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During the first years of the democratic transition in Argentina, the dennounciations of human rigths violations committed during the military government absorbed the accounts of the Malvinas war and merged, according to Federico Lorenz, the figure of the victims of the dictatorship with that of the veterans. But the urgencies of the human rights movement were not related to the soldiers of Malvinas. Decades later, the humanitarian narrative entered the activist repertoire of the ex combatants. Following Alicia del Campo on the idea that theater and social theatricalities are cultural scenarios where meanings of recent history are fought over, the article analyzes Lola Arias´ Minefield and Theater of war, and a protest of the Comisión de Familiares de Caídos en Malvinas as stages that display tensions around the human rights discourse and the figure of the victim for activism and the memories of the 1982 war.

In the last few years, around the 30th anniversary of the Malvinas War between Argentina and the United Kingdom there was an explosion of cultural productions about the war experience, with various proposals and formats which, besides drama, film, and literature, include TV shows, short-feature films, educational materials, and opera. I will focus on some examples which prove significant when reflecting about the documentary value of bodies, particularly as regards the recent work by Lola Arias (the documentary Teatro de guerra, the play Campo minado, and the video-installation Veteranos), and about the symbolic power of absent bodies, particularly in the opera Aliados, una ópera en tiempo real, by Sebastián Rivas and Esteban Buch, which premiered in Buenos Aires in 2015 directed by Marcelo Lombardero. At the performative boundary between heterogeneous materials, and based on cross-contaminating genres and diverse languages, these works construct a scene that looks back on the war past to bring it to the present. In this context of temporal tension, the presence of the documentary-real, gives rise to a space in which, through bodies (or the absence thereof), History breaks through.

In the city of Córdoba during 1983, the last year of Argentina’s dictatorship, the Association for Development of Visual Experiences (ADEV) made its public appearance during an exhibition in a cultural center. In interviews with some former ADEV members, they agreed that the proposal of Selva Gallegos (one of ADEV members) combined paintings and poetry regarding the recent Malvinas War. This article proposes an exploration of cultural history about that artistic series, some background and the context of its production and dissemination. A hypothesis holds that those paintings and poetry proposed “structures of feelings” and “severe turbulence” to put a strain on the official, heroic and authoritarian memory built by dictatorial authorities around that postwar conflict. Some of the studied variables were a series of Gallego´s early works, individual and group factors that influenced a critical exposition during the dictatorship, artwork traits that reframed artistically the Malvinas War from a Mediterranean city, images and words that became (in)visible.

The return of the Malvinas soldiers after the Argentine defeat in the war was seen as a threat to the Armed Forces. Their testimonies and their own physical and psychological state could contribute to fuel the social indignation and to deepen the discredit of the population about the Military Junta that had provoked a war against Great Britain. Given this, the Armed Forces they designed a plan to hide its own soldiers. The same methodology that had been used during the previous period of clandestine repression – cover-ups, censorship, threats, intelligence operations and media complicity – was implemented after the Argentine surrender in the islands so that the population could not see or receive the soldiers. This work aims to reconstruct how these returns were organized, the strategy of invisibility that the dictatorship developed and the mandate of silence that the ex-combatants themselves were forced to sign once they returned to the continent. The concealment of these returns was thus added to the long list of actions implemented by State terrorism tending to hide their crimes.

Since mid-April to May a mass of adhesions and demonstrations were display to support the “recovery” of national sovereignty over the Malvinas Islands. A variety of events were folded to the "cause", collecting money and other goods to donate them to Patriotic Fund Malvinas Argentinas or deliver to the Third Army Corps. In those moments, solidary accompaniment to soldiers was the objective why society was mobilized. In the following lines we proposed to review and analyze social and cultural actions that emerged around war in the city of Córdoba. A first hypothesis considers that from different spaces, actions were multiplied. Although it had fundraising destiny, they contributed to reconstruct social networks that had been eliminated, sabotaged or controlled by the dictatorial government. The initiative to raise funds for the soldiers promoted various artistic, cultural and social institutions and brought together together people from different social background. We focus on the civil sphere, inquiring about the organizers, the activities and the different meanings that were articulated around these artistic - cultural actions during the days that the conflict lasted.

Wars are extreme events that let a mark on the societies that lived them as a whole, and primarily on those who survived, the civilians and military that fought in them. To the ex-combatants, war experience is a landmark in their lives since it is an extreme experience in which the option kill and/or die is a constant, and so they try to elaborate it in the postwar years turning to different languages. The present article is about one of the classic languages that the veterans of several wars along history have appealed to : poetry. More precisely, it address the marks that the conflict between Great Britain and Argentina for the South Atlantic islands let on the lives, identities and memories of the ex-combatants, and, in order to do so, it analyzes “Soldados”, the collection of poems written by Gustavo Caso Rosendi, an ex-conscript that fought on the Malvinas islands in 1982.

This paper is a study of a play by the Argentinian playwright and director Soledad González, from the province of Córdoba. The focus will be on Malvinas 74 días/1982 (2016). In this play, Argentina's dictatorial past is brought into play: the work deals with the effects of the Malvinas War, the military confrontation that took place in 1982 with the United Kingdom, with the dispute over the sovereignty of the Malvinas, Georgias, and the South Sandwich Islands. In the elaboration of this event belonging to the traumatic recent past of the country, Soledad González adopts strategies that come from post-dramatic and performative theatricalities. The analysis on the play is based on the concepts of archive and repertory (Taylor D., 2012), epidramas (González S., 2016a), a notion developed by the author herself, and performative memories (de la Puente M., 2019), among others. We argue that Malvinas 74 días/1982 constitutes an interesting example of contemporary dramatic textualities, insofar as its poetics is located at the crossroads between poetry, music, and theater. In this way, it manages to bring into play personal and collective, private and public memories of the Malvinas War, exploding and multiplying the forms and meanings associated with this event in the country's traumatic past.