The Scenario of Memory

Alicia Haber

 

"Charrúas y Montes Criollos" revolves around the concepts of ecology, history and national identity. There is a confrontational attitude toward the destruction of nature, the extermination of human beings, and the disappearance of memory. Present are heartfelt homages to a fundamental aspect of the Uruguayan landscape, its devastated native woodlands - montes criollos - and a moving evocation of the indigenous cultures that inhabited our lands - the Charrúas and others - along with a pain-filled denunciation of their extermination.
The analogy of these multiple devastations, so detrimental to the vernacular, is the nodal root of Rimer Cardillo's aesthetic discourse. There is in particular a specific reference to the Charrúas, victims of the conquest, who, after having been persecuted and decimated in the independent Uruguay of 1831, went on to suffer further imported aggressions (this time the smallpox epidemic that took lives among chief Sepe's tribe in 1863), which led to their disintegration as a nation, although they left their legacy of Amerindian blood, present in the genes of the country's population.
A return to the roots is transmitted very clearly. Cardillo takes the archaic mode of thought as a legacy and a commitment, thereby linking himself to aboriginal cultures through his homage to the primordial. But the return to the roots is also linked to the ideas of regeneration and rebirth: the memory implies immortality.
Thus appears the "myth of eternal return," and with it the concepts of solidarity and continuity. "We find in man," says Mircea Eliade, "at all levels, the same desire to abolish worldly time and to live in sacred time. Further still, we find the desire and the hope to regenerate time in its entirety, that is to say, to manage to live - to live as human beings, historically, in eternity, thanks to the transfiguration of the duration of an eternal instant."1

Archeology as a metaphor for cultural continuity

"Charrúas y Montes Criollos" evokes an archeological site where the process of discovery of our roots is underway. The intention is not, however, one of historical recreation, but instead an aesthetic interpretation - symbolic of the concept of archeology as a reservoir of memory, as an element that allows us to travel along the roads of the past, starting out with memory and imagination. A fascination with the primitive is revealed.

The mounds

The soil is spread out in different mounds. It recalls the artificial "hills" of the Uruguayan aborigines. The tumuli were admirably chosen by the indians, at very propitious sites, and constituted a true artificial habitat where life and death developed at the same time; there they undertook their everyday lives and buried their dead, and thus the cyclical remained as it does in the installation. The tumuli created by Cardillo have to do with a concept of life, and at the same time they recall the indigenous dwellings often built in rounded form with earth, branches, straw and leather.
Death is also present because burial and sacramental mounds existed in the indigenous past of this nation. "As soon as an indian dies they take the body to a certain site, which today is a little mountain, and they bury him with his weapons, his clothes, and all his jewelry and objects."2 We find necromorphic elements. But they are not necessarily negative. Cardillo does not start with a gloomy idea, but instead with an awareness of the need for ecological, cultural and historical regeneration; he invites the viewer to reflect, though this does not imply desperation. Death is in a ritual category for all primitive peoples, and the fate of the deceased is the reaffirmation of the permanence of the community. As the primeval material, the universal raw material, the earth has always been conceived of as a generating element, which invokes the cyclical: live - death - life. "The earth," maintains Gilbert Durand, "becomes the magical.."3
A telluric epiphany evokes the ctonic, the germinal, the maternal, the generating and the regenerating. Out of it comes forms, springs life, and it is at the beginning and the end of all biological processes. It is the ancestral; in displaying it Cardillo metaphorically "returns" to his soil, to his nation. The earth here, too, plays the role of humus of art and from it emerge creative forms.

