‘many name plaques will remain empty, nameless, thus commemorating the violent voiding of identity that was the torturers’ explicit goal …’
Andreas Huyssen
‘there is an attempt to construct something magnificent, that impresses you as a result of its scale … but these plaques are not inscribed. Those that are inscribed are in the centre’
Rúben Chabobo
The first time I visited the Parque de la Memoria I went the wrong way. This implies that there is a right way to navigate the landscape, and this would be misleading. Once you have
extricated yourself from the traffic outside and negotiated the hole in the fence that marks the entrance you are free to explore the space in any way you choose. If you leave behind the portacabin that serves as a makeshift reception and head for the corner on the farthest right hand-side, you will come across the start of the carteles de la memoria. The carteles interpret the recent violent past through the medium of road traffic instructions. Follow the road signs as they hug the river’s sinuous edge around to the right and you would eventually reach the Sala PAyS. If you head to the farthest corner on the left hand-side, however, as I did that first morning, your view is immediately dominated by Dennis Oppenheim’s Monumento al Escape. After studying the three houses housed precariously on top of one another that make up this memorial, as well as the colourful graffiti that line their interior, curiosity then got the better of me. Rather than moving across to begin the Monument to the Victims of State Terrorism at its beginning, as I perhaps ought, I clambered up the grassy verge and met it midway through its ruptured stelae.
From this vantage point on top of the hill, you can begin to make out Nicolás Guagnini’s artwork, 30,000, with which we began chapter six. Your attention is also diverted by Norberto Gómez’s monstrosity, Torres de la Memoria. This didn’t look like a Tower of Memory to me (it didn’t look like anything at all) so I continued my journey through the monument, reading the list of names along with other visitors, until our bodies had been safely channelled along the four ruptured walls and down the slope, past the “30,000” that is the face on the poles and the 30,000 spaces for names on the walls, to the river plate on the other hand-side. If you accept the park’s invitation to meet the river and enter into its embrace via the small walkway, and move with the walkway as it bridges into the water, you are rewarded at the end of your
journey with an extraordinary sight. As you look out onto the river – the same body of water into which many of the disappeared were thrown – you see the statue of a small boy. The boy is not steady. He appears fragile and lost. Perched impossibly atop the water, the figure of the small boy undulates with the ebb and flow of the tide.
Memorials are not what they used to be. They are changing. They are changing in form. There are more contemporary, abstract sculptures to rival the neo-classical works that dot our national capitals and public squares. There are new forms represented in new media
altogether, including museums of memory,1 memorial parks (including but not limited to this one)2 and arboretums,3 modern art in memorial parks4 and even parks of (“dead”)
memorials.56 One result is that the relationship between memorials and place is changing. Many new memorials welcome you into their space and into their embrace, where you are free to think through memories both personal and public in your own way. The relationship between memorials and time is also being altered. As temporary interventions in time and space, many new and performative memorials are there one minute and gone the next.7 Memorials are changing. And yet, we come to study the new memorials much as we did the old. As (trainee) scholars of sociology, cultural geography, cultural history or cultural studies, we often try to understand these memorials in terms of their aesthetic or affective prowess; their form, shape or structure; or their discursive and cultural codings (Williams 2007, Huyssen 2003, Sturken 2007, Young 1993). We forget that this codification is a complex social and historical process that entails concrete groups struggling over the meaning of the recent past in concrete cultural, political and historical interventions over space and time.
My aim here is to put forward an alternative reading, based on a variation of an existing methodology. I assume in this chapter that memorials are not random prompts, according to which we are free to construct any memory we might wish. Nor are they pre-determined texts to be read and remembered as if by rote. Rather, I understand memorials and landscapes of memory as cultural frames of memory that are shaped by – and which help to shape in turn – a field of meaning (Huyssen 2003) as a field of representability (Butler 2006, 2010) (see chapter three). This field of meaning is spatially-inflected. As visitors to the park, we try and make sense of the violent past and attribute meaning to it by situating ourselves in an ‘expanded
1 See, for example, the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos, Santiago de Chile; Museo de la Memoria, Rosario,
Argentina; Lugar de la Memoria, Lima, Perú, Museo Memoria y Tolerancia, Mexico City; Centro de Memoria, Paz y Reconciliación, Bogota, Colombia; or the Museo de la Memoria (Museum of Memory), Montevideo, Uruguay.
2 See, for example, the Parque de la Memoria de Sartaguda, in Navarra, Spain. 3 See, for example, the National Memorial Arboretum, Staffordshire, UK. 4 See for example the Yorkshire Sculpture Park.
5 See, for example, Memento Park in Budapest, Hungary.
6 Not to mention TV documentaries, films, theatrical productions, social protests, trials and truth commissions. See chapter five. 7 See, for example, the twentieth anniversary commemoration of the Siege of Sarajevo; the commemoration of one hundred years
since the beginning of the First World War at the Tower of London, United Kingdom; or the commemoration in Berlin of the fall of the Berlin Wall. See also chapter one for an earlier discussion.
field’ of meaning and a ‘global culture of memory’ (Huyssen 2003). We do so by situating ourselves within a field of meaning that is temporally-inflected, too. My argument in this chapter then, is that when a visitor stands before a memorial in the Memory Park, and uses this memorial as a ‘vehicle’ (Jelin 2003), ‘technology’ (Sturken 2007) or ‘frame’ (Butler 2010) to (re)construct her memories and understand and attribute meaning to the recent violent past, she does so immersed in a dynamic and expanded field of meaning that is both spatially and temporally-inflected, as a field of force whose historical, cultural and political contours have been socially constructed over time and space. As visitors to the park, we are interpellated with images, discourses, narratives and representations of the past through the frame of a memorial. We do not react to this medium as if in a vacuum; we activate, negotiate and co- construct a response, building our memories around the memorial by drawing upon the contours of an expanded field. This is not a unified field. Rather, it is a contested field. Its contours are also the contours of power, and these contours attempt to “pull” the visitor in different directions, towards different interpretations of the past.
This chapter forms the second part of a conversation between the way the disappeared are represented in collective memory and the way this memory circulates in and through the park. Key to this chapter is the idea of the political logic of memory. In chapter six, I showed how the collective memory of the disappeared has a cultural biography in which it tends towards two political logics of memory which shape, and are shaped by, the historical interventions of human rights actors. In this chapter I will deepen this cultural biography by demonstrating how these twin political logics form the two poles around which visitors organise the constellations of meaning, discourses and memory that intersperse in and through the park in the expanded field in which they are immersed, and which they use to ‘activate’ the memorials and attribute meaning to the recent violent past and the disappeared. The chapter is divided into three parts. In each of these parts I consider a pair of memorials from the park. These include the Monument to the Victims of State Terrorism in part three. Four of the six memorials are permanent installations. Two were temporary installations performed through the media of contemporary art and drama in the Sala PAyS which took place in 2011 and 2014 (see chapter three). I conclude by reflecting on the importance of political logics of memory in helping visitors to stabilise, though not suture, their ‘symbolic worlds of meaning’ (Verdery 1999) within an ‘expanded field of representability’ (Butler 2010).