Paulina Tercero
5 days

During her ´ace residency, Paulina Tercero Leyzaola (Mexican and Swiss) developed a video documentary about Argentinians who had to exile in Mexico during dictatorship. While she was in Buenos Aires, she interviewed writers, theorists, journalists and a variety of people who experienced that process and were back in our country.

ARTIST STATEMENT
This documentary is the chronicle of a migration that has a very precise beginning and a very clear ending. It is a migration that started with the social unrest in Argentina following the coup by the military, under the command of general Jorge Rafael Videla in March 24, 1976, which dissolved Congress, imposed a government by decree and the rule of martial law. The ending came when democratic life returned to Argentina, marked by the election of a civilian lawyer, Raúl Alfonsín, as President in 1983. None are to be found at the usual café, or their accent heard at the queue to the cinema. Many around me feel it too: the city is confronting a void created by the almost sudden departure of Argentinian friends, colleagues, teachers, psychoanalysts and lovers… We, Mexicans, are happy for them, of course, but we feel a bit orphaned, we cannot have a conversation with our friends any more: How does it feel to be back home?

This documentary is about those men and women who migrated to Mexico City, where I come from, who then went back to Alfonsín’s Argentina after living a different culture. Thirty years on, I would like to document that exile: how those Argentinians grew roots and were changed by the people in their new, temporary home in Mexico and what was it like to go back to a deeply changed society.