The Commented “Illustrations” as Spaces of Memories of the Human Rights Violation in Chile between 1973 and 1990

Abstract

This qualitative work focuses on the intermodal (visual-verbal) valuation of human rights violations in Chile during the Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973-1990). The present study aims to explore how different Chilean illustrators, participants in the Bad Memory II competition, evaluate the mentioned period and construct historical evidence through the combination of their images and the verbal captions. The corpus is composed of the awarded twenty-four illustrations at this event organized by the Museum of Memory of Santiago, Chile, and by Balmaceda Arte Joven. The theoretical-methodological approach to the intermodal value meanings of selected illustrations is carried out from an integrative perspective that harmonizes the contributions of the Appraisal Model and the socio-semiotic and critical perspective of intersubjectivity. The results show that the construction of meanings of personal and social memories is carried out through intersemiotic evaluative prosodies that legitimize or delegitimize actors, social processes and historical events, by means of strategies, such as: Response full of fear, Animalization, Dehumanization and Condemnation. The illustrators appear highly aligned with macro-strategies of transformation of that status quo, opposed to the violation of human rights.