Sergio Rojas

Where do these bodies go right now

that I cannot stop shining?

Do they perhaps never become another thing?

Do they perhaps leave?

And where do they go?

Where do they go?

Silvio Rodríguez: A dónde van

Culturally speaking, the most powerful event, since human beings exist on the earth, it has been death. Questions about the meaning of existence, the reason trying to solve the meaning of permanent change making everything feasible, the possibility of something unimaginable existing beyond finitude… all of them are some queries arising in the presence of perhaps the paradoxically most radically material and most spiritual event of our existence as well: death. The most ancient archeological milestones in the history of humanity are mainly tombs. Then the body of who has died, the corpse, is transcended by the meaning of death in the cultural, social and personal spheres. It seems like death implies not only the disappearance of the person who has died, but also a certain transcendence of the corpse in the ritual, in the funeral songs, in the consolation of the family members and friends who are “accompanying” the deceased in this passing, in conversations remembering his or her life.

Death itself does not necessarily mean nude fatality of human existence destroyed by its implacable materiality. Who has died is no longer among the living, because he or she is not in his or her body. The corpse we observe lying there corresponds to the end of a life. Nevertheless, what does it happen in the situation of “death in absentia”? What can we expect when there is no corpse for the one we suppose has died? Or what does it happen when the deceased’s identity has been separated from his or her body? This is the situation of “missing” persons. On one hand, the person’s identity is dematerialized and spread in the stories of those remembering the deceased, in the files recording the diverse routes followed in his or her life, in the family photographs, in the testimonies of those who saw them “still alive”. The missing person gains a presence that transcends the present time. And, on the other hand, the corpse that has not been found, which is still missing, progressively becomes materialized, until the moment that –after waiting for an excessive time to know the sinister circumstances that changed the condition of “presumed” deaththe only objective is to find the corpse which lies somewhere,“here and now”. Then, from one side, the missing person lives in the memory of those who are waiting for them, the person is also kept in the images of that time, for instance, thirty or forty years ago. From the other side, it is well known that the corpse is at present not more than what we call “remains”, like the press expression “human remains were found…”. And suddenly the remains are found (because the corpse of somebody who has disappeared some decades ago can only appear all of a sudden). And the artist’s father was missing for thirty six years.

This is a terrible issue. The found corpse corresponds to the remains of that person, but now we only have material traces, that is to say, we cannot recognize the remembered person in these remains. It seems like these human remains lack of any identity; we mean a human way of identity. Are these remains what this corpse was before?

From the end of the 80’s to current times, DNA studies (Deoxyribonucleic acid) have significantly progressed, being able at present to determine the identity of human remains up to a 99,9% of certitude. Traditional Forensic Medicine was only able to identify corpses when the lapsus between death date and the moment of discovering the corpse was really specific. In the case of longstanding cadavers (without any trace of soft tissues), the Physical Anthropology (concentrated on skeleton search) and then the Genetic Anthropology represented a great progress for the identification of human remains. Beyond the strictly scientific and police implications of these advancements, they have a complex impact on our social imaginary about death. In fact, those remains where time had transformed into something radically unfamiliar with the person we remember are still his or her body.

As we already know, forensic procedures by DNA determination have been very important in the body examination actions applied to the victims of State terrorism. Firstly, the sinister police machine for political repression prepared several lists of politically persecuted persons, and then they converted those lists into missing people lists. So the State police operations were a way of “erasing” the individuality of those being subsumed under generic adjectives for dangerousness (“subversive”, “agitator”, “terrorist”). Afterwards, the deaths of missing people were officially denied.

The DNA Project, by the artist Maximo Corvalan-Pincheira, does not only intend to attract our attention on the scientific identification procedures, but also proposes a disturbing reflection about the individual’s identity, considering that the assumed singular and extraordinary uniqueness of human beings could be traced now on the remains of his or her corpse. Actually, the idea is to find that identity in a reality order located beyond the biography, the memory, the history; a reality order without a narrative, placed in the time of matter. Nevertheless, this unbelievable situation –the fact that thousands of persons were missing for several decades and that the silent uniqueness of those corpses finally became a vicarious sign of the personal identity when being examined on the forensic table- refers us to another reality order: the political and social disaster carried out by uniformed agents. The question about the “cause of death” leads then to different reality orders, according to which this question may be answered: to be victims of physical failure, of a murder weapon, of a criminal trade, of a civic & militar coup d’état, of a social & politic conflict… The forensic report does not accept the nation’s disaster as a cause of death.

The so-called “genetic profile” consists of DNA short tandem repeats, organized according to their size, which characterize an individual. In short, an “individual” is the result of the combination of unrepeatable variables. In a certain way, we could say that this unrepeatable uniqueness has been found in a dimension beyond the human being, a biochemical reality occurring farther on a human world. This is a strange depersonalized uniqueness. When the “remains” cannot finally be recognized, then we appeal to science. This is what the artist wants to communicate by DNA Project.

At the exhibition hall, the viewer can observe 33 small human and resin-made bone fragments, each one of them being pierced by small white fluorescent tubes, which are hanging over a water mirror. Having in mind the reflection subject, the scene looks like the Purgatory. The sound of falling water produces an atmosphere which invites the viewer to go through and look attentively and thoughtfully this strange scenery, where artificial items give room to the nature of an unfamiliar universe. In fact, the corpses floating in the air are just organisms (we make the difference here), as we cannot recognize the eyes, the face, the back, the limbs, the head. On the contrary, these fragments lack of the possibility to be recognized. Then, we may state that the DNA Project faces us to an odd way of bare life.

In our contemporary political thought, the concept of bare life has been used to name the condition of human life when it has been completely deprived from rights, in such a way that the man’s emotional, social, moral and intellectual life becomes reduced to a purely organic and animal survival. Nevertheless, here, in this reality order that we enter with DNA Project, where we could believe that all the signs of an unrepeatable, unknown and singular life have been erased, we can still find the exceptional traces of that existence. Through the biochemical tracks of the organism, a coded “identity” may be found; and this information allows us to know to whom those human remains belong. This knowledge, helped by Genetics, has a closing meaning for a search waiting during decades for that “all of a sudden” moment to be finished. The DNA Project exhibition –a visually beautiful scene and a disturbing subject to be analysed- despite the police, politic and medical circumstances, corresponds to the implementation of a reflection about the finitude enigma.