Argentinian Artist Claudia Bernardi Visually Unearths Brutalities Of Past And Present

“Art is always changing and always possible. Even if the images are sad, the creative process is a remarkable opportunity,” says award-winning Argentinian artist and social justice and human rights advocate, Claudia Bernardi, whose deeply settled sorrow reflects as much in her voice as in her forensic unearthing artwork.

A professor at the California College of the Arts, and Founder of the Walls of Hope School of Art and Open Studio in Perquin Morazán, El Salvador and Sincelejo, Colombia, Bernardi’s transformative artistic journey began when she joined the 1986-founded non-profit, scientific NGO, Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF) in El Salvador, Guatemala and Ethiopia. She visualized and drew archeological maps of areas where human remains were exhumed– with associated objects and ballistic evidence. This deeply impacted her “born from memory and loss” art form reflected on her printmaking pieces that are “sculpted history” of the atrocities. Burying maps beneath pigments Bernardi’s “frescoes on paper” reveal a fluid message weaving “art, ethics, aesthetics and politics.”

Developing and facilitating community art projects worldwide, Bernardi’s collaborative work with survivors of state terror, political violence, and the exiled bring to life community-based murals painted by victims of human rights violations. She has collaborated with Amnesty International, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and with unaccompanied, undocumented Central American minors held in U.S. prisons.

“America’s ‘disappeared’ today are the Central American teenagers held in the U.S. criminal justice system who, forced to leave their countries because of violence and poverty, embarked on a horrifying journey to the United States. They’re not here to take anyone’s job away,” Bernardi is frustrated that many of the teenagers who turned themselves in to U.S. border officials to be safe were instead jailed. “A 16-year-old from Guatemala hoped to have another chance. He said, ‘we are the disappeared no one is looking for’.”

Unearthing Argentina’s Military Junta Atrocities

During my virtual interview with Bernardi, I accompanied her on an emotional journey back to 1976 Argentina, reliving the junta’s chokehold on the innocent population. Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina and orphaned as a teenager, Bernardi and her sister Patricia lived with their grandmother before she left them. Being left alone, instilled independence and strength, transforming her and Patricia into the resilient women they are today. Fending for themselves, they graduated from the university with degrees in Fine Arts and Anthropology respectively, while living through the 1976 overthrow of Isabel Peron’s government that unleashed a seven-year brutal military junta regime. With full U.S. government support, the regime systematically persecuted over 30,000 “disappeared” committing “dirty war” atrocities.

Bernardi recalls departing Argentina in 1979, as a 23-year-old, while her sister remained behind. The history she shares in her art is “unmasking the worst that happened in Argentina. It is always an open wound that never, never closes.” She recalls how Argentina’s universities’ open, agile space for political expressions dramatically changed with junta appointed deans. Students had to carry three forms of ID, one of which “the certification of good behavior” was issued at the neighborhood police stations–where many of the “disappeared” were taken.

“When we heard about “los desaparecidos” (the disappeared) it was a new word–we didn’t know what it meant. While we continued to study and work, the sense of fragility that military junta brought upon us was enhanced and modified by the economic dis-quietness,” Bernardi says the “simultaneously alarming” human flexibility that acclimates and adapts amazes her–much like adapting to a new life amidst a pandemic.

In her chapter The Tenacity of Memory / La Tenacidad de la Memoria, in the essay collection, Transforming Terror/ Remembering the Soul of The World, edited by Susan Griffin (U. of California Press, 2011), Bernardi writes about returning to Argentina and running into an old classmate at a bus stop who assumed she had “disappeared.” She puts history before the present to celebrate survival. There are “no amendments, no healing to genocide,” she writes, “assumptions of the past” can’t be changed “so easily or so willingly. We remain hostages of our own memory, even when what precedes us has taken the shape of a continent of sorrow.”

Bernardi exhumes Argentina as “a country wounded by state terror” with a military dictatorship that “produced the death of the country.” The country which committed “a suicide risking its future” forever tinted by the “unavoidable repercussion of moral, legal, economic, political and spiritual corruption.”

A Brain Transplant At U.C. Berkeley

After spending time in Europe, Bernardi arrived at U.C. Berkeley. Studying in the U.S. “with a catastrophic foreign policy in Latin America” was not her first choice.

