Benjamin Naishtat
Historia del mal - Film - 2011
presented as part of the exhibition Panorama 13
Film
1879. One thousand five hundred men walk in the desert under the orders of General Roca. They are going to build the nation Argentina. They advance in a decided manner towards the great South, there where there is nothing, taking civilisation with them. A century later, in the town now called General Roca, the military junta in power organises a National History Conference to celebrate the centenary of the Conquest of the Desert.
We arrive on site beginning 2011, go into the desert to conquer, ask the current inhabitants of Patagonia to act the boredom of the soldiers of the Conquest, even if they want to play war. Beautiful fake archives are compiled. And then we try to talk with them, of the Conquest, of the Indian, omnipresent absent figure in this story. They try to talk of the Historical Congress of 1980 which saw the greatest figures of the military hierarchy go to a small town in the desert. Who saw it? Who was there at the time? We want to talk of territory and time, that is to say of History, but we end up bogged down in these little stories which emerge from reality and take over, ending up conquering this film.
