Rubén Chababo: In early 2000, Gustavo Germano began assembling a photographic series called Absences (Ausencias), a project envisioned as a comparison spanning two periods starting with Argentina and then extending towards all of South America. The work is about emptiness, the incommensurable void left by the violence on people and communities in Argentina during the military regime from 1976 to 1983. Germano took his camera and returned to the places where the missing victims of state repression had once lived. By juxtaposing the original images of the disappeared to the pictures taken in the same exact places thirty years later, he captured the brutal impact left by their absences: an empty place at a table, an arm laid toward nothingness, a deserted beach. His documentary project compelled him to travel across Argentina. Helped by families and friends of the victims, Germano gathered images that would allow him to reconstruct their story. Absences is a work that moves itself within the space of the invisible, in the unique and emotional void left by the violence of a fury that even today, after more than three decades, continues to wound Argentinian society and consciousness. More here.