“To Make Speak”: Listening Operations in Autor material (2023) and Las cruces (2019)

Abstract

This work examines a film and a literary work—both documentary in nature—, which address events related to human rights violations during the Chilean civil-military dictatorship. Las cruces (2019), by Teresa Arredondo and Carlos Vázquez, is a film that stages the judicial file on the massacre of Laja and San Rosendo, and Autor material (2023), by Matías Celedón, is a publication that recomposes fragments of the sound file that one of the members of the intelligence service recorded for a library for the blind. From the voice/archive axes we seek to examine how these works promote a particular type of listening, collecting the expression “to make speak,” strongly associated with torture sessions, with the intention of shedding light over other possible meanings in which it is possible to repair violence through the emergence of an aural unconscious.