Grupo Etcétera...: One example of the underlying tensions in the CCMHC management is the bipolarity between the extreme sacredness of the past that establishes what is politically correct, whereby the victims have become untouchable, idealized martyrs, whereas the survivors are seldom taken into account in decisions on the places where they were held captive. Moreover, some sectors are harshly criticizing how the former ESMA is being used: they argue that the space is being trivialized by the activities conducted there, because such activities are becoming naturalized by routines and the bureaucratic work there. From that point of view, the aim of "bringing the space to life" with all kinds of activities, might leave visitors to the former prison with a profound sense of dislocation regarding the site and what took place there.

We decided to structure the exhibition around four narrative/conceptual lines: "Through the looking-glasses", "Crisis and representation", "The flight of the incidental ray" and "The revelation of rebelling". The first looks at what we call The Memory Industry and shows all the testimonies and spectres of what we can or cannot understand on entering a "space for memory", what is reflected and refracts from the history of the site and its consequences today. For this section we invited the artists Alejandra Fenochio (to do a series of paintings in the former ESMA), Azul Blaseotto (to exhibit the portraits she made during the trials of military personnel), the German artist Jenny Wolka and the Tucuman native Ezequiel Monteros (with a video-installation about the imaginary place where the bodies of the missing were thrown into the sea), and Sergio Lamanna (an interactive sculpture prepared specifically with that room in mind). This section also includes the Ser y Durar (Being and Lasting) video installation by the Spanish collective Democracia. It also features Memoria en Construcción (Memory under Construction), a key book compiled in 2006 by the artist and photographer Marcelo Brodsky that documents the impassioned debate as to what to do with the former ESMA.

In "Crisis y Representación" we focused on the Argentine crisis in 2001 as one of the inaugural examples of the brutality stemming from the austerity measures, public-spending cuts and privatizations. We then refracted that crisis in representation to other more recent crises. Carlos Trilnick started out doing research work for a participatory installation based on a remembrance of the events of 2001, which ended up leading to other crises and other states of emergency similar to the so-called checkpoints in the US or Israel. Using materials from demolitions, Ezequiel Verona made a series of sculptures called Mueble-Inmueble (Furniture-Real Estate) which questions the fragmentation and privatization of urban space vis-à-vis a memory erased by gentrification. The Brazilian Daniel Murgel made an artwork to be destroyed on the day the space opened: his installation Amnesia, construir para destruir (Amnesia, building to destroy) seems like the result of an archaeological dig or an explosion in the exhibition room. We also included a giant photograph by SUB, a photographers’ collective, taken by Nicolas Pousthumis on December 19 and 20, 2001. The Uruguayan Fabián Crespi constructed a participatory piece that invited the viewer to go through ten roulette numbers that are also the life memories of a post-crisis decade. These same tensions were expressed in Diego Perrotta’s ceramics, consisting of the busts of two rodents, one black, the other white, facing each other like sphinxes of a nation about to explode.

"La fuga del rayo incidente" exemplifies the global revolutionary nature of those political radiations. We proposed to the artists a dialectical analysis of those fleeing points that arise in world historical contexts and that have an impact of the universal political imaginary. In this section we featured the NSK passports, a "State in time" created by the Slovenian artists’ movement during the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia. To exemplify the decomposition and recomposition of the State as one of the general standardized outcomes of globalization and cultural tourism, we included the immense flag, as a backdrop, made up of a combination of dozens of flags by Yaya Firpo. Oráculo (Oracle), Sebastián Díaz Morales’ video installation, contains a register of shots taken in different parts of the world in distant places and times. Mur i wieza (Wall and Tower) by the Israeli artist Yael Bartana is a sort of conceptual platform that places under discussion the effects of the Diaspora and the consequent creation of the State of Israel. The film documents the moment in which a "call to return" is made to the Polish people and a series of characters who emigrate and collectively undertake a construction that appears to be a tower, but ends up once more as a confinement camp. Docile Soldier by the Palestinian Khaled Jarrar shows the power relations of a photographer (Jarrar himself), as personified by an officer who guides the proceedings of his subordinates, making them come to the fore, one by one, to pose for a portrait. Perestroika Songspil, by the Russian collective ChtoDelat, deals with a key episode in the disintegration of the former Soviet Union, at the outset of Perestroika. Eduardo Molinari’s Banderas (Flags) places the flags representing the revolutionary movements of the 1970s (Montoneros and ERP) next to archived images and texts of participants in the politics of the dictatorship – players who still circulate in Argentinean politics and cultural life.

In "La revelación de rebelarse" we imagined the story of Alice in Wonderland as a hypertext. This speaks of the way a slight turn from the natural course of things provides the possibility of bringing about other realities by driving us to rebel in order to change the fate we had expected. León Ferrari’s collages, published on the covers of 30 instalments of the testimonial archive Nunca Más (Never Again), help to re-contextualize the space under a new designation. Juan Carlos Romero produced a series of posters that were placed throughout the entire exhibition room with the word FURIA (FURY). Matthis de Brujne presented his piece in conjunction with Holland’s union of cleaning workers. The Chilean Victor Hugo Bravo produced an installation that simulated the headquarters of an armed group in which each and every one of the objects shown is camouflaged. Hernán Cardinale presented an interactive piece composed of a 360 degree revolving photograph showing a panoramic view of the city’s poorest neighbourhoods next to the richest. Leopoldo Polo Tiseira showed an installation concerning the case of the militant Montonero Horacio Maggio, known as "Nariz" (Nose), who was kidnapped but managed to escape from his captors at ESMA. We also featured maps of soy and other transgenic crops and the mining mega-industry – two of the main examples of present-day human-rights abuses-- by Iconoclasistas. We also invited El Asunto, an independent publishing house that made Libro Vivo (Living Book), consisting of texts, poems and testimonies, during the course of the exhibition.