Carcel de Caseros

One of the most notorious prison in Argentina has finally been demolished last week, according to a BCC report today. The Carcel de Caseros (Caseros Prison) was a place where dissendents of past regimes in Argentina were incarcerated and "disappeared."

The International Herald Tribune reported on August 7, 2007,

...The Cárcel de Caseros is considered to have been among Argentina's most inhumane prisons under Jorge Rafael Videla's brutal military dictatorship from 1976 to 1981.

What made Caseros worse than many other prisons was the lack of direct sunlight. Prisoners grew sickly from lack of vitamin D. Their skin turned green and flaked off, and their teeth, hair and eyesight deteriorated...

And instead of killings and physical tortures, the prison was constructed in such a way to exert psychological pressure on inmates. The walls were painted in garish colours and built in a way that disoriented the senses. Numerous prisoners committed suicide because of that.


Photo credit: fadwebsite.com

It is perhaps fitting that someone has made an art piece out of the deserted building. Using the broken glass of the facade windows to create a light illusion of faces staring out from the prison, Seth Wulsin won admiration from the Argentine public, some of them ex-detainees. The faces shimmered in the sunlight and, depending on where the observer was standing, not all were visible simultaneously. Some disappeared when the angle of the light changed with the passing hour.

It is an example of art that heals. All the more apt as, day by day, the building was demolished in stages, the faces disappeared forever. An ephemeral memorial to those who were "disappeared" and perhaps laying past ghosts to rest.

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