Ceramics

"Charrúas y Montes Criollos" sends us back in multiples ways to the artistic contributions of the aborigines that inhabited these lands. In ceramics, in stone and in sculptures there are references to carved funeral urns, to the petroglyphs of rupestrian art, to carvings in stone, to the spearhead and cutting tool industries, and the sculptures of lithic art.
In particular they allude to the pottery making that extended throughout the country and had diverse manifestations in vessels with rhythmic geometric motifs that are molded, incised, painted, pointed, corrugated and imbricated, in deep and flat open plates, in wide bowls, jars, platters, pots, and in tubular, cylindrical, bell-shaped and zoomorphic forms."4
They also evoke body tattoos, another form of native art, and the work likewise has its references to mutilation rites. The Charrúas created different marks on their bodies with incisions that were an element of tribal distinction among the bravest warriors; moreover, there is considerable evidence of tattooing among the Uruguayan aborigines. The existence of mutilations of phalanxes and fingers on funeral occasions has been verified among the Charrúas, Minuanes, Yaros, Timbues and Chana-beguaes. "When the deceased is a father, a husband or an adult brother, the grown daughters and sisters cut their hair, and the wife cuts off one of the joints of her fingers for each death, starting with the pinky. They also stick themselves several times with the knife or the spear of the deceased, part by part, in the arms, breasts and sides, from the waist up. I have seen it. Add to this that they spend two moons inside their huts, where all they do is cry and eat very little food. I have not seen a single adult woman with all her fingers intact and who did not have scars from spear wounds."5 When Cardillo recalls these practices it is not only in a historical sense, but instead as a metaphor of the wounds and mutilations inflicted upon the autochthonous peoples of this country and of Latin America.
Birds, fish, lizards, tatouays and armadillos (the most typical animal of River Plate prehistory), along with other examples of local species, are present in the ceramics Cardillo displays on the mounds. Using animals (which he found dead in Uruguayan fields and rivers) as forms imprinted in relief in clay molds, he makes them look like fossils and invites us to enter the past. Here is the concrete presence of life and death, since these ceramics are the testimony of the transformed corpse; Cardillo thus acts as have so many primitive artists who resort to ossuaries and skeletons to express themselves visually. Fossilized images, these forms reinforce the idea of the permanence of a culture beyond all possible exterminations and suggest the intensity of the ancestral and the old, which should not be lost. The vessels become recipients of memory, in "memory of the immemorial" as Gaston Bachelard would say.6 The fossil (and I go back to Bachelard) "is not, then, simply a being that has lived; it is a being that lives still asleep in its form."7 With the araucaria, a Latin American plant, Cardillo underscores the importance of the entire continent, this time using the plant as an aesthetic element that simultaneously plays a symbolic role. Making the most of its splendid texture, he imprints clay molds and achieves other pieces that look like funeral urns.

Totem poles

Totem poles in wood and cement recall the indigenous human groups in many ways. Canoes, piraguas, paddles, arrows, human figures, lithic sculpture, spears and vernacular fauna are subtly alluded to in this "ceremonial of memory."8 A serpent is defined on one of these totems. A symbol of great consequence in the history of human imagination, here it is associated with the time cycle (because of the fact that it changes skin), and serves as a vehicle for alluding to the perennial, to the cyclical and to life that triumphs over death, a message which is present in "Charrúas y Montes Criollos" in a variety of ways.

The sanctuary and its altars

A kind of sanctuary in the form of a sacramental nave with tumuli, stones, tree trunks and an enormous altar implying a pilgrimage to our past and a journey that leads to recognition of the roots of this culture. There must be a pilgrimage toward a sacred relic.
On mounds of earth that guide us to that altar are a series of heavy granite stones. With their hardness they convey the idea of permanence, of eternity, and have to do with ancestral Latin American lithic cults, and also with the tools made by the indigenous peoples. Their incorruptibility has led cultures to associate them with protection, sacredness and fertility. Mircea Eliade explains: "For the religious conscience of primitive man, the hardness, the coarseness, the permanence of matter constitute a hierophany. Nothing is more immediate and more autonomous in the plenitude of its strength, nothing more noble or more terrifying than a majestic rock, than a block of boldly erect granite. Above all the stone is. It is always the same, it remains and, more importantly, it strikes a blow. Even before seizing it to hit with, man stumbles into it. And thus he perceives its hardness, its roughness, its power. The rock reveals to him something that goes beyond the precarious human condition: an absolute way of being. Neither its resistance, nor its inertia, nor its proportions, nor its strange contours are human: they are signs of a presence that overwhelms,
that terrifies, that attracts and that threatens. In its size and its hardness, in its form and its color, man finds a reality and a strength that belong to another world, different from the profane world of which he forms part.9
The mounds with stones lead to the imposing "Native Forest Altar," a box - urn - shrine - altar - coffer built of wood that contains native species, one more element of memory and homage to the vanquished and to the particular characteristics of a natural world which the macrocephalic Montevideo tends to forget about. At the symbolic level the box has to do with memory, with oblivion, and the "images of the secret" (Bachelard). In this case the shrine has its doors and opens up, which suggests the possibility of discovering what is contained in this "dungeon of objects" (Bachelard). "I look into the coffers that brutally surround me, creating darkness above and below, into deep, deep boxes, as if they were no longer of this world," says the poet Jules Supervielle.10

