7.13. Voices Across the Archive: Memory, Violence, and Repair [ES/EN]

Research Question How do letters and artifacts created by children and adolescents in response to the assassination of Miguel Ángel Blanco reflect the emotional and symbolic impact of terrorism, and how can these private expressions contribute to the construction of collective memory? Methodology and key findings This paper explores how letters and artifacts created by children and adolescents in response to the 1997 kidnapping and assassination of Miguel Ángel Blanco—widely recognized as a turning point in Spain’s civic mobilization against terrorism—reflect the emotional and symbolic impact of political violence. Drawing on a qualitative thematic analysis of approximately 300 condolence letters written by minors, selected from a broader corpus of over 3,000 documents preserved in the Miguel Ángel Blanco Archive, the study examines recurring themes, emotional expressions, and symbolic language using corpus analysis tools (Sketch Engine). It also incorporates artifact analysis of enclosed items such as drawings, prayer cards, and poems to uncover the affective and memorial dimensions of youth responses. Framed by theories of victim pedagogy, microhistory, and archival memory, and informed by Gérôme Truc’s work on memorialization practices, the findings reveal how children’s private expressions of grief—marked by empathy, moral outrage, and symbolic identification—contribute to the construction of collective memory. These materials, once archived, transform individual mourning into public remembrance, offering a unique lens into how younger generations process trauma and participate in national narratives. As part of the project, an online dissemination initiative has been launched to make the letters written by minors publicly accessible, fostering intergenerational dialogue and expanding the archive’s educational and commemorative reach.

This presentation outlines the development of a collective project realized by the Coalition Against Disappearances and Galerie Neurotitan to commemorate the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances (30 August). From July to August 2021, Galerie Neurotitan, in cooperation with the Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari Arte y Acervo, exhibited both major and lesser-known works by Argentinian conceptual artist León Ferrari. His series “Nunca Más” draws on the 1984 report by CONADEP (Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas), which documents across 50,000 pages grave human rights abuses committed under Argentina's military dictatorship. In 1996, the newspaper Página/12 republished the report as required reading for public schools, with Ferrari designing covers for 30 weekly editions. To continue Ferrari’s legacy of opposing human rights violations through direct action, the gallery engaged in a thematically aligned collaboration with the Coalition Against Disappearances, a network of non-governmental organizations and research institutions dedicated to combating enforced disappearances and structural impunity in the pursuit of truth and justice. Together, they developed a mural bearing Ferrari's handwriting, for which the Coalition's global partners submitted portraits of victims of enforced disappearance. The artist collective Orangotango implemented the mural, visually referencing anti-colonial resistance practices emerging from protest movements in the global South. The project demonstrates how memory work, activism, and art converge to visualize and confront diverse dimensions of human rights violations — not only by exposing injustice but also by supporting victims, broadening both geographic and conceptual scopes of action and representation, fostering resilience, provoking dialogue, and advancing collective efforts toward a just and progressive global development. At the core of this process are rich, multi-layered collaborations among artists, human rights activists, institutions, and communities, which deepen, sustain, expand, and nourish memory and democracy work.

What happens when someone’s heritage is a “terrible gift” (Simon, 2006) that is hard to come to terms with? What is the role of the archival testimonies, oral histories passed from generation to generation, literary works, and the discourse of heritage institutions in conditioning difficult demands that this gift places on those to whom it has been given? How is a narrative formed by the state borders, national heritage regimes and established mnemonic tropes? This paper addresses the book proposal based on the personal family archive collected and preserved since the 1900s, which reflects the upheavals and social transformations that took place in Russia during the 20th century and weighs it against the social fabric of today. My aim is to write the “intimate history” using Saidiya Hartman’s term (2019) and to analyze the memory work which was happening in each iteration of written recollections (made by three generations of the same family and re-writing each other’s narrative). I also want to investigate the trajectories of this archive, parts of which were acquired by the Contemporary History Museum in Moscow and parts are still privately owned, and the issues of accessing the material in the present circumstances. The analysis of this personal, private memory which also became a part of the public memory can demonstrate the potential of memory work which was – and still is – happening in relation to the complexities and controversies of contemporary Russian history. How does memory affect our (in)ability to act? What can we learn from our own intimate histories when put against the nation-state historical narrative (which has also changed drastically in the Russian case over the last decades)? What is the role of inheritance and intergenerational memory in construction of identities today?

This paper presents the Matrimoine / Rematriation project, a new initiative at the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum (Cologne) that brings together museum professionals, researchers, artists, and mediators around a shared vision: rethinking provenance research as a form of memory work. The project reclaims matrimoine—an old French term meaning “mother’s inheritance”—as a feminist and decolonial framework for engaging with overlooked objects and stories, often marginalized within ethnographic collections. Reintroduced here through feminist and decolonial epistemologies (Hertz 2002), matrimoine refers to material and immaterial heritages rendered invisible because of their familiarity, low market value, or the gender and social position of their creators and users. At its core lies rematriation—understood not only as the return of material objects, but as a decolonial methodology centered on healing, embodiment, and epistemic restitution. Inspired by Diagne’s concept of mutant objects (2020), the project investigates how items long confined to museum storage can be reactivated through collaborative provenance research, opening space for new, plurivocal narratives. Methodologically, it combines provenance research, participatory mediation, and collaborative ethnography carried out with African diasporic communities in Cologne and with partners from source communities on the African continent. Through these collaborations, it seeks to recognize the colonial and gendered entanglements embedded in the collections and to reanimate them as spaces of shared memory, dialogue, and reparative justice. Drawing on Azoulay’s notion of potential history (2019), the project treats the museum archive as a political field, shifting the focus from what was to what might still become. As an emerging initiative, Matrimoine / Rematriation proposes hypotheses on how feminist and decolonial approaches can transform the museum into a site of relational memory-making and co-created futures.

Four decades after the publication of the Nunca Más report (CONADEP, 1984), we ask: how are the archives of repression in Northwestern Argentina inscribed in the national memory disputes over the dictatorial crimes (1976–1983)? What narrative, editorial, and political operations shape their agency as legal strategies and practices of resistance at the local level? Drawing on a transdisciplinary theoretical framework and memory studies, this research conducts a comparative and contrastive analysis of two testimonial archives from the provinces of Salta and Jujuy: La represión en Salta by Lucrecia Barquet and Raquel Adet (EUNSa, 2004) and Con vida se los llevaron by Reynaldo Castro (EdiUNJu, 2004). Their simultaneous appearance in 2004 allows us to read these works as localized Nunca Más: first, because they share the characteristics of a master narrative, granting intelligibility to cultural trauma by defining the nature of the pain, the figure of the victim, their relationship to society, and the attribution of responsibilities (Alexander, 2004); and second, because the production of these archives with a regional focus enables us to explore the tensions and vacant zones in the national emblematic memory. Given the impossibility of advancing the trials under the Full Stop (1986) and Due Obedience (1987) laws, both works functioned as a legal strategy and a form of social agency, bolstered by the legitimacy conferred by their publication by university presses. This allows us to construct an incipient corpus of localized memory archives that, through the displacement of geographical center and the embrace of generic hybridity—encompassing testimonies, legal documents, photographs, chronicles, and literary texts—render visible the contested, open-ended, and fragmentary nature of their construction, as well as the ongoing struggles over the meanings of Argentina’s repressive past.