This project will result in a number of outputs, including a co-authored monograph, peer-reviewed articles and a series of documentary films that have the dual aim of documenting the research process and creating a cinematic map of the imaginaries explored through the reception and ethnographic studies.

This article constitutes the diary of a documentary in the making, one that aims to create a cinematic map of the local imaginaries of post-dictatorship transition. The unfolding project it charts uses film as a medium—both its reception by audiences and its creative potential as a mode of documenting and expressing social phenomena artistically—in order to map and produce fresh understanding of the multifaceted and layered, polysemous set of social imaginaries of the memory of Argentina’s civic-military dictatorship and the ensuing post-dictatorship transition to democracy. This cinematic journey into the Dantesque labyrinth of the imaginary unfolds in the liminal space between the imagination and the real. In doing so, intimate lived experience resonates through public displays of trauma and pleasure, taking us into a yet-to-be-defined space that is neither documentary nor fiction.

Este artículo constituye el diario del proceso de producción de un documental que busca crear un mapa cinematográfico de los imaginarios locales de la posdictadura argentina. De este modo, traza el desarrollo y despliegue de un proyecto que utiliza el cine como medio, tanto en su recepción como en su potencial creativo para documentar y dar cuenta de manera artística de fenómenos sociales que permiten comprender el multifacético, entreverado y polisémico conjunto de imaginarios sociales de la memoria de la dictadura cívico-militar argentina y la consiguiente transición democrática. Este viaje cinematográfico supone un ingreso al laberinto dantesco que se desarrolla en el espacio liminal entre lo imaginario y lo real. En este despliegue, experiencias vividas de manera íntima resuenan en demostraciones públicas del placer y del trauma que conducen a un espacio aún por definir entre el documental y la ficción.

This article seeks to map out the notion of disobedience as it is conceptualised and practiced by the recently formed Argentine collective “Historias Desobedientes. Hijas, hijos y familiares de genocidas por la memoria, la verdad y la justicia” and its eponymous Chilean counterpart. To do so, it explores the published writings and artistic expressions of some of the collective’s members, as well as citing recent ethnographic work with some of the women who have publicly broken this “family mandate” by openly condemning their own fathers’ crimes against humanity. The analysis aims to better understand the complex interactions between ethics, affect and politics in these disobedient becomings. The article takes a comparative, transnational approach. By exploring dialogues that have been opened up between the Argentine collective and disobedient women located in Chile and Germany respectively, it asks what has enabled the emergence of these new public actors within the local sphere of human rights activism decades after the dictatorships ended? It considers not only how the Historias Desobedientes have been shaped by local human rights struggles, but also the ways in which they offer their own contours to the increasingly intersectional and transnational agenda. Particular attention is paid to the seminal influence of contemporary, intersectional feminism in articulating this specific praxis of disobedience as a non-violent challenge, not only to the resurgent discourses of reconciliation, impunity and/or denial, but furthermore to the long-embedded patriarchal and capitalist structures underpinning them.

This article takes as its starting point the use of fire as a political metaphor by Algerians who participated in the Screening Violence research project; it emerged in these discussions as a trope of struggle and conflict in Algeria. In part, this political imaginary has been influenced by France, where fire has historically represented freedom and resistance to unjust powers. However, this inheritance has not been received passively in Algeria, and its irony in a colonial context contributes to a complex relationship with tropes of resistance in Algerian cultural and social discourse. We therefore trace a genealogy of the trope of fire which acknowledges the inevitable and significant contribution of the French political imaginary to the Algerian, but which also recognises the distinct cultural modes of resistance taken up by Algerian artists and political activists themselves, from the Algerian Revolution of 1954 to the Hirak protests of 2019.