Argentina: Beyond the Prison Walls
An Evening with Paula Luttringer and Margarita Drago
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 I went down about twenty or thirty steps and I heard big iron doors being shut. I imagined that the place was underground, that it was big, because you could hear people's voices echoing and the airplanes taxiing overhead or nearby. The noise drove you mad. One of the men said to me: so you're a psychologist? Well bitch, like all the psychologists, here you're really going to find out what's good. And he began to punch me in the stomach.
Marta Candeloro was abducted on June 7, 1977 in Neuquen. She was then taken to the Secret Detention Center "La Cueva."
Date and Time: Tuesday, September 16, 6:00pm
Location: Watson Auditorium, 316 Waverly Avenue
Paid Parking: Marion Lot and Booth Garage
Light Work invites you to attend the powerful lecture and performance, "Argentina: Beyond the Prison Walls featuring Paula Luttringer and Margarita Drago." The 2008 Syracuse Symposium continues its "migration" theme with a joint presentation by two Argentine artists who suffered exile and compulsory silence: photographer Paula Luttringer and memoirist Margarita Drago.
Born in La Plata, Argentina, Luttringer went into exile, after being kidnapped as a college student in 1977 and held for five months in a secret detention center. Upon returning to Argentina in 1995, she turned to photography as a means of expressing the intersection between her country's recent history and her own story. Also a political prisoner, Drago is the author of numerous newspaper and journal articles, and of the best-selling memoirs, Memory Tracks: Fragments From Prison (1975-1980) (Editorial Campana, 2007). She also has represented her native Argentina in congresses of the United States, Mexico, Peru, and France.
 "The audience will have the rare opportunity to interact with two premier artists: one working with the camera and the other with the pen," says Silvio Torres-Saillant, event co-organizer and SU professor of Latino-Latin American Studies (LLAS). During the program, Luttringer will show and discuss some of her photography and Drago will read excerpts of Memory Tracks in Spanish, with English translations. The evening continues with an audience discussion and readings of testimonies, by LLAS students in English and Spanish, from women unlawfully imprisoned by the Argentine military.
A 2001 Guggenheim Fellow, Luttringer is responsible for several award-winning projects, including El Matadero (The Slaughterhouse) and El Lamento de los Muros (The Wailing of the Walls). Her photography is part of the permanent collections of the National Museum of Fine Arts and Museum of Modern Art, both in Buenos Aires; the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston; the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY; Portland Art Museum in Oregon; La Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris; and the Portuguese Photography Centre in Portugal.
In addition to speaking at SU, Luttringer will spend a month as a Light Work Artist-in-Residence, working on a book about Argentine women. Since the year 2000, she has made repeated trips to Argentina to meet and photograph women who, like her, were illegally removed. The residency will enable her to sort through these photos and interviews, as part of the editing process. Since 1976, more than 300 artists—approximately 12-15 a year—have participated in Light Work's acclaimed artist residency program.
 A resident of the United States since 1980, Drago is professor of Spanish language and literature and of bilingual education at York College of the City University New York. She also is vice president of the Latino Artists Round Table (LART), for which she organizes lectures, presentations, and conferences at universities and cultural centers.
According to United Nations reports, Argentina has a pernicious history of human rights abuses, with four out of every 10 women suffering emotional, physical, or sexual abuse. During Argentina's 1976-1983 military dictatorship, thousands of women were forcibly incarcerated by the regime. "As victims of the intolerance and fear of truth that dictatorships and false democracies typically perpetuate in the presence of free-thinking women, Paula Luttringer and Margarita Drago will empower us with their tale of how imprisonment fueled their art," adds Torres-Saillant.
Presented by Syracuse Symposium, the evening is co-sponsored by Light Work and LLAS. Syracuse Symposium is an annual, semester-long intellectual and artistic festival, hosted for Syracuse University by The College of Arts and Sciences. For more information about this evening contact Light Work at 315-443-1300.
More information
Image: Paula Luttringer—Untitled from the series El Lamento de los Muros (The Wailing of the Walls), Argentina, 2000-2005, pigmented inkjet print
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Th3 Event: Artist Talk and Portfolio Review with Keith Johnson
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 Th3: Artist Talk and Portfolio Review with Keith Johnson
Date and Time: Thursday, September 18, 5:30pm
Light Work would like to invite you to another special event, an artist talk and portfolio review that will be presented as part of September's Th3. Past Artist-in-Residence Keith Johnson will give a short presentation about his photographic work, followed by an informal portfolio review session.
Johnson participated in Light Work's Artist-in-Residence program in 2005. He has been involved in photography since the early seventies. He graduated in 1975 from Rhode Island School of Design with an MFA and studied with Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind after spending a year at Visual Studies Workshop with Nathan Lyons. He has exhibited throughout the United States, most recently in solo shows at George Eastman House in Rochester, NY; College for Creative Studies in Detroit, MI; the Art Institute of Boston; The University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA; and CEPA Gallery in Buffalo, NY.
Th3 was created to promote the Syracuse area visual arts or visual cultural venues by establishing a common date and time when area residents can visit those venues at no charge. Twenty-two venues throughout Syracuse participate in this program. In addition, visitors to each venue in September have the opportunity to enter a drawing for a gift certificate to Gentile's Restaurant.
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