The presence of the trunk in the shrine is fundamental, as testimony of the native flora that must be preserved. It stands upright, but at the same time is dry, battered, and has been sacrificed, has been burned. For this reason on one of its altars Cardillo places a tree encapsulated in metal, which preserves it and prepares it as testimony for the future.
That highly sacramental zone is completed with tree trunks lying on burial mounds like punished and mutilated corpses. Another great altar is linked to this area of the environment: its allusions to the funereal are more explicit because its iron doors come from a Montevideo crematory.

Evocation of pain and war

Iron and wood are joined in large, very abstract sculptural forms. Their sharp borders and their aggressive forms metaphorically materialize pain, vicissitudes, suffering, war. The same contents are present in another large monumental sculpture rendered in iron and cement, whose cruciform layout clearly makes reference to sacrifices.

Multiple echoes

It is precisely now, amidst the festivities for the 5th Centennial of the Discovery of America, that Cardillo wants to visually convey the "voice of the vanquished," and to point an accusatory finger at some of the ominous effects of that historic event.
Although the work generally addresses the specific case of the Charrúas and pays homage to their indomitable character and their unyielding resistance over three centuries, Cardillo alludes to the destruction of other indigenous cultures of Uruguay and of this continent, and to other massacres and exterminations.
The subject of the conquest as a historical event is fundamental, but also present is a critical reflection on a culture that hypertrophies the value of imports from the great metropoli. Moreover, while the native woodlands refer to something very specific, at the same time they imply a denunciation of all types of ecological destruction, of attacks on the biosphere and the Uruguayan and Latin American ecosystems. "I am concerned with the fate of certain geographic locations that should be preserved in their original condition, recovered like sanctuaries, venerated as places for meditation and observation. Today they are very degraded. One of them is Cabo Polonio, a paradigm and symbol of our coast, the indian location where arrowheads can still be found, which was already mentioned by the first Europeans who reached our soils, and where the presence of the gigantic rocks and dunes is truly an emblem," observes Cardillo painfully.11 "It is the same with Punta Ballena, a place I have gone to since I was a child and which has now been attacked and wounded by a highway that damages it and by buildings that distort it. It should be another sanctuary of national geography", Cardillo goes on, as he lists the damage done to our landscape legacy."12 Says Cardillo, "The native woodlands have been penned in, just as in the northern part of the country the last of the Charrua tribes were penned in; pilgrimage and dispersion were forced upon them."13
Thus Cardillo updates his proposal and stirs thought on the problems of cultures that break with their roots, who neglect their past, who destroy their ecological surroundings, who disregard the contributions of their predecessors. These issues are not a subject of the past. They belong to a present that continues to conspire against man, nature and memory. Uruguayans reclaim the Charrua identity (as seen in everyday evocations of the Charrua grit - "garra" - and other native myths), but they do little to preserve the memory of that people.
In any event, "Charrúas y Montes Criollos" may very well suggest other sentiments regarding suffering and the need for recovery in the broadest sense of the word. Multiple echoes emanate from the semantic fan opened up by Cardillo.

