Cuerpos ausentes y horror

This article proposes to analyse the multiple interpretations, for the book of poems Desapariencia no engaña by the Argentine writer Néstor Ponce, concerning the topic of the missing persons during the terrorism of State in Argentina (1976-1983). The poems present the horror of the dictatorship in a new way. These texts will be analysed taking into account two main ideas: the concept of installation, typical of the conceptual contemporary art and that of synecdoche. The bodies of those missing are made present via poetic language. These voices break the silence by speaking about passion, memories, and everything that is connected to life. Hereby an antithesis is established between absence and presence, confinement and freedom, ignorance and memory. A heterotopia is constituted. Ponce travels to hell, as Ulises, to give a voice to “the hooded ones”, the tortured ones, the massacred ones, the missing ones and with these tales he constructs a fragmentary memorial on the unique historical experience of these taken lives.