3.14. Archives and the Afterlives of Violence [ES/EN]

This paper outlines the main features of the project Repository ‘Archive on Foreign Nationals, Memory and Human Rights 1973-1990’ (RAEMDH), developed by the National Migration Service (Sermig) in collaboration with the National Archive of Chile, the Museum of Memory and Human Rights (MMDH) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM). The project was launched in 2023 to coincide with the government's commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the coup d'état in Chile. Among its findings, the corpus of documentation identified from these two archival institutions is characterized by its value as evidence of the use of administrative bureaucracy for the control, repression and punishment of foreigners for political reasons; the construction of a database of foreign nationals that characterizes the main reasons and administrative decisions against them (expulsions, entry bans, revocation of residence permits, among others); the possibilities for active symbolic reparation through interdisciplinary work and through the state via international diplomacy; and the scope of the use of artificial intelligence technologies to construct new forms of mediation between the content of the documentation and its use for educational purposes and for access to truth and historical memory. The RAEMDH project raises questions about the role played by foreigners during the civil-military dictatorship in Chile; expand and deepen our understanding of the intensive use of state bureaucracy as an instrument of repression and discipline of the population, in particular the deployment of legality through its regulatory provisions (e.g. Decree Law 1,094 (1975)); and, based on this experience, reflect on the current challenges and paradoxes facing human mobility and the State's treatment of the foreign population in Chile today.

As research on museum education in Poland demonstrates, implementing participatory tools to deepen democratization of museums remains a practice used less frequently than more. Consequently one observes a discrepancy between increased exploration of collective memory with long tradition of Polish research and development of community archives and the degree of museums’ engagement in participatory projects aimed at changing their role in shaping public debate about the past. It poses two questions: why, despite pluralization of museum narratives, co-creation remains a declaration rather than practice? Why, after museum boom in Poland and new museums establishment, institutional threshold constitutes a barrier to fostering pluralist memory culture? The answers will be based on analysis of participatory process, which lasted a year at the Museum of Warsaw – a city that serves as a reference point for various social groups and the political center of the country. To prepare a temporary exhibition for the institution's 90th anniversary, the museum decided for the first time on a multi-stage participatory activity addressed to four groups: museum team (excavation workshops); experts on history, memory, and social practice (FGI); city residents (a plebiscite conducted in collaboration with the media); and adults interested in co-creating the exhibition (8 creative workshops). Based on activities' results, I will discuss challenges posed during the process of creating the exhibition, intended to become a "forum" for historical education and debate, as well as what, for the museum team, proved to be risk of the institution dominating the creation of parallel histories and limiting role of collective memory in building communities understood as intergenerational, internally heterogeneous coalitions of memory.

This paper examines the continuities and transformations in the documentation and heritage policies developed by the IWO Foundation over its hundred-year history. Founded in Vilnius in 1925 as the Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut (YIVO), a scientific center for the study of Jewish life and Yiddish culture, the institution emerged in a Europe marked by rapid modernization, the consolidation of nation-states, and rising antisemitism. Established in Buenos Aires as a local chapter in 1928, IWO combined academic research with heritage preservation through its archive, library, and museum. The destruction of the Vilnius IWO during the holocaust and the subsequent displacement of people and collections to New York and Buenos Aires redefined the institution’s archival geography and the relationship between center and periphery. Materials brought by survivors and those transferred through the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction (JCR) program transformed the Buenos Aires holdings from sources documenting Jewish everyday life in Argentina to and Eastern Europe into records and memory objects of a culture subjected to annihilation. Decades later, the 1994 AMIA bombing, which destroyed the building housing IWO, once again placed its collections at the center of processes of rescue, restoration, and reinterpretation. The dual nature of these materials, at once research sources and memory objects, prompted a re-evaluation of archival practices and the institution’s mission, fostering reflection on how to reconcile their evidentiary and commemorative functions. Drawing on institutional records, staff testimonies, and interviews with participants in the recovery efforts, this paper analyzes how IWO, originally conceived as a scholarly and heritage institution, redefined its role within Argentina’s broader memory landscape.

How can a neglected institutional archive serve as a site for rethinking the influence of humanitarian medicine on post dictatorship collective memory? This ongoing project investigates the DIGNITY archive (Copenhagen) to trace the transnational history of torture documentation and rehabilitation. Among its holdings are medical files (1976, 1981) produced by Amnesty International’s Danish Medical Group during the examination of 35 Greek activists persecuted under the Papadopoulos Junta (1967–1974). These cases –alongside documentation of Chilean, Uruguayan, Argentinian, and Northern Irish survivors– formed the foundation for the methodologies that informed the first official Research and Rehabilitation Center for Torture Victims (RCT, DIGNITY’s precursor). The project’s preliminary findings expose the ambivalent legacy of medical humanitarian archiving: while preserving evidence of state violence, the clinical framing of torture transformed lived experience into research material, where survivors’ voices are mediated and medicalized. To address this, we developed a methodology of archival return and activation, grounded in feminist ethics of care and radical empathy (Caswell & Cifor, 2016). Through renewed contact with surviving members of the original examinees, we place institutional clinical documents generated in Denmark in dialogue with personal accounts emerging from within the Greek survivors’ past and current socio political context. This approach reconfigures the archive as a site of relational memory work, where institutional narratives are unsettled and rearticulated through survivors’ encounters with their own histories of political activism and torture as mediated through a foreign clinical gaze. By activating dormant materials and enabling new constellations of meaning, the project contributes to current debates on how archivists can move beyond preservation to foster participatory forms of memory activism in post dictatorship contexts where the necessity for truth and justice remains relevant. Ultimately, it demonstrates both the potential and the ethical challenges of transforming humanitarian archives into forums for critical dialogue and social change.