Cristina Demaria

Arte e memoria. Il Parque de la Memoria y de los derechos humanos di Buenos Aires

The essay explores the relationship between art – visual arts, installation, sculptures, videos - and traumatic collective memories by analysing a peculiar site of memory: the Parque de la Memoria y de los Derechos Humanos in Buenos Aires, Argentina. After a short introduction aimed at clarifying some of the ways in which a work of art can be called upon to transmit, recount, expose, reflect or work through a traumatic past such as that of the Argentinian state terrorism and the “guerra sucia”, we discuss the space of the Parque along the Rio de la Plata, that includes a monument for the desaparecidos, an actual park with sculptures and installations, a space for temporary exhibitions and an archive. In particular, we devote the second part of the essay to Alfredo Jaar’s 2015 temporary exhibition “El punto ciego de la historia”, in which the Chilean artist dialogue with Argentinian’s past and his own works on the Chilean dictatorship.

True Detective Stories: Media Textuality and the Anthology Format between Remediation and Transmedia Narratives

Through the analysis of the recent HBO first season TV series True Detective (2014-), the essays focuses on the renewed anthology format of contemporary seriality as a way to inscribe the form of the novel in the transmedia imagination and its narrative models. While the first part of the essay concentrates on Media and Literary Studies’ debates on the statute of media texts, their materiality and the transformations of their contents in the participatory and convergent culture of prosumers, the second part is devoted to an in-depth reading of some of the main features of True Detective’s first season: from the ways it remediates many other genres and media, to how – as an audiovisual sychretyc text - it plays with dialogues, cinematography, music and its temporal, spatial and seeing enunciative strategies and positions in order to construct a (quasi)dystopic narrative of America as an after-image , or, better, a post-collapse America and its Southern Gothic landscapes. In the lst paragraph, this writing briefly engages with how this particular format of TV series helps developing narrative models that fan we bpages and fanfic archives are still struggling not so much to comprehend, but to actually transform into an expanded textuality able to tell a more ‘true’ story.