From the Truth Commission Report to the Stage and the Museum: The Artistic Dislocation of Violence from the Ecuadorian Chapter of (original) (raw)
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A Sacred House for the Lost: Chile's New Museum of Memory and Implications for Human Rights Today
2012
This thesis investigates the creation of collective memory by exploring the case of a new government-sponsored Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Chile. The exhibit commemorates human rights violations perpetrated by the State during the country's dictatorship (1973-1990). Being the first government-sponsored memorial of its kind and magnitude, the exhibit speaks to Chile's post-authoritarian democratization efforts and to the multiple challenges still facing memory-making today. Remembering traumatic events, which defy and often threaten a social group's core sense of collectivity, can be a taxing and daring task. Memory-makers or "carrier-groups" that framed this trauma narrative for others to use were faced with difficult questions when attempting to tell a story about controversial and painful events. The way the museum's narrative is framed also carries implications for human rights and for the quality of democratic development today. To better understand this case, the thesis asks (1) how were individual stories transformed into a collective representation?; (2) given that defining memory is often polemical, how is this representation sustained as legitimate?; and (3) what are the implications of this official portrayal of national memory for human rights and democratic development in Chile today? Negotiation and mythification are identified as two processes by which memory-makers transformed individual accounts of the past into a legitimate and single collective representation. My analysis shows the museum chose to focus its narrative on honoring dictatorship victims (of forced disappearance and extrajudicial executions). It does so through a Catholic narrative of salvation, whereby victims are provided a sacred space for reverence. While this myth helps establish a broadly recognized symbolic grave for dictatorship victims, it also depoliticizes and dehistoricizes Chile's authoritarian period. The narrative helps secure the Chilean State as a guarantor of civil and political rights, but not of social, economic and cultural rights, which have become prominent in democratization agendas since the 2000s and whose inclusion in the exhibit would allow for a deeper interrogation of the past in light of current social challenges. i TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Introduction …………………………………………………………………………… Wider Audience …………………………………………………………… 4.3 An Awaited Public Statement: The Museum and Scholars of Memory in Chile …………………………………………………………………. 4.4 Apolitical Redemption …………………………………………………………… 4.5 The Human Rights Lens ………………………………………………………….
My aim in this essay is to map out the contributions that cultural texts lend to the discussion on human rights, memory, and citizenship. To that end, I read Francisco Goldman's The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop?, paying attention to the notion of a criminal state that is developed in this account. With these three topics in mind, I unravel the processes constituting criminal networks of power and their logic of articulation. I also use two psychoanalytical notions: perversion and abjection. Both serve to navigate the meaning of a senseless psychotic history that produces phobic states of being. This is the way I interpret what Guatemalan people lived through at the end of the twentieth century and beyond. On the other side of abjection and perversion, there is "justice" and "truth." These two words are a compass for those who, with serenity, perseverance, and tenacity, decide to control radical evil and prevent the disruption of the social bond. It is axiomatic, as a policeman told the investigators of the crime that "there are some things that should be investigated and others not" (42). From the get-go, Goldman's chronicle produces a sharp sensation of uneasiness, a general feeling of disturbance. As the narrative progresses, a psychotic, or at least perverse, atmosphere oppresses us. 1 The memory of that "time of fear and sadness-but also of unforgettable intensity-stayed inside me," says the author, "like a dormant infection that can sometimes be stirred back to life, even by a glance" (142). How does Goldman produce these sensations? He does so through hyperbole, which conveys exaggeration and exorbitance; through metonymy, which conveys the perpetual disorientation of the sign due to its incapacity to signify; and
Conserveries mémorielles. Revue transdisciplinaire de …, 2011
Drawing on the ethico-political relationship between memory and justice in the sense proposed by Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida, this article addresses the recovery of the historical memory of the victims of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship (1939–1975). It does so by contrasting Antonio Muñoz Molina’s novel Beltenebros (Prince of Shadows, 1989) and the recent Spanish “Law of Historical Memory” (2007). In juxtaposing the novel and the current law, it aims to trace in each text a series of recurring representational practices (words, images, expressions) that seek to do justice to the victims, with unequal success. The novel’s recurring expressions (i.e., shadows, the repressed, eternal return, ghosts, and blindness) stress the importance of coming to terms with the “ghosts of the past.” The law focuses instead on other words and images (i.e., foundation, reconciliation, concord, and closure) that allude to the idea of historical progress, it will be argued, without proper acknowledgment of the injustices of the past. In doing so, the law becomes a commemorative site for the Spanish Transition, but not for the recovery of the victims’ memory. The law’s re-appropriation of the “spirit of the Transition” reveals Spain’s deep fear of confronting the ghosts of the past, a fear that can be perceived still today.
