Pauline Delfino

Film

In Pereyra Iraola Park, in the province of Buenos Aires, researchers observed that certain birds had lost their song. Working with archival recordings made in the 1960s by a scientist, they reconstructed these vocalisations and then played them on special devices installed in the park in an attempt to artificially reactivate a lost aural memory.

I wanted to know what had caused this disappearance, so I decided to go there and find out.

What I discovered was a place marked by several absences: that of a daughter of the Pereyra family, who owned the park before it was nationalised under Perón; that of the disappeared victims of the dictatorship, whose bodies may have been hidden there; and that, more diffuse, of the birdsong itself.

As I explored this space in search of buried stories, I set out to map its memory, in the manner of the scientist who had archived those songs. But as the investigation proceeded, another space opened up: that of my own memory. A family archive emerged – that of a young woman who disappeared during the dictatorship.

Between the tunnels now covered over and the treetops where birds flit about, these different presences overlap. In their stories, the landscape becomes the place where these ghosts appear.

Pauline Delfino

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Born in Paris in 1999, Pauline Delfino studied history at the Université Paris Sciences et Lettres before going on to write a dissertation on archives in documentary cinema at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. This research led to her graduation short film *Babel*, which was selected for the Amiens International Film Festival and screened as part of the documentary film month. A programmer and member of the La Clef collective, she co-founded the associations Ré/créations and Les films à mains levées, working to promote moving image education and the dissemination of cinema.

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