A Song for Children, Censored by a Dictatorship, and the Reason Why the Door Says El Mono Liso.
When I named the studio, I didn't look very far. It came from a song that María Elena Walsh wrote for children and that ends up being, like almost everything she wrote, considerably less innocent than it appears: El twist del Mono Liso. A clumsy, funny monkey that catches a fake lion and dances. Nothing more. And yet someone, at some desk, once decided that this monkey was dangerous.
Who She Was
María Elena Walsh was born on February 1, 1930 in the province of Buenos Aires and died in Buenos Aires on January 10, 2011. She published her first poem at fifteen in the magazine El Hogar and her first book, Otoño imperdonable, at seventeen. That book earned her the second Municipal Poetry Prize and a scholarship that took her to the United States, to the house of Juan Ramón Jiménez. She was nineteen years old.
She could have stayed there, in literary circle poetry. She went to Paris, sang Argentine folk music with Leda Valladares, came back and started writing songs for children. It was a professional decision, not one of comfort: Argentine children's literature at the time was, to a large extent, rhymed morality. Walsh brought it nonsense, adult humor and careful meter. Manuelita, the Potato Queen, the Little Wizard of Gulubú, the Slick Monkey. After her, writing for children stopped being the lowest rung of the trade.
The Banned Song
During the first years of the last dictatorship, the military government censored three of her songs: El twist del Mono Liso, La cigarra, and Gilito de Barrio Norte. Two of them were children's songs.
Someone collected a government paycheck for deciding that a monkey that dances twist was a threat.
Walsh didn't let the matter slide. On August 16, 1979, in the middle of the dictatorship, she published an article in the newspaper Clarín titled "Misadventures in the Kindergarten-Garden-Country." She described a country turned into a classroom, with a monitor watching what was sung, read and thought, treating adults like helpless creatures. She defined the censor, among other things, as a thief of the right to imagination.
The newspaper sold out. The text continued circulating photocopied inside and outside the country. It cost her dearly—she was excluded from official radio and television circuits. She had already stopped singing in public; in 1981 she was diagnosed with bone cancer, which she lived with for the last thirty years of her life. She kept writing until the end.
Why a Photography Studio
Because my trade resembles that monkey more than I would like. I do something that from the outside looks like a game—looking, framing, pressing a button—and every so often someone gets uncomfortable with what appears in the frame. An image is never entirely innocent either.
And because there is something Walsh did her whole life and that I try to sustain: working seriously with material that others look at askance. She did it with children's songs. I attempt it with a photographic essay, a body on stage, an image that interests no one but me.
The monkey in the logo has its tail outside the circle. That is not an oversight.
The Song. El twist del Mono Liso, lyrics and music by María Elena Walsh. The rights to the work are current and administered by SADAIC and the María Elena Walsh Foundation—Sara Facio, which is why I do not reproduce the lyrics here. It can be heard on licensed music platforms and on the official channels of the work.
To Read It. Tutú Marambá (1960), El reino del revés (1965), Dailan Kifki (1966), Cuentopos de Gulubú (1966). For Adults: Novios de antaño (1990) and Fantasmas en el parque (2008). The 1979 article is in the collection Desventuras en el País-Jardín-de-Infantes (Sudamericana, 1993).
Tribute with no commercial purpose. The works cited belong to their authors and rights holders. Consulted sources: Walsh-Facio Foundation, National Library of Teachers, Konex Foundation and press archives.