Casting Disappearance: Roberto Cabrera's "Personajes" and the Guatemalan Civil Conflict

In the 1970s, the Guatemalan artist Roberto Cabrera produced a series of assemblages titled Personajes, which feature life-sized casts of faces and body parts, as well as found objects, furniture, and scrap metal. Presenting these detached humanoid forms, the series addressed the daily experience of violence and grief caused by the Guatemalan civil conflict, during which forced disappearance and extrajudicial execution became a familiar reality. The cruelty of forced disappearance hinges on the inability to determine the fate or whereabouts of the victim, as their loved ones have no bodies to mourn and no conclusions to draw. The cast functions as a useful analog for disappearance because it mirrors, in crucial ways, its uncertainties. Achieved by contact, rather than through mimesis, casts are complex objects, caught between presence and absence, the individual and the reproducible, lifelikeness and death. In an environment where access to the body was summarily denied, Cabrera’s Personajes confront the viewer with its traces. Exploring how Cabrera leverages the complex materiality and ontology of the plaster cast, I argue that the works stage an encounter with the psychological effects of forced disappearance –– its undecidability and its preclusion of emotional and interpretative closure. Viewers of the Personajes were required to parse multiple kinds of ambiguity, spurring them to reflect on the ethical and semantic dilemmas posed by representations of violence. Displaying materialized traces of the body, Cabrera’s Personajes asked Guatemalan audiences to contend with the collective grief brought about by the civil conflict.