The No-History

Installation made of the editing of a thousand books after the revision of archive material declassified by the US concerning the Southern Cone countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. This region of South America has a long history of interaction, one of the most traumatic of which is the operations which these countries undertook to persecute, arrest, torture and kill people during dictatorship times. One of the most well known operations was called The Condor Operation. Following the return of democratic government these same countries formed the Mercosur Treaty (Southern Common Market) of which all the countries are members and Chile is an associated country.

The documents were selected according to criteria of information content and visibility, and they represent a tiny proportion of the total of the existing documents. Many of the documents are censored with blacked-out sentences, have the seals and stamps and use the letterhead of the organisations that produced them.

Taken together they reveal the extent to which the frontiers between these countries were ignored during the dictatorships, and the level of collusion between the governments and the United States in order to control discourse in opposition to the regimes and to the logic of USA politics.The non- History is the title of the installation presented at the 8th Mercosur Biennial, which reveals through the documents and its method of presentation how our national histories have not yet begun to be related based on the truth of past events. Both the notion of sovereignty and the autonomy of the implicated countries, as well as the image of border, are called into question.