Transforming our destiny is a patient and passionate construction, not without problems and contradictions.

That is why when two women who have become experts in the fields of art and science tell their story in the first person, the result is inspiring. Furthermore, what is related here is not a finished story, but rather that story’s drifts and confluences, its luminous and dark zones that, even now, upon reviewing them again, continue to cause us feelings of horror and sadness.  

Patricia Bernardi is the founder of the Equipo Argentino de Antropología Forense [the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, henceforth referred to by its Spanish acronym, EAAC] and Claudia Bernardi is an esteemed artist and professor who has built her career in the United States. Before turning 30, Claudia was already a renowned artist and educator in the place she was living in the United States, and Patricia, together with a group of fellow anthropology students was already laying the groundwork for the creation of for what would become the EAAF.

Between 1984 and 2014, Patricia and Claudia exchanged letters as a way of staying connected across the distance between Buenos Aires and the United States. In their correspondence they wrote about their shared past, their enigmatic present, their time at university, their loves, and more than anything, art and science.

We offer here a first glimpse into a personal and unique archive that has been preserved for decades by the Bernardi sisters and has not been shared until now. The heart of this project is the letters the Bernardi sisters exchanged throughout the 1980s. It is in those letters that they discuss the origins of the EAAF.

In addition to the letters, the archive contains a selection of photos, visual art, newspaper cuttings, and other memorabilia.
By assembling these assorted materials and using them to create a kind of dialogue between Claudia and Patricia based on text and images, we seek to offer a story that, despite being fragmented, tells a tale full of meaning that has been evolving and continues to evolve.

At the same time, some of symmetries in our ways of thinking ended up being surprising, at least to us. For instance, while one sister was beginning an exhumation in the Avellaneda cemetery, the other, at the other end of the world, was making artwork that consisted of burying clothing, evoking absences, and thinking about the disappeared from a political yet poetic point of view.  These subtle consonances are, in retrospect, strikingly powerful, because they are evidence of how Claudia and Patricia were connected not only by blood, but also by a specific way of living and conceiving what they had experienced.  
From this imperfect symmetry, imperfect like everything in life, we developed the conceptual approach to this website.

Suggestions for how to read the website:

On the timeline, we have placed a number of “meeting points” related to biographical, personal, and political events from Claudia and Patricia’s childhood up until a project on which they collaborated in 2014: a mural in the former Esma, where the offices of the EAAF are located in Buenos Aires, that was painted by the relatives of disappeared people whose remains were recovered by the Team.

The red dots below the timeline mark Patricia’s paths, which are connected to the earth, its depths, and its secrets.
The yellow dots above the timeline mark Claudia’s paths, which are connected to how Patricia’s work was seminal to Claudia’s artistic work.  
The blue dots indicate the symmetries and confluences on the life paths of the two sisters.

And so, this first section of the story appropriately opens with a photo from the siblings’ childhood in which we see Claudia running with her younger sister, Patricia, right behind her, in the garden of their house in Güemes 2866, Florida, Buenos Aires, around 1963.

At the top of the page, we also show readers what we affectionately call “the little slips of paper,” which comprise a structure created out of post-its, sticky notes that despite their delicate nature became a kind of backbone, a powerful force, as we discussed our ideas for this project that we carried around in our heads and our hearts. “The little slips of paper” represent our thoughts at the time when the idea for the page (and how it might be rendered) was being envisioned.

A few editorial comments:

As noted above, this is a first glimpse at an archive that has not been viewed before, and for that reason, it continues to be unearthed, worked on, classified, and revealed. In each section, we know there is a possible story that could be developed or explored in greater depth.  
The letters shared here are but a small part of the original archive. Claudia and Patricia prioritized which ones would be exhibited after an exhaustive selection process in which they chose those missives that would help to begin weaving together and providing meaning to this unique story. The original syntax has been preserved as much as possible with only a few small changes to aid the reader’s understanding. Notes are included in cases where it is necessary to provide additional information.

Members who contributed to this project:

The decisions that have been made are the product of an ongoing process of selection, editing, and writing that we are doing in collaboration with the journalist and poet, Ivana Romero. The work Ivana has done with us to date has allowed us to present this first synthesis of materials to you, which is open to new interpretations and possibilities. Ivana has been our friend for more than two decades, but that was not the main reason we wanted to work with her. Apart from her talent and her poetic sensibilities (where words are sometimes not enough, the silence that poetry proposes is eloquent, and it is from that space that we would like our page to be approached), Ivana was born in 1976. Her generation and ours are in constant dialogue with the goal of continuing to construct memory, truth, and justice.

In addition to Ivana’s careful work, we must mention the discerning eye of designer Fabián Muggeri, who created this web page using programming by Mariano Arias.

