String Born

Buenos Aires ethnomusicologist Inés Pereda built a career studying the folk songs she once dismissed in her grandfather’s kitchen. At his death, she inherits his handmade criollo guitar and verses carved into the wood beneath its strings.

The songs encode locations across the pampas: a forty-year record of graves hidden during Argentina’s Dirty War. Yet the instrument reveals its pattern only when played with the precision, memory, and honesty Inés refused to learn from him.

Following the music could expose men who survived the dictatorship with power intact. It could also lead toward the mother taken when Inés was two, and force her to carry testimony she once called an old man’s grief.

The map is unfinished because the missing are still being found.