Form and content

To fully develop these subjects and connotations Cardillo has created an environment: it allows him to physically and spiritually involve his audience, inserting them as witnesses in a reality which encompasses them and compromises their emotional and sensory capacities in different ways. The work requires a time for circumnavigation, as Umberto Eco would say, and a highly moving psychological climate triumphs.
Earth, clay, ash, stone and wood are the elements used by Cardillo. The material, form and content are closely interrelated. The idea of primitive culture and of nature are already in those materials. But there are also castoffs that evoke what has been destroyed and is recoverable through art, and which also allude to a culture of poverty and obligatory recycling. The salvaging of identity is implicit in the scrap iron and wood, very typical elements from everyday Uruguayan life, which upon recycling make death and the past current, rescuing them from oblivion, providing for their rebirth. He underscores in various ways the value of a culture that knows how to conserve, that does not live in a delirium of consumption, that maintains its attachment to its objects. Each of the pieces includes elements with a history, testimonies of an existence. On the other hand, the environment relates to things Uruguayan: there are no technological frenzies foreign to our underdeveloped culture, or visual luxuries that deviate from the country's socioeconomic reality; everything is made from castoff material or elements from day-to-day life. Fire is very important in the salvaging of identity and is present in the forging process and in the ashes and burnt timbers. It has to do with Uruguayans' almost daily direct contact with fire, as a result of their eating habits (grilled and barbecued meat), and a relationship with wood and fire that has been lost in developed societies.

Linked with this proposal is the way Cardillo underscores the texture and coarseness of his materials. He uses cement and wood in the totems; the pieces can be viewed from behind and from the front, showing the rugged texture of charred wood, of shavings and splinters, while the tracks of time are suggested by rust colors achieved with iron powder added to the cement.
With a contrast that emphasizes chiaroscuro and textures, light plays a fundamental role and creates the sensation of mystery appropriate to this scenario of memory. Warm and distributed intensely over certain points, it has to do with the materials used and with the general spirit of the work. The renowned lighting designer Carlos Torres's work in conjunction with Cardillo makes a special visualization possible. The shading he creates gives a clear idea of mystery. Thus we penetrate the semi-darkness, just as we penetrate an indigenous past, that of Uruguay, for which scant documentation exists. At the same time a sense of the crepuscular prevails in certain zones, and if we remember the etymology of crepuscular ("crepurus" = uncertain) we see that there are references to uncertainty and ignorance. The music of the well-known composer Fernando Condon abstractly creates, in keeping with the spirit of the entire environment, a climate of mystery that has archeological and anthropological lilts. The metaphorical level, removed from demagogy and explicitness, is also present in this musical composition that subtly captures the rain, thunder, the warbling of birds, and the sounds of drums and voices.
Vertical forms linked to horizontal ones visually express death and regeneration, passive and active, what has disappeared and what can come back to life, what lies flat and what stands erect, transmitting once again the message of vital regeneration that is present throughout the proposal. Margins of solemnity and ritual, in a world that attacks and destroys to the extent of putting the planet in danger, open up the display of earth and natural elements. We find links to ecological art, whose purpose is to use nature as an expressive means for rejecting the mechanization and the artifice of contemporary life.
"Charrúas y Montes Criollos" also a relationship with archeological art, a current trend interested in showing a culture's possibilities for continuity. Cardillo makes his own choice by fusing anthropology, history, ethnography and ecology.14 He himself has in a certain way acted like an archeologist, intensely researching aboriginal cultures through broad bibliographical information, but also on incursions that have led him to see the native fauna and flora.15 As an archeologist he has sought out the ancient (archeology = archaios: ancient, logos: science). In this sense he pays homage to a science which despite its limited dissemination has been in our country for quite some time, over a century now, although in its more modern aspects it is newer and has had a particular boom with the work carried out in SaIto Grande. Yet we should not forget that the first text on national archeology was published back in 1892.
"Charrúas y Montes Criollos" reveals the discovery process undertaken by Cardillo. He started with an initial project but did not apply it in a dogmatic and fixed way; instead he allowed the site of his creation (his native Uruguay and the Municipal Exhibition Hall), the materials he found, with their own histories and textures, and the testimonies with which he was confronted, suggest the final work. Thus we see the importance of the photographic and cinematographic documentation of the work in progress, as performed by Grupo 936 and the cameras of Channel 5, Uruguay's public television station.
To a certain extent, that anthropological and archeological content revealed by the environment can be found in the creative process itself; the work was made by a team, with a community criterion, with a tribal spirit, as if the metaphorical deliverance of the aboriginal legacy were being sought in that way too. Similarly, as Cardillo explains, he follows procedures
that are not unlike the indigenous ones. "I have chosen the logic of indigenous construction. For that reason I have not sought industrialized technological solutions, but instead those linked to the primitive world; everything I have done could have been put together in the technical universe of the aborigines."16 In this way he attempts to create based on a language that identifies him with his country and with Latin America. He salvages something indigenous in this highly Europeanized place that rarely thinks about its Amerindian heritage, and places himself in a polycultural perspective in which he brings the indigenous to the legacy of the Old World. As the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes has said on various occasions, for a Latin American it is important to know that he is neither only European nor only indigenous, but instead an "eccentric branch of the West" that must discover itself and take on its own physiognomy. As Fuentes maintains, we are not simply transplanted countries, but instead nations that must be aware that they can see themselves in all their complexity, adding to their European heritage that of the ancient aboriginal cultures.
Cardillo aims at an integration that does not imply ignoring our European legacy, but instead seeks to salvage something from the most remote and primeval.

