Navigating Experience

Abstract

This chapter begins by defining what it means to experience the memorial, so as to lay bare the emotional and moral expectations the site has for its visitors and visitors have from the site. We will then look at the ways the memorial’s space (§2) and landscape (§3) are employed in its experience, and how, as an invented, new memorial, new practices of revisiting memory develop in it. This will provide the basis for the theoretical shift I propose (in §4) from thinking about memory work through the lens of trauma transference, to thinking about it through acts of mediation and speakability.