More about Ivana:

She was born in 1976 in Firmat, in the province of Santa Fe. She is a poet, journalist, and author. She has a bachelor’s degree in social communication from the Universidad Nacional de Rosario and a master’s in journalism from the Universidad de San Andrés in Buenos Aires.
She is the author of the following books of poetry: Caja de costura (Eloísa Cartonera, 2014) and Ese animal tierno y voraz (Caleta Olivia, 2017). She also wrote the autobiographical chronicle, Las hamacas de Firmat (Editorial Municipal de Rosario, 2014).
She regularly publishes journalistic and non-fiction pieces in various media, among them Radar y Radar Libros (Página 12), Las 12, Clarín Cultura and Revista ñ. In the last two publications, she also had an editorial role.
She teaches Poetry I and non-fiction classes in the Art of Writing program at the Universidad de las Artes (UNA). She also teaches introductory classes in that program.
Currently she is translating essays by May Sarton, the North American poet originally from Belgium. She is also finishing another book of poetry and is writing a book about Bruce Springsteen, of whom she is a great fan.

Work group:

Idea for the project and its coordination: Claudia Bernardi and Patricia Bernardi
Editing of texts and primary consultant: Ivana Romero
Web design: Fabián Muggeri
Web programming: Mariano Arias
English translation: Alison Ridley

About translator Alison Ridley:

Alison was born in England but grew up in France, Norway, the United States, and Venezuela. She received her doctorate in Spanish from Michigan State University in 1991 and she teaches at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia, U.S.A. She has published book reviews and academic articles on the plays of Buero Vallejo, but she is also a translator. Since 2014, she has translated several books and essays written by Chilean American author and human rights activist, Marjorie Agosín. She met Claudia for the first time about ten years ago when Claudia was at Hollins giving some presentations about her art and her work in El Salvador with Walls of Hope.
Translating Simetría-dos has been a great privilege for Alison, who hopes that, thanks to the translation, Claudia’s and Patricia’s important work will have a broader reach.

This project has been made possible thanks to the Beca Creación 2021 [Creative Scholarship] granted by the Fondo Nacional de las Artes [National Arts Fund], which is overseen by the Ministerio de Cultura de la Nación [Argentina’s Ministry of Culture].
For permission to reproduce photos or other images, please contact us beforehand and be sure to cite the source: Archivo Claudia y Patricia Bernardi-Proyecto Simetrías.

We welcome you to Simetría-dos.

The grandmother, Doña María B. de Carracedo, was a feminist before the concept was invented. When we became orphans, Patri was 13 and Claudia, 16. Their grandmother was not a great source of support or emotional shelter, but she was, and continues to be, an unquestionable inspiration, a model who pointed us in the uncommon direction of becoming independent women who would make our own personal and professional decisions. In the letters, the grandmother (sometimes referred to as “abuels”) peers out from the fog of Alzheimer that plagued her during the last decade of her life. Plunged into memory loss, she was no longer the undisputed family matriarch; instead, she became a tender and fragile being.
Photo taken in the Monserrat apartment, 1979.

Here are a series of shared moments in places around the world.

The El Mozote massacre was one of the most egregious cases of human rights violations committed during the twelve years of the civil war in El Salvador.
Between December 6 and 16, 1981, the Salvadoran army began an offensive in the northern part of the region of Morazán. It lasted ten days and was dubbed “Operation Rescue.” The military campaign was carried out principally by the Batallón de Infantería de Reacción Inmediata (BIRI) Atlacatl [The Atlacatl Rapid Deployment Infantry Battalion], that had been trained by U.S. advisors as an “elite” counterinsurgency battalion.
The objective of “Operation Rescue” was to eliminate guerrilla presence in a small portion of northern Morazán. The guerrillas (FLNM: Frente Farabundo Martí de Liberación Nacional or the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front) had a training camp in that region, close to the hamlet of El Mozote, called “La Guacamaya.”
During the first days of the military operation, there were several clashes between the army and the guerrillas, and the latter withdrew from the region on December 9. Nevertheless, the Salvadoran army’s Atlacatl battalion murdered, tortured, and committed other acts of extreme violence against the civilian population in the canton of El Mozote and the surrounding rural areas.
According to the official register of victims, 986 civilians were murdered indiscriminately; more than half of them were children. Rapes and other acts of sexual violence were also systematically committed against women, girls, and boys.
The exhumation in the hamlet of El Mozote unearthed 143 people, 131 of whom were under the age of 12. Two hundred and forty-five spent gun cartridge cases were also recovered. A study conducted by a ballistics expert found that at least 24 shooters participated in the incident.  
The EAAF did the exhumation work in 1992. While not an official member of the EAAF, Claudia Bernardi participated in the exhumation because of her ability to draw maps and graphics that would help the team to delimit the work areas. That experience was fundamentally important to Claudia’s own work, as it served as the impetus for what would later become “Walls of Hope,” a community arts project that Claudia developed with a group of Salvadoran artists and that has been replicated around the world.

Works by Claudia Bernardi mainly using the fresco on paper technique.