In addition to his subverting of police techniques, Berra is also attempting here to recreate mechanisms which, as in Claude Lanzmann’s sense, lead from memory to the immemorial: attempting, in other words, to abolish the distance between past and present, presence and absence, but also to create a form of memory with its roots simultaneously outside time and in the furthest reaches of the human. As if he were saying, ‘Here I have presences I can offer as testimony to the absence I am pursuing. This is my successful failure. My way of wooing—but not catching—life as it flees. These are the shadows of a body I cannot reach.’ This work includes: the identikit photo by Leandro Berra of a friend who vanished under the military dictatorship in Argentina; the photo of Leandro Berra taken from an official acknowledgement of his arrival in France, accompanied by a diagram of his genetic profile: a total of fifteen STR (Short Tandem Repeats) markers and a sex marker; a photo of the identity photograph used on his last residence permit in France in 2001, accompanied by a diagram of his genetic profile including a total of thirteen markers included in the group established by the FBI’s CODIS (Combined DNA Indexing System).

Leandro Berra