Symbolic continuity

It is interesting to note how this monumental sculptoric projection maintains links with Cardillo's previous work as a printmaker. The valuation of Uruguayan and Latin American fauna was certainly incipient in the insect images of his first prints. Later, when the real boxes began to appear in 1979, we could begin talking about reliquaries. Further on, in creations made in the United States in 1985, he addresses sculpture. Wooden altars, ancestral boxes, "ranchos" (sod huts), temples, totems and arches give shape to these new proposals, while he explores in print textures achieved with plates made of different materials which later lead him to create single works on paper that presage the themes displayed in this installation. He used cotton papers pressed on previously worked plaster and wooden plates, or on scrap iron or other found objects that allowed him to obtain powerful reliefs. Powdered pigments, pastels and acrylics, and woodcuts or collage for the backgrounds enrich the textural qualities of these works. Thematically, the boxes, coffers, amphoras, pyramids, vessels, maps, fossilized signs; charred doors, rupestrian graphites revolve around historical preservation and Latin American roots, around the homage to nature. We also find thematic links with the sacramental and the funereal in the mollusk shell that is an allegory of human rebirth and appears in funeral rites and in diverse artistic expressions over the course of history, materializing ideas of eternity, of cosmic order, of vital impetus, and of return. More concrete forerunners of "Charrúas y Montes Criollos" are the installations undertaken in the United States, including "Ceremony of Memory" in 1988, "Altars," at the Intar Gallery in 1989, and "Latin American Memorial," in the garden of the OAS Museum of Modern Latin American Art in Washington.17
He does not, in any event, abandon the idea of the print; we find it above all in his use of positive-negative, and in his imprinting of forms on ceramics. In this sense cement, as Cardillo explains, acts as paper, playing the same support role for the print that paper does.

