​​​​​​​

“The responsibility of the artist or intellectual is to refuse to enter into that perverse system of thought in which people become abstractions,”

Griselda Gambaro, in conversation with Marguerite Feitlowitz, BOMB Magazine, 1990.
 

“It’s been really clear in this timeline that the people are doing a much better job defending core constitutional values than our institutions are right now,” 

Professor Kate Shaw, Strict Scrutiny podcast, 16 February 2026.

​

In July of 2010, I stepped off a plane in Buenos Aires, Argentina. I’d read that southern hemisphere winters would be much milder than those I’d grown up with in upstate New York. I packed only a fleece and a thin scarf. Outside, I was pummeled with sleet and freezing cold. It was my first time abroad and the first time I realized that expectation and reality can differ so drastically. We often think we know the story from afar, but through firsthand experience, we meet with truths more nuanced, difficult, and messier than we might’ve hoped.
 

In Buenos Aires, I studied Argentine literature and read Jorge Luis Borges, Juilo Cortázar, Silvina Ocampo, Manuel Puig, and our playwright, Griselda Gambaro—authors whose worlds can’t be easily mapped; whose realities slip, invert, end, and begin again; whose characters call out from the darkness. I read about Argentina’s history of government repression, the profound violation of rights during the so-called “Dirty War” of the 1970s and 80s, and the 30,000 desaparecidos—the migrants, dissidents, students, intellectuals, artists, and children who were denied due process, kidnapped, tortured, and disappeared by the government. Through this authoritarian strategy, the governing military junta circumvented the law while manufacturing a sense of plausible deniability. As Creon says, “If she wishes to die there, let her die. If she wishes to live hidden under this roof, let her live. We will be cleared of her death…” Societal ambivalence toward life, truth, and justice doesn’t merely permit gross violations, it necessitates them.

 

More than a decade after my time in Argentina and an entire hemisphere away, I am experiencing a world whose physics and psychology starkly contrast the stories we were once told about it. Here and now, Gambaro’s warnings about power and memory are instructive. She asks us to probe the role of authority, how it is wielded and by whom, and from where it derives power. Gambaro cautions us against the inadequacy of capitulation, fatalism, and acquiescence. Through Antígona, she demands accountability and historical accuracy.

 

Grief about the state of our world is unmooring, and self-preservation and nihilism have a magnetic pull. We need to ground ourselves in the life-giving, the true, and the just, lest we slide into hopelessness. I am grounded by the work of the Argentine group Las Madres y Las Abuelas de La Plaza, who continue to demonstrate and tell the stories of los desaparecidos, decades after their kidnappings; by local community members who, in the face of increasing personal risk and despite efforts to scapegoat vulnerable neighbors, offer them solidarity and support instead; by the idea of six people, a crew of designers and technicians, and an audience convening to participate in the telling of an ancient story. By the perseverance of the persecuted. By every Antígona.

 

Despite unthinkable odds, Gambaro urges each of us toward the grounding force of righteous fury—in the service of righteous action.

​

--Frankie DiCiaccio, DeKalb, IL, 2026