,000 “disappeared” committing “ dirty war” atrocities.īernardi recalls departing Argentina in 1979, as a 23-year-old, while her sister remained behind. Fending for themselves, they graduated from the university with degrees in Fine Arts and Anthropology respectively, while living through the 1976 overthrow of Isabel Peron’s government that unleashed a seven-year brutal military junta regime. Being left alone, instilled independence and strength, transforming her and Patricia into the resilient women they are today. Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina and orphaned as a teenager, Bernardi and her sister Patricia lived with their grandmother before she left them. Claudia Bernardiĭuring my virtual interview with Bernardi, I accompanied her on an emotional journey back to 1976 Argentina, reliving the junta’s chokehold on the innocent population. Claudia Bernardi (foreground), her grandmother and sister, Patricia.
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