A resistant attitude

Formally, the pieces of "Charrúas y Montes Criollos" all have great expressive power, in all cases starting from the idea of a primitive monument or of Latin American cultural vestiges. Relexifying those pre-Columbian languages through a contemporary aesthetic, Cardillo manages to join past, present and future without allowing himself to be contaminated by aesthetic trends of the very cosmopolitan New York.
It is rare for a Uruguayan artist to turn to indigenous roots for inspiration. This is explained by the scant traces left by the aboriginal populations, by their epimiolithical cultural status, and by the absence of creations of the stature of the great pre-Columbian cultures like the Mexican and the Peruvian. But the tribes that lived in Uruguay had their customs, their languages, their thought systems, their religions, and their artistic expressions, and Cardillo wants to pay them homage. From the distance of New York, the remote past takes on another importance, and Cardillo thus helps to salvage something that tends to be very much forgotten: the legacy of aboriginal cultures that developed in Uruguay and having a history of some 13,000 years. Perhaps, too, his condition as a printmaker here plays an important conscious or unconscious role, since the engraved and carved stones of what Uruguayan archeologists have called the "Industria de Banadero," are one of the fundamental artistic contributions of the indigenous peoples."18
Cardillo emphasizes his cultural identity by demonstrating a stubbornness in maintaining his roots. Like other Latin American artists, precisely because he is living far from his birthplace, he feels the need to underscore his origin. Moreover, he assiduously returns to Uruguay in order to continue feeding from that source. In a certain sense, as the Chicana artist Amalia Mesa-Bains says, it is a survival mechanism.
Cardillo's aesthetic posture is related to a whole "multicultural" movement which today is very intense in the United States, as very well analyzed by Lucy Lippard.19 The image of an Anglo America is being replaced, and the "multicultural>, theme is present today in all of American life. Marked demographic changes have yielded very deep-reaching cultural transformations, and the Black, Hispanic and Asiatic presence is emphasized in the visual arts as well. There is a clear resistance to accepting the vision of a homogeneous society and the illusion of a reassuring melting pot; instead the tendency is to underscore the differences that allow it to steer clear of uniform monotony. One sector of "resistentes" considers that a new vitalizing thrust is given to creation by the preservation of multiple identities, memories, customs and traditions. The art of communities having diverse ethnic origins is increasingly visible, and it's precious legacy is channeled in the visual discourses of the minorities who today are the majority. Cardillo forms part of that "multicultural" movement in the United States. There is resistance to dissolving into the once much coveted melting pot, and a trend toward salvaging the Latin American cultural heritage.

