Sites of Memory, Emptying Remembrance

Abstract

The experience of wandering through the city past the facades of sites that the military dictatorship once used as detention and torture centers seems to tell us that, in the present, almost no eloquent sign forcefully denounces that condemnable past. What has transpired between the cruel and tormenting past being cited by these dramatic sites and the forgetful everyday malaise of neighborhoods trusting that anonymity will dissipate guilt? The impassibility of walls—apparently free of any stigma—announces that the traumatic remembrance of human rights violations has been gradually losing intensity, to the point where it has become fused with the sedimentary indifference of passive forgetting by a quotidian city in which the past’s monstrosity cannot manage to turn criminal evidence into social shame. It seems necessary to reintroduce the transposing force of remembrance into these tranquil facades, to lacerate this urban quietude with the warning sign of a memory for which the act of remembering continues to signify danger, emergency, and catastrophe. But how to agitate the temporalities of this empty memory in order to break with the citizenry’s apathy and distractedness? How to depacify the remembrance of history so that the explosions of memory, its resplendence and discontinuities, can rattle the complacent everydayness of a society of tranquil habits?

Translated by Michael J. Lazzara.