London Review of International Law, vol 7, no 2 (2019), 2019
In this article, I examine the relationship between the 1990 Chilean truth commission and international human rights law, and how this relationship informs the work of the truth commission in shaping social and institutional relations in Chile after the 1973-1990 dictatorship. The argument running through this article is two-fold. First, there is a constitutive and creative relationship between the Chilean truth commission and international human rights law. That is, international human rights law, as a ‘global’ legal form, informs the constitution of the Chilean truth commission as a continuing phenomenon; and international human rights law mediates the truth commission’s creative potential to craft ‘truths’ (determining which ‘truths’ are ‘truths’) while also grounding the ‘truths’ by giving them legal authority. The second aspect of the argument is that the ways in which international human rights law informs, mediates and grounds the ‘lawful truth’ entails subordination of ‘local’ legal forms to the ‘global’ legal form of international human rights. This shows how the craft of the official ‘truth’ of the dictatorship is shaped and authorized by international human rights law, a ‘global’ legal form that carries a normative socio-political, legal and economic form of organizing social and institutional relations. This not only silences coexisting accounts of lawful truths, but it also forecloses the possibility of ‘living together’ after dictatorship beyond the normative forms and meanings carried by international human rights law. I develop this argument through an ethnography of Chile’s Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos (Museum of Memory and Human Rights).
Contested Urban Spaces. Monuments, Traces and Decentered Memories. Edited by Ulrike Capdepón & Sara Dornhof (Palgrave Macmillan), 2022
How to commemorate extreme violence that did not occur in the remote or recent past, but keeps on happening in the present, as it does in contemporary Mexico? How to speak of massacre, torture or disappearance in everyday scenarios constituted by social indifference? These questions are addressed on the basis of the author’s latest audiovisual research on “landscapes in transition”. The essay discusses the agency of memorial as well as artistic interventions in relation to current crime scenes, in two Mexican extermination sites, as well as in urban space, such as the antimonumento. The author interrogates the very notion of memory in contexts of ongoing violence, and its generalized notions of closure or healing. Instead, she highlights the role of material traces as well as of aesthetical agencies. On the basis of her audiovisual work on forensic processes she stresses the notion of narrative as materialization of non-imaginable dehumanization.
Leiden Journal of International Law, 2022
Social memory studies start from the premise that people acquire their memories not only through individual means, but through social processes as well. Social groups often provide materials for memory, and prod individuals into recalling particular events. One of the distinctive differences between the practice of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) concerns memory-related remedies. While the IACtHR quite frequently orders respondent states to commemorate grave violations of human rights (including the construction of monuments), the ECtHR has refrained from granting such commemorative remedies. Some organizations representing victims have called upon additional tribunals to embrace the IACtHR's remedial approach to address grave breaches of international law. Drawing on social memory scholarship, this study is aimed at empirically assessing the impact of four sites of memory in Colombia established by order of the IACtHR. The study's findings suggest that international tribunals alone cannot shape collective memories that are inconsistent with sociocultural features characterizing the local society. On the other hand, judicially-ordered sites of memory are meaningful for the victims' families and small-scale social units. These findings turn our attention to micro-level sociological perspectives, and particularly to the symbolic-interactionist approach to international law, highlighting the vital symbolic role of international tribunals for individuals and small social units. The valuable role of such memorial sites for the victims' relatives and related communities suggests that international tribunals addressing grave human rights violations should consider granting commemorative remedies.