This articles aims to think the alliance between representation of catastrophe and catastrophe of representation. It will observe some historical essays of figuring catastrophic events through moving image. In the video-installation Los durmientes (2014), by Chilean artist Enrique Ramirez, exhibited at Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos in Santiago in 2015, the water filling the entire frame acquires a solid and opaque quality, functioning as an obstacle to spectator’s vision, reinforcing the “constitutive invisibility” which characterizes the representation of catastrophe. By affirming the inaccessibility of the truth about prisoners, tortured, murdered and disappeared under Chilean military dictatorship, can this moving-image be understood as a deletion-image?
moving image; catastrophe; memory; dictatorship
