Nibia

Below is a video documentation of the exposition at Subte Municipal museum, in Montevideo.

nibia from krahd on Vimeo.

1. Background

Nibia Sabalsagaray (1949 – 1974) was a Uruguayan literature teacher and social activist, tortured and killed in captivity at the beginning of the last military dictatorship (1973- 1985) in Uruguay.

The Military Justice categorized this crime as a suicide by hanging.

Despite the validity of the Law 15.848 (Ley de Caducidad) which granted amnesty to military responsible for crimes committed during the dictatorship, in September 2004, Sabalsagaray’s sister presented to the Uruguayan Justice a letter requesting the change of the categorization of the expedient, from murder to suicide, and the identification and punishment of those responsible.

Since the submission of the letter were systematic attempts to stop it, archive it, and thus deny the application: it was not accepted initially by the Court, then it was argued that it had to be presented in the same office that was involved in 1974, which no longer exists, then Judge Vomero dismisses it because of Law 15.848, but is finally accepted because of the request of change of categorization.

It arrives to the Executive, Guianze is assigned as a prosecutor and Vomero again drops the file. Guianze requested a historic autopsy, the judge denied it. This denial is reversed and the autopsy is performed.

In 2008 Vomero indicates that the file should be closed. Guianze demands that it is unconstitutional to apply the Law 15.848 in this case. The Prosecutor of the Court rejects the proposition. Nibia’s sister, Stella, requests again and, thanks to her being family, its accepted, and arrives to the Executive, which rules that the Law is unconstitutional.

The Legislative and the General Assembly reaffirm it: but those pronouncements had no legal effects. The Prosecutor of the Court and the Court endorse and legitimizes the proposition and declared the Law unconstitutional in October 2009.

In 2009, for the first time, an active General, Dalmao, is summoned to appear before the court.

On November 8, 2010, Judge Vomero indicted General Dalmao and retired Colonel Chialanza to be responsible for the especially aggravated murder of Nibia Sabalsagaray.

As of December 2010, both military are in the process of appealing the sentence.

In spite of the numerous attempts to deny the request to the Court, the case, sometimes for reasons more circumstantial or accidental, as the assignment of Guianze as prosecutor, and many others by the strength of the presented evidence, and the work of those involved has advanced in its path.

2. The piece

The project presented is an interactive installation that questions the relationship between (Uruguayan) society and the recent past, through recontextualization and redefinitions of a particular image.

It tries to explicit, moreover, that the relationship with the recent past and its iconography is never foreign: the military dictatorship was not an exogenous phenomenon but obviously a product of the activities of those who carried it out and those who supported it. The society is never passive. The current reading that we all are chemically pure victims, that –as victims twinned by the painful shared past– the only thing to do is find the best way to turn the page, is, at best, reductionist.

The work consists of a small room, dark, with black walls, with only one entrance, blindeed by double black courtains.

Hanging towards the end of the room, there will be a projection of the locally very known picture of Sabalsagaray, in black and white (it has a sepia tint). Two meters ahead of the projection, there will be a wooden stool with a standard lighter on top of it.

In this site may enter only one person at a time.

If this person decides to take the lighter and lights it, the picture in the area corresponding to the position of the lighter begins to burn, disappearing, becoming black.

But it will always impossible to burn it completely: a short time after a zone is burnt, it is reconstructed, reappearing the image, which never fades completely.

The relationship between the spectator and the image is drastically resignified, by making explicit the underlying interaction between the graphic representation and its consumption.

By allowing to try to burn the image, it is not only said that there are always people who burn it (and in a way –perhaps distant– we all are), but also that the perception of any cultural phenomenon cannot be apolitical.

But, analogously to the expedient submitted to the Justice, the image persists, resurges, perhaps by itself.

The detection and tracking is done using either a Wii Remote controller (a device for videogame control produced by Nintendo), which contains an infrared camera and detects up to four infrared sources, or using a PlayStation Eye camera and detecting the image blob of the fire.

All the software programming, including the burning simulation and the image reconstruction is done in C++, using OpenFrameworks ((http://openframeworks.cc), a creative programming framework.

The burning simulation is done by manipulating the pixel values (using an algorithm similar to the burning effect of traditional of image manipulation software), following an upward motion constructed by randomly mixing several paths recorded using a drawing tablet.

The reconstruction is done directly: after a certain amount of time without interaction, the pixels gradually recover they original color.

The projection is done with a standard projector, with a resolution of, at least, 800×600 pixels, and 1500 lumens.

The piece has been shown in museums Subte Municipal (September 2010) and Museo de la Memoria (December 2011) Both in Montevideo, Uruguay.