Marcelo Brodsky

This interview with Marcelo Brodsky (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1954) focuses on the genesis and meaning of La clase, 1967 (The Class, 1967) (1996), a work that emerges from the intersection of personal and collective memory. 

After years of exile caused by the Argentine dictatorship, the artist returned to Buenos Aires in 1995 and took part in a commemorative event at the Colegio Nacional, the school where he had studied, where the names of 98 former students who had been forcibly disappeared during the dictatorship were read aloud for the first time. For the event, Brodsky intervened the photograph of his class, adding brief texts that recounted the fate of his absent classmates. 

Originally conceived as an act of remembrance rather than as a work of art, La clase, 1967 became an emblematic piece by generating a deep emotional identification among the students who viewed it. 

The image functions as a bridge between generations, bringing together word and image to activate memory and transform absence into symbolic presence within the very space where it all began.