MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Multiple disciplines exhibit on Argentina’s Malvinas passion opens in Buenos Aires

The exclusive document from Rafael Wollmann when British marines surrender

A multiple discipline exhibition on the Malvinas Islands ahead of the 30th anniversary of the South Atlantic conflict will be officially opened Thursday evening in the Palais de Glace, Buenos Aires.

Under the ambitious heading of “Malvinas, art, document, history, memory and nowadays” the exhibition brings together a multitude of expressions on a highly sensitive and emotional issue for many Argentines as is the sovereignty claim over the Falklands/Malvinas and the efforts to integrate them to the continent be it by force or diplomacy.

Precisely the exhibit takes off in April 1982 when documentary photographer Rafael Wollmann was visiting the Islands and exclusively documented the Argentine forces landing for their short lived conquest that so deeply marked recent Argentine history and helped transform the South Atlantic archipelago.

From a colonial forgotten rural community the Malvinas have become in three decades a bustling hub of business, fishing, tourism, farming and now oil exploration.

With that same intensity in Argentina the unfulfilled dream of recovered Islands continues to mark Argentine feelings, dreams, art and sufferings of the thousands of soldiers, mostly teenage conscripts sent in 1982 unprepared but with the illusion of a geste to the barren, wind swept islands which turned out into tragedy.

The to-be heroes returned as the culprits of an infamous defeat of incompetent generals and admirals, and abandoned to their luck, families and stressful memories that will accompany them for life.

That confusion of emotions, scars, memory, documents and creativeness, very much worthy of value and the commitment of its creators is presented in this exhibit which is sponsored by the University of Tres de Febrero, Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art, the Malvinas Islands Museum created in 1982 but that will see the light for the first time on Thursday and the Taeda Foundation with the support from the Argentine presidency and the Ministry of Education.

See: Falklands War Photos