4.14. From Memory to Heritage: Contested Pasts and Public Meaning

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the façade of the Medical Association of Peru became a spontaneous memorial where relatives and colleagues placed photographs, flowers, and messages to honour deceased doctors. Based on exploratory ethnography, this presentation analyses how this transformation redefined the institutional building as a space of collective mourning and professional recognition, exploring tensions between institutional and citizen memory and the material expressions of grief in post-COVID Peru.

The present work is part of the ongoing project “Lessons from Things in Latin America: Good Practices and Pedagogical Insurgencies” (UERJ/FAPERJ), which maps educational practices developed by museums and heritage institutions recognized by the Ibermuseos Program, which since 2014 has highlighted pedagogical initiatives across Latin America. The study analyzes the theoretical and methodological conceptions of memory, history, and education found in the exhibitions and educational materials of museums awarded under the “Human Rights and Democracy” category. The chronological focus is on the past decade, aiming to understand the impacts of the ethical political turn on new ways of interpreting and engaging with heritage. The methodology involved data organization and categorization, the creation of thematic records, and the qualitative analysis of educational materials. The growing relevance of memorial demands in the contemporary political arena has given new value to memory, transforming it into an authentic “memorial capital” mobilized in the defense of remembrance and the reparation of injustices (ROUSSO, 1998). This process resonates throughout Latin America, especially in post dictatorial contexts, where previously silenced memory projects have been strengthened in favor of historical plurality and the democratization of societies (GONZÁLEZ; MUÑOZ, 2021). There is a significant relationship between the development of public policies on memory and human rights and the political contexts experienced in Latin America in recent years, particularly in Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay, where museums have become instances of symbolic justice and spaces for the promotion of citizenship. The Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, Chile, exemplifies this dynamic. In 2022, its educational initiative “El mapa de mis derechos”, developed in partnership with the Escuela de Diseño of the Pontifical Catholic University, received an honorable mention in the Ibermuseos Education Award. The project playfully explores citizenship, fundamental rights, and traumatic memories, using collection objects as pedagogical tools.

This paper examines the artistic studio at Smolna 36 Street in Warsaw, established in 1951 and shaped by three family connected artists before becoming a Museum of Warsaw branch. It illustrates challenges curators face when transforming private studios into public exhibition spaces, while offering inspiration for similar heritage institutions. Workshop at Smolna 36 was created by Karol Tchorek, a socialist realism sculptor who participated in a building of Warsaw's MDM district and created site-specific stone plaques commemorating Warsaw citizens murdered by Nazi occupants. The workshop also stored artworks from his antiquariate, including folk sculptures by Leon Kudła. After Tchorek's death, his son Mariusz, cofounder of avant garde Galeria Foksal and creator of the 'Theory of the Place', managed the space, planning to apply said interactionist theory there before his untimely death. The theory was, however, implemented by his widow, British artist living in Warsaw, Katy Bentall. Her creative performances problematized the site's legacy and explored relationships between herself, her husband, and father in law. The author uses the palimpsest category to describe intertwining layers of artworks, critical interventions, and reinterpretative practices presenting the workshop as memory site, active workshop, and heritage institution. Analysis engages memory studies concerning archives (especially photographic), post-memory, and 'genius loci' critiques. Archival power to define knowledge through selection and exclusion addresses a fourth artist's missing legacy: Karol's wife Zofia, a fiber artist excluded largely due to family conflicts of memory. Today, Studio at Smolna 36 challenges the Museum of Warsaw to preserve its creators' legacy without reducing it to Karol Tchorek's private museum, instead honoring its three distinct performative 'layers' and possibly reevaluating Zofia's textile work. Mariusz's 'Theory of the Place' offers site specific opportunities to maintain Smolna 36 as an open, living heritage institution, possibly modeling similar preserved studios in Warsaw and worldwide.

Since 2010, South Asia has seen a growing effort to record, preserve, and curate the memory of the 1947 Partition—the violent division of British India into a Hindu-majority but secular India and a Muslim-majority Pakistan—commonly referred to as the Partition Memorialisation Project (PMP). This shift centres testimony and memory initiatives and departs from nationalist historiographies that neglected the human experience of Partition. However, this renewed attention has largely been framed through the lens of post-amnesia, with museums and oral history projects cast as urgent interventions against forgetting. This interpretation overlooks a critical understanding of heritage: commemoration exists in the present for a future generation, and therefore, to study the conditions of the present is important to understand what is remembered and what is silenced. This paper takes the position that, rather than presuming such memorial work produces unified or reconciliatory narratives, it is necessary to interrogate what becomes of memory when it is transformed into heritage. The premise that Partition memory can be collective becomes unstable when placed against both the contested nature of the history and the political realities within which heritage-making takes place. India and Pakistan uphold divergent interpretations of the event, its causes, and its legacies. In the contemporary moment—marked by the rise of far-right, anti-Muslim politics in India, authoritarian governance across the region, and strained bilateral relations—the curation of a history of Hindu-Muslim violence raises difficult questions. Can memorialisation claim collectivity when the political conditions under which it operates are themselves divisive and exclusionary? What versions of the past are sanctioned or suppressed? Drawing on fieldwork at the Partition Museum in Amritsar, this paper examines how institutional practices of memorialisation navigate these tensions and what they reveal about the limits of transnational or collective remembrance.

Research Question : How do public debates - around Berlin’s Documentation Centre for Displacement, Expulsion and Reconciliation - illuminate both the democratic potential and the constraints of commemorating contested pasts? Can the Centre be understood as a space where agonistic and dialogic modes of memory coexist. Context and Aim: This paper examines the Documentation Centre for Displacement, Expulsion and Reconciliation as a case study of how emotionally charged and contested histories are commemorated within a democratic framework. The decades-long effort to forge a collective memory of the expulsions after 1945 has been marked by tensions between victimhood and perpetration, national and transnational perspectives, raising a central question: does the Centre function as a forum for democratic engagement, or does it expose the limits of what democracy can accommodate? Methodology: A qualitative, interpretive study of political debates, media coverage, and institutional documents on the Centre’s conception and reception, theorised through dialogic memory (Assmann) and agonistic democracy (Mouffe) to assess how far these frameworks are realised in practice. As such to what extent can the institution sustain disagreement without eroding shared democratic norms? Preliminary Findings: The Centre functions as a laboratory of democratic memory work, where controversy can operate as civic engagement. It partly performs a shift from lieu to milieu de mémoire by cultivating a public sphere of remembrance that invites reflection, empathy, and cross border dialogue. Open conclusion: Does the Centre ultimately demonstrate the democratic potential of contested commemoration, or does it reveal the boundaries of democratic tolerance in post war German memory culture? In other words, are all claims about the expulsions open to public contestation, or do the norms of Streitbare Demokratie rightly exclude certain positions and if so, which, why, and decided by whom?