Lucila Quieto

Born in 1977 in Buenos Aires (Argentina)
Lives and works in Buenos Aires (Argentina)

Lucila Quieto studied photography at the Escuela de Fotografía Creativa, Buenos Aires subsequently used photography, painting and collage as part of her artistic practice. Her work, Arqueología de la ausencia (Archeology of Absence, 1999-2001), has been exhibited in many countries, including Argentina, Italy, France and the UK. Her work has also been included in many joint exhibitions with other artists who are also children of disappeared parents, including Amontonados: Temporalidades de la infancia (2010), Anacronías (2011), Familias Q’heridas (2011), and Ficciones: Imágenes que construyen sentidos sobre el pasado (2017). In 2010 she co-founded Colectivo de hijos, a group of children of disappeared parents who, through art groups such as the Club del Collage and published books, have tried to influence public policies directed at the relatives of victims of the 1976-1983 Argentine dictatorship. Currently she works in the photography section of the Archivo Nacional de la Memoria, located in the former clandestine torture and detention center, the ESMA. 

Carlos Alberto Quieto disappeared five months before the artist’s birth. In Arqueología de la ausencia, on view at KB17, Quieto combines fiction and biography, as well as performance and photography, to explore the disappearance of her father. Rather than just focusing on her own family history, however, she also invited other children of disappeared parents to participate in the work, placing an advertisement in a branch of HIJOS (Hijos por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio) with the following tempting offer: “Now you can have the picture you always wanted.” Quieto remembers: “I asked every son or daughter to look for a photograph of their parents. I then reproduced the images as slides. I projected them on the wall and asked the children to insert themselves between the camera and the image.” The experiment resulted in 35 black-and-white photographs each showing a playful and fictional scene that imagines alternative futures for those families. The images of Arqueología de la ausencia are thus answers to a disturbing question: what might have happened had the disappeared survived? Quieto’s montages speak of a time that is neither in the past nor in the present but in what she calls “a third time,” an invented, dream-like temporality, a dimension where everything, even the impossible, seems plausible.