Toying with history: Playful memory in Albertina Carri's Los rubios

Blejmar, Jordana ORCID: 0000-0002-3631-5149 (2013) Toying with history: Playful memory in Albertina Carri's Los rubios. Journal of Romance Studies, 13 (3). pp. 44-61. ISSN 1473-3536, 1752-2331

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Abstract

This article analyses the use of Playmobil figures in Albertina Carri's autofictional film, Los rubios [The Blondes] (2003). Deploying what the author calls a 'playful memory' of the traumatic past in Argentina, Los rubios is a pioneering example of a new trend of post-dictatorship cultural remembrance that takes a desacralized, non-solemn and de-monumental approach to the past. Young writers and filmmakers, many of them children of disappeared parents like Carri, employ dark humour and make explicit references to children's games and toys in their representations of the 1976–1983 military regime. The use of toys in the reenactment of traumatic episodes of history, however, is not new, for it echoes similar artistic re-appropriations of a vicarious past by second- and third-generation artists of the Shoah. Drawing on this transnational corpus, the article argues that toy art and playful memories not only redirect our gaze away from the experiences of the adult survivors and towards those of their descendants, offering a new (child-like) perspective on twentieth-century liminal experiences. They also connect state violence to the violence inherent in everyday objects of childhood. Moreover, the nature of anthropomorphic toys such as Playmobil – deformations of their worldly counterparts (Young), a sort of 'dead among us' located between the animate and inanimate world (Stewart) – is particularly suitable for depicting both the neither-dead-nor-alive figure of the disappeared and the distortions of memory. Finally, against those who consider playful memories acts of dispassion and an insult to victims, this article suggests that in their rejection of realism and mere reproductions of the past, playful memories revitalize the intergenerational transmission of history by offering images of 'sacred' events (meaning events that resist representation) at the same time as – in Ernst van Alphen's words – hinting at the ontological impossibility of completely and comprehensively mastering trauma.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	47 Language, Communication and Culture, 4702 Cultural Studies, 16 Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	09 Nov 2015 11:13
Last Modified:	22 May 2025 23:43
DOI:	10.3167/jrs.2013.130305
Related Websites:	Publisher
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/2035202