Uruguayan Torture Series
suite of 35 etchings

Some years ago I began to think of art as a political instrument. In the late 1960s, I started making political art, declarative work. To me, that was not satisfying because any possibility of mystery disappears as soon as the artist makes a clear statement. That produced a big crises in me. Gradually I learned to elicit creativity from the viewer instead of promoting my own creativity. This art is not about me; it’s about you. I just set the stage. A little later, I faced the situation in Uruguay. I moved there, from Germany where I was born, at age one. Then in 1964 I came to the United States. A de facto dictatorship had begun in Uruguay in 1969 and was made legal in 1973. I was a militant student; most of my friends ended up in jail, in torture. Meanwhile, I was in New York, very comfortable, relatively wealthy.

I developed thirty-five etchings for this suite, most do not overtly depict violence. Instead I try to produce a situation in which neither the image nor the text reveal too much. Only when they are seen together does something happen. The etchings feature everyday objects rather than exotic information from somewhere else. I photographed them in my basement. The body parts, my own. The image and text are relatively meaningless in themselves. Once they click together, an insight occurs about the violence. That configuration is not just about being tortured, empathizing with the victim, but also with the torturer and oneself as accomplice.

–Luis Camnitzer