Murals

About the Book

Murals is a moving, and necessary, graphic novel. Through a plot that unfolds on the boundary between reality and fable, Daniel Feierstein and illustrator Juan Soto construct a narrative about the forced disappearance of Santiago Maldonado, confronting us with every day, and often invisible, forms of institutional violence.

The starting point is well known: a young man disappears, under a democratic regime, after police repression by the Argentine National Border Patrol forces, in the southern region of Argentina. But unlike a chronicle or an essay, Murals chooses the language of the graphic novel to tell what others remain silent about, and to point—simultaneously with harshness and beauty—at what happens to us as a society when we choose not to see.

The story, centered on a teenager who begins to discover what many prefer to ignore, also becomes an unsettling parable about the mechanisms of silence. Here, forgetfulness is not merely a failure of memory, but a political choice. Memory, then, becomes a spell, an instrument of resistance and revolution.

Excerpt

There are stories that cannot be erased, even when they are covered up.

After learning about the case of a young man who had disappeared in his town, the protagonist of this story begins to see what others prefer to ignore. A graphic novel about forgetfulness as a spell, memory as a way to conjure it up, and the invisible transformations that turn us—if we're not paying attention—into accomplices of what we keep silenced.

Translated by Sandra Botta - Edited by Cecilia Della Croce