Installing Democracy Uruguayan Transitional Justice in Fernando Barrios’s Artista de mierda KRISTAL BIVONA As countries in South America transitioned from dicta- torship to democracy in the 1980 s, each took a different approach to dealing with state terror. Each continues to grapple with the memory of dictatorship-era violence in distinct ways. Each nation’s road to redemocratization; the popular movements for truth, memory, reconciliation, accountability, or impunity; and the legal framework of each transition to democracy all impact how these dicta- torships are remembered and which narratives dominate the collective imaginary. Cultural and artistic production engages in dialogues with the official and unofficial stories of the dictatorships and their legacies. This article investigates how visual art in Uruguay engages with transitional justice and memory of the dic- tatorship (1973 –85 ) through an analysis of the installa- tion Artista de mierda (Artist of Shit, 2019 ) by Fernando Barrios (b. 1968 , Uruguay). The work reveals how Uru- guay’s transition to democracy maintained the structures of violence and oppression that reached previously unimaginable intensity under military rule but that pre- date the dictatorship. Further, I argue that it challenges the ongoing erasures of memory that flatten the way that the authoritarian past has been dealt with in the Uru- guayan context. Nearly four decades after Uruguay began its transition to democracy, the struggle over which narra- tives would dominate cultural memory and what society should do about the open wounds of the dictatorship continues to be negotiated. Visual art—not only the form and content of the artworks themselves but the condi- tions that enable exhibitions that engage directly with memory of the dictatorship, such as sponsorships, insti- tutions, and curation—can effectively take positions to intervene in cultural memory and bring to light perspec- tives on state violence that are obscured in other fields. According to the International Center for Transitional Justice, “transitional justice refers to the ways countries emerging from periods of conflict and repression address large-scale or systematic human rights violations so numerous and so serious that the normal justice system will not be able to provide an adequate response.” 1 As a field of inquiry, transitional justice studies has tradition- ally encompassed various social sciences, including com- parative politics, sociology, and law. The historian Paige Arthur explains that transitional justice “came directly out of a set of interactions among human rights activists, lawyers and legal scholars, policymakers, journalists, donors, and comparative politics experts concerned with human rights and the dynamics of ‘transitions to democ- racy,’ beginning in the late 1980 s.” 2 While there are countless situations throughout history where govern- ments transitioned between different forms of governance or where societies had to recuperate after war or atrocity, transitional justice as a term has gained traction in describing those processes involved in transitions to con- stitutional democracy. 3 Societies transitioning toward constitutional democracy after periods of conflict or authoritarianism contend with questions of whether there should be a pursuit of justice for the recent past at all, and if so how to approach it. 4 Approaches to transitional 1 . “What Is Transitional Justice?,” International Center for Transi- tional Justice, May 24 , 2018 , www.ictj.org/what-transitional-justice. 2 . Paige Arthur, “How Transitions Reshaped Human Rights: Con- ceptual History of Transitional Justice,” Human Rights Quarterly 31 (2009 ): 324 . 3 . “The origins of democracies are to be found in political choices rather than structural conditions—and these choices are made by elites,” concludes Arthur. She attributes this groundbreaking idea to a 1978 ini- tiative of the Latin American Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars dubbed the Transitions Project. This idea shifted scholarly focus from already flourishing democracies to what were at the time emerging democracies, in order to understand the process of democratization. Transitional justice presupposes that the end goal is a democracy in which the past has been dealt with, and it presupposes that such a shift is enabled by decision making and pacts among elites. Arthur, “How Transitions Reshaped Human Rights,” 346 . 4 . Mihaela Mihai examines the issues surrounding the justification for transitional justice and the distribution of justice in contexts where it is pursued in her excellent interdisciplinary work. See Mihaela Mihai, Nega- tive Emotions and Transitional Justice (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016 ). 41 Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, Vol. 5 , Number 4 , pp. 41 –54 . Electronic ISSN: 2576 -0947 .  2023 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, https://www.ucpress.edu/journals/reprints-permissions. DOI: https://doi.org/10 .1525 /lavc.2023 .5 .4 .41 .