Notes

1. Mircea Eliade, Tratado de Historia de las Religiones, Ediciones Cristiandad, Madrid, 1974, p.155. See also the same author
Mito y realidad, Guadarrama, Barcelona, 1978, and El mito del eterno retorno, Planeta, Buenos Aires, 1984.
2. Felix de Azara, De los indios salvajes, Enciclopedia Uruguaya, Vol 1, Arca, Montevideo, 1968, p.82.
3. Gilbert Durand, Las estructuras antropologicas de la imaginacion, Taurus, Madrid, 1981.
4. Rene Mora, "Restos ceramicos y campaniformes," Hoy es Historia, year IV, No. 21, Montevideo, 1987, pages 69-83. Mario Cossens, "Situacion actual de la prehistoria uruguaya," Hoy es Historia, year 3, No. 15, Montevideo, 1986, pages 80-94.
5. Felix de Azara, op cit, p. 82. See Teresa Porzecanski, Curanderos y Canibales, Luis A. Retta Editor, Montevideo, 1989.
6. Gaston Bachelard, La poetica del espacio, F.C.E., Mexico, 1986.
7. Bachelard, op cit, p. 148.
8. "Ceremony of memory" is the title under which Amalia Mesa-Bains presents works involving new expressions of spirituality by contemporary Hispanic artists. The exhibition included works by Rimer Cardillo. See, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Ceremony of Memory, Center for Contemporary Arts of Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1988.
9. Mircea Eliade, op cit, p.253.
10. Cited by Bachelard in op cit p.122, comes from Supervielle's Gravitations, p.17.
11. Interview with the author, February 20,1991.
12. Interview with the author, February 15, 1991.
13. Interview with the author, April 2, 1991.
14. Other archeological artists are Anne and Patrick Poirier, Charles Simonds, Peter Saari, Ana Mendieta, Marta Pala, Deborah Butterfield and Robert Stackhouse.
15. The works studied by Cardillo include the following: Eduardo Acosta y Lara, La guerra de los charruas, Monteverde, Montevideo, 1969; Eduardo Acosta y Lara, Salsipuedes 1831, Revista del Instituto Historico y de Geografia, Apartado, Montevideo, 1989; Francisco Bauza, Historia de la dominacion espanola en el Uruguay, Clasicos Uruguayos, Biblioteca Artigas, Montevideo, 1967; Mariano Berro, De la agricultura colonial, Clasicos Uruguayos, Biblioteca Artigas, Montevideo, 1975; Pablo Blanco Acevedo, El gobierno colonial en el Uruguay y los origenes de la nacionalidad, Clasicos Uruguayos, Biblioteca Artigas, Montevideo, 1975; Luis Cardoza y Aragon, Guatemala: las lineas de su mano, F.C.E.,Mexico, 1955; Juan Cassanga, La forestation en la conservation de solos, Bulletin technical No, MAP (Ministry of Livestock, Agriculture and Fishing), Montevideo, 1987; Ricardo Cassias, Juan Lies gang and Jacob Epineuria, Panorama de la erosion y conservation de suelos del Uruguay, Boletin tecnico No.4, MGAP, Montevideo, 1978; Serafin Cordero, Los charruas, Ed. Mentor, Montevideo, 1960; Charles Darwin, Viaje de un naturalista alrededor del mundo, El Ateneo, Buenos Aires, 1951; Diogenes de Giorgi, Martin del Barco Centenera, Ediciones del Nuevo Mundo, Montevideo, 1989; Osvaldo del Puerto, Notas tecnicas, Facultad de Agronomia, Montevideo, 1988; Tomas de Mattos, Bernabe, Bernabe, Banda Oriental, Montevideo, 1988; Ruy Diaz de Guzman, Anales del Descubrimiento, poblacion y conquista del Rio de la Plata, Ed. Comuneros, Asuncion, 1980; Louis C. Faron, The Mapuche Indians of Chile, Holt Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1968; Fray Bartolome de las Casas, Del unico modo de atraer a todos los pueblos a la verdadera religion, F.C.E., Mexico,1942; Jose Joaquin Figueira, De las memorias del brigadier Don Antonio Diaz, Estado Mayor del Ejercito, Montevideo, 1978; Jose Joaquin Figueira, Una excursion arqueologica al Cerra Tupambay realizada a comienzos de 1881, Revista Nacional, apartado, Montevideo, 1958; Notas antropologicas, Gaceta Comercial, Montevideo, 1955; Jose Joaquin Figueiras, Pipas de ceramica de los aborigenes del Uruguay, El siglo ilustrado, Montevideo, 1961; Eduardo Galeano, Memoria del Fuego, Ediciones del Chanchito, Montevideo, 1987; Luis Rodolfo Gonzalez and Susuana Varese de Gonzalez, Guaranies y Paisanos, Nuestras Raices, No.3, Ed. Nuestra Tierra; Marvin Harris, Canibales y reyes, Alianza Editorial, Madrid, 1988; J .A. Hunter, El poder charrua, Tupac Amaru, Montevideo, 1990; Rodolfo Maruca Sosa, La nacion charrua, Ed. Letras, Montevideo,1957; Andre Malraux, La cabeza de obsidiana, Sur, Buenos Aires, 1947; Oscar Padron Farre, Sangre Indigena en el Uruguay, Pesce, Montevideo, 1987; Jose Manuel Perez Caste-llanos, Seleccion de escritos, Clasicos Uruguayos, Biblioteca Artigas, Montevideo, 1968; Teresa Porzecanski, Curanderos y canibales, Luis A. Retta, Montevideo, 1989; Fructuoso Rivera, Cartas a Bernardina, Arca, 1968; Paul Rivet, Les derniers charruas, Revista Sociedad Amigos de la Arqueologia, Montevideo; Monica Sans, Las poblaciones prehistoricas del Uruguay, Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias, Montevideo, 1988.
16. Interview with the author, April 6, 1991.
17. See the following catalogues: Amalia Mesa Bains, Ceremony of Memory, op cit; Amalia Mesa Bains, "The archeological aesthetic of Rimer Cardillo," Intar, New York, 1989; Somos un pueblo, Aquinas Center of Theology and Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, 1990; The Work of Contemporary Hispanic Artists, Museo del Barrio, Montclair State College Art Gallery, New York, 1990.
18. Jorge Amilcar Rodriguez, "Poblamiento y formaciones socioculturales prehistoricas en el Rio Uruguay Medio," Hoy es Historia, year VI, NO.35, Montevideo, 1989; pages 56-70.
19. Lucy Lippard, Mixed Blessing, Pantheon Books, New York, 1990.