“Coming to Berkeley after having lived through the fractured years in Argentina was what I coined a ‘brain transplant’. I lived in a censored world in Argentina,” Bernardi remembers crying the first time she set foot inside Doe Library at UC Berkeley, beholding countless collections of books. “I cried because they took away all our books in Argentina.”

In 1983, Argentina’s “father of modern democracy” lawyer turned statesman, Raúl Ricardo Alfonsín Foulkes, was democratically elected–ending the military junta. Establishing the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, he tried and sentenced the heads of the former junta regime and Bernardi’s 21-year-old sister, Patricia, was part of the EAAF Team that worked on exhuming mass graves.

Her sister’s work, Bernardi says profoundly changed her art as color, form, and composition concerns in her art reflected the history of what was unearthed. She details how the exhumation of a “disappeared” 19-year-old woman, Leticia–how her remains had long, preserved hair still attached to the cranium and became the muse for multiple paintings titled “Leticia.”  

The profound impact of the exhumation transformed Bernardi’s final graduation thesis. A friend described the amulet she had created as “making dead people.”

“I realized art had an independence from the artist. Being worried about my sister, I realized that the practice of art and how I experienced it, was similar to having a well-settled antenna that picks up from somewhere else and metabolically impacts the artist’s vision,” Bernardi compares the amulet’s symbolism to a performance–mysterious, undeliberate and lacking predestined intentions.

Pressing pure powdered pigments into wet paper with a printing press, as the base of her frescoes on paper, Bernardi ensures the pigments remain in their purest intensity on the paper while knowing there’s little she can plan as they settle. The process of making the artwork “to become” is not easily achieved–the result is a cause and effect, of scraping layers to reveal surprises, resembling a chaos, she says, similar to her life in Argentina.

“I bury maps and cover them with pigments using the same tools for exhumation–brushes and spoons. And at a meticulous moment the earth shifts and delivers the human remains,” Bernardi recognizes how art elucidates and articulates the “communal memories of survivors of human rights atrocities.” 

Bernardi’s works have exhibited worldwide including among many, at The International World Peace Center in Hiroshima, The Centre for Building Peace (Donegal, Northern Ireland), The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The Sonoma Museum of Contemporary Art, The Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, The Tokushima Modern Art Museum, The Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, DAH Teatar in Belgrade, Serbia, University of Haifa (Israel), MACLA Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana, and the Center for Latin American Studies at U.C. Berkeley.

Awarded the Honorary Degree, Doctor of Fine Arts, Honoris Causa by the College of Wooster, Ohio, Bernardi holds an MFA from the National Institute of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires, an MA and second MFA from the U.C Berkeley. She has taught in many universities including Mills College, San Francisco Art Institute, and University of Rosario, Santa Fé, Argentina. She was awarded a California Arts Council Artist-in-Residence Grant to create and facilitate art projects with political refugees and survivors of torture from Latin America. Among her many awards are the International Beliefs and Values Institute Sustainable Visions and Values Award, and the Social Courage Award from The Peace and Justice Association.

Walls of Hope–Perquin, El Salvador

In 1992, Bernardi joined her sister and the EAAF as part of the U.N. Truth Commission investigating mass killings in El Mozote (El Salvador). She spent three months exhuming some 143 human remains.

“Of those, 136 were children under 12,” Bernardi stares into an emptiness detailing the unearthing of small bundles of little shirts which she unwrapped to find children’s fragile skeletons.

Burdened with the pain and memories of the experience, Bernardi wanted to found an art school at the same site for the “children who are alive.” In 2005 she auctioned her artwork at the “cheapest prices” to found Walls of Hope School of Art and Open Studio of Perquin, El Salvador–miles away from the exhumed mass grave of El Mozote. The art projects and site-specific interventions weave diplomacy and community development for unprecedented collaborative, communal understanding while building bridges of communication. The ‘Perquin Model’ has traveled to Canada, Guatemala, Colombia, Mexico, Argentina, Northern Ireland, Germany, Switzerland and the United States.

Reclaiming the “disappeared” through her art, Bernardi understands that certain calamities remain “a point of reference.” Art is an “antipode of genocide” since genocide is scrupulously planned, and never an accident.

“It’s a tremendous privilege to have the opportunity to accompany people in the act of remembering,” says Bernardi. “I see myself as a facilitator, asking good questions and allowing the participants of the collaborative and community-based art projects to align the dots to form a line that is important for them.”