Last Tuesday, March 14, the donation of the portrait of Marcela Viegas Pedro, survivor of the Banfield Well, was carried out to the Universidad Nacional de Rosario.
In the month of Memory for Truth and Justice, the UNR Human Rights Area organized this activity to honor the Travesti-trans collective.
The donated portrait is part of the work "How to portray a survivor?" by the artist Germán Menna, a work that brings together transvestite-trans women who survived the last civic-military-ecclesiastical dictatorship and post-dictatorship in the province of Santa Fe. It can be visited on the first floor of the UNR Government Headquarters, located in Maipu 1065.
Marcela Viegas Pedro was violated by State terrorism because of her gender identity and a survivor of the Banfield Well. Between October 1974 and November 1978, in this Center for detention, torture and extermination, there was also a clandestine maternity hospital. Around 350 people were illegally detained there, according to data provided by former detainees, relatives and human rights organizations.
The Rector Franco Bartolacci, the Secretary of the Human Rights Area Paula Contino, the artist and graduate of the UNR Germán Menna, the photographed Marcela Viegas Pedro, Human Rights organizations of the city, members of the cabinet, the UNR community participated in the act. and compañeras from the Working Group for the Historical Reparation Law for post-dictatorship Travestis-Trans survivors and from the Santa Fe Trans Memory Archive.
Paula Contino expressed being “convinced that art is a presence that confirms a place in the world for us, while it steals part of its ferocious domain from solitude. The presence interrupts the silence and noise and keeps us from indifference and cruelty. When there is a presence, we resist orphanhood and give battle to the machinery of abandonment, discrimination and exclusion. Because the presence, when it occurs, envelops us, and becomes a praise of love, because when they name us and look at us, they re-confirm our existence in the world we inhabit”.
For his part, the artist Germán Menna thanked the University and especially the management of the Human Rights Area for accompanying the work and providing this symbolic and fundamental place of visibility to the portrait of Marcela, through which it seeks to represent all the travesti-trans community, who were denied many rights.
Marcela Viegas Pedro thanked the UNR authorities, Germán Menna "for making us visible", she was moved and expressed that trans people "also have the right to be what we want to be in life. All my support to those who fight, who are back there ”, pointing to her colleagues in the transvestite-trans community of the City and the region.
To close the act, the declaration of institutional interest of the Exhibition "How to portray a survivor?" that was carried out within the framework of the Month of Memory, for Truth and Justice at the Museum of Memory during the year 2022, which was curated by Leticia Rigat and Andrea Beltramo.
This activity was an action that is part of the Memory Brands Program, a policy of symbolic reparation and a tribute to vindicate the struggle of the transvestite-trans collective seeking an ethical and political view of Human Rights as a transversal axis of our public action.
Communication team Human Rights Area UNR
Photographer: Paula Martinez