A Sacred House for the Lost: Chile's New Museum of Memory and Implications for Human Rights Today (original) (raw)
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Memorializing in Movement: Chilean Sites of Memory as Spaces of Activism and Imagination
A Contracorriente: Revista de Historia Social y Literatura en América Latina, 2019
We argue that the defense of the Museum of Human Rights speaks to the power of memory as possibility, as foundational to ways collectivities understand the genealogies of violence and injustice in order to imagine otherwise. Moreover, memorial site protagonists have successfully challenged and accessed state resources toward representation and education regarding the violence of the past and toward alternative ways of imagining justice and human rights in the present and future
Showcasing Dictatorship: Memory and the Museum in Argentina and Chile
Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society, 2012
This article compares two recently inaugurated museums dedicated to the period of dictatorial terror and repression in the Southern Cone: the Museum of Memory and Human Rights at Santiago, Chile (opened in 2009), and the Museum of Memory at Rosario, Argentina (2010). Both museums invoke in their very names the "memorial museum" as a new mode of exhibitionary remembrance of traumatic events from the past. They seek to sidestep the detachment and "objectivity" that has traditionally characterized historical museum displays in favor of soliciting active, performative empathy from visitors. Neither of the two institutions, however, complies entirely with the memorial museum's formal characteristics; rather, they reintroduce modern museographical languages of history and art, thus also challenging the emergent "global canon" of memorial museum aesthetics.
(2013) Materiality and Politics in Chile's Museum of Memory and Human Rights
Thresholds 41: pp. 158-171, 2013
What follows is a reflection on the design and curatorial strategy of Chile’s Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos (Museum of Memory and Human Rights, hereafter MMDH), opened in 2010 to remember the victims of state repression during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990). By assessing the dynamics among sections, themes, images, and objects in the exhibition’s script, and in the dialogue between the museum and two contemporary art pieces incorporated into the museum circuit, I evaluate how the museum-going experience relates to the political project of the institution. Likewise, I reflect on the material challenges associated with the representation of violence and the reconstruction of legitimacy in the aftermath of state terror and argue that this museum solves these challenges by shielding and perpetuating political and economic principles connected with the legacies of the dictatorship.
Memorializing in Movement: Chilean Sites of Memory as Spaces of Activism and Imagination 1
A contra corriente: Una revista de estudios latinoamericanos, Vol. 16, Num. 3 (Spring 2019): 1-16, 2019
Here we will first reflect on the rise of sites of memory marking atrocious pasts across the Americas, south and north, including tension-ridden and contrasting memorialization-state relations. We will then explore two grassroots-led Chilean sites, Londres 38 and Estadio Nacional, Memoria Nacional, that have drawn powerfully from the repressive histories and memories to become dynamic places of connection, dialogue, and activism, toward distinct possible presents.
Valentina Infante Batiste, 2023
Introduction and context In this paper, I would like to share with you some of the conclusions of my doctoral thesis, in which I studied pro-regime memory and memorialisation in democratic Chile (1990-2022). I term it the 'other side of memory' because it is the memory that opposes victims' narratives of the Chilean dictatorship. My specific focus was on pro-regime memory sites described as a monument, memorial, statue, or symbolic marker (e.g., street name) built to celebrate a past authoritarian regime. In Chile, these sites either praise the military coup of 11th of September 1973, glorify General Augusto Pinochet's 17-year dictatorship (1973-1990), or celebrate Military Junta members and regime civil collaborators. Thus, pro-regime memorialisation is the phenomenon in which former military regime icons or dates materialise in celebratory symbolic markers, that is, become heritage and public art, or public manifestations of memory. Some of these pro-regime memory sites were created during the dictatorship (1973-1990), while others were inaugurated in democracy (after 1990) by regime supporters and Pinochetistas (General Augusto Pinochet admirers). Thus, it should be noted from the outset that pro-regime memory groups-in other words, groups that pay tribute to Pinochet or his dictatorship-have been, throughout democracy in Chile, very active in creating public memory sites to counter Victims' memorials. I could recount at least 13 proregime memory sites created in democracy. One of the best well-known cases is the statue of José Toribio Merino in front of the Navy Museum in Chile, which paid tribute to one of the instigators of the military coup of 11 September 1973. The statue was placed there in 2002 and was removed in 2022 after human rights activists demanded its elimination, and after the courts accepted the demand.
Trespassing Journal, 2014
The ESMA (La Escuela Mecánica de La Armada) was the most notorious detention centre of the Argentine military dictatorship (1976-1983) that disappeared up to 30,000 people. In 2004, it was turned over by presidential decree to the city of Buenos Aires to be transformed into a “Museum of Memory.” This represented one of the most important victories for the Argentine human rights movement, the achievement of one of their key demands. Once the decree was made to transform the site into a Museum of Memory, the question of what to do with the enormous complex arose. Five years of intense debate between human rights organizations, public intellectuals, and other stakeholders ensued. While a museum represented a triumph of the human rights movement, ambivalent feelings about the idea of a museum were voiced. Some voiced skepticism over the museum becoming a tourist attraction directed primarily at foreigners. Others questioned the pedagogical value of museums. The concretization of a Museum of Memory posed a dilemma for the future of the human rights movement in Argentina, one that, I will argue, provoked resistance to the museumification of memory. This article addresses these ambivalences by tracing the particular memory discourse that human activists developed during the post-dictatorship period that was process-oriented and organized around a concept of resistance. A museum as both an end product and official institution posed a challenge to these conceptions. First, memory was a discourse of resistance that emerged in conscious opposition against the government’s version of the past and in the larger context of legal impunity. The victory of human rights posed a problem for a movement predicated on opposition to official government policy when its objectives became official government policy. The transformation of the ESMA was part of a process of institutionalizing the human rights’ version of the past as the official government version that was also occurring alongside efforts to redress the past by restoring legal mechanisms for accountability. Invocations of memory among human rights organizations in Argentina were demands for accountability in the absence of legal means of justice. In the context of impunity, with no viable means of forging accountability and justice in the present, activists forged a discourse of “collective memory” in order to keep advancing their claims. Collective memory in the way that human rights activists and academics employ the concept in Argentina was less descriptive as prescriptive and normative. It was also open-ended rather than fixed, goal-directed rather than spontaneous, and described a process not a product. Although working toward concrete goals, memory’s value was lay in its everyday work in the temporal moment rather than potential future accomplishments or end products. Museums as fixed forms posed a fundamental problem to this conception. In the end, ambivalence was so great that when the ESMA was finally opened, it was not even called a museum but an Espacio Memoria (a space of memory).
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).
Memorial Fragments, Monumental Silences and Reawakenings in 21st-Century Chile
Millennium, 2009
This article analyses the commemoration of political violence and its victims in the aftermath of the Chilean dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet (1973—90). We assess the varied political processes involved in commemoration, and we identify those whose struggles to reclaim sites and spaces associated with past human rights violations represent a new political, and in some cases antipolitical, repertoire. We also examine shifts in official stances and action regarding human rights and political commemoration.