HERMANO

During the research process for the project La Patria personal, and drawing on Jean Allouch's ideas about mourning as act and sacrifice, Tamara Cubas proposed to her family an exercise built around the idea: "What kills is the hole, not the bullet". She photographed her relatives holding in their hands a blackboard on which they had written a single word in answer to the question: what did Omar take with him when he was disappeared in 1975? The set of five photographs was titled El agujero y la bala.

As its name symptomatically suggests, it evokes the highly performative image through which Allouch expresses his notion of mourning: "one mourns someone who, in dying, takes with them a small piece of oneself" (Erótica del duelo, 2006). This snapshot was transformed into an act of public mourning when, in Actos de amor perdido, Tamara asks her father Luis to walk onstage holding the sign on which "HERMANO" (BROTHER) is written. For the exhibition El día más hermoso, Tamara made a video in which her father Luis writes the word "HERMANO" and holds it up for several minutes.