6.21. Memory in Public Space: Literature, Landscapes, and Urban Traces of Political Conflicts [ES/EN]

The return to democracy, on the 10th of December of 1983, allowed the public and cultural space —in which the memories of the last dictatorship have been transmitted— to be reclaimed. The memories, individual and collective, are always plural (Halbwachs, 1950; Jelin, 2002…). This pluralism can be expressed in democracy because this regime must guarantee freedom of speech for all citizens, that is to say, a diversity of voices, sometimes in conflict. The conflictive dimension of the memories about the last Argentinean dictatorship raises the question of the possible democratic coexistence of antagonistic memories. We will analyze the memorial conflicts about the last dictatorship from the 2000’s to the present. We will focus on two forms of artistic activism (Longoni, 2009): the “Tiles for Memory” (Buenos Aires, since 2006) and the “White Tiles of Memory” (La Plata, since 2011). Both projects can attract the attention of the pedestrians and provoke hostile reactions materialized by vandalism, which leaves traces of the conflicts over the meaning attributed to the recent and violent past. Analyzing the vandalism of these creations and the response of the groups that create and install the tiles will allow us to question the limits of the democratic pluralism, exploring the paradox of democracy: this regime allows the transmission of diverse collective memories, even though those memories are not always democratic. We will also take into account the official discourses of the national governments since the 2000’s, in order to study the growing visibility of groups that “deliberately distort” historical facts to legitimize the last civil-military dictatorship (Ranalletti, 2022). We will show that memorial conflicts go beyond the interpretation of the past: by inscribing themselves in the present, they question the democratic regime and its limits.

With the defeat of the LTTE and end of the civil war in Sri Lanka, the government championed the re-integration of the North with the rest of the island. However, the Sri Lankan Army continued to occupy large swathes of land in the North which included homes of many displaced Tamils. This humiliation of the Tamils is aided by normalising the military presence and refusal to leave the land that rightfully belongs to the Tamils. Romesh Gunesekera in his short story collection Noontide Toll laments that the military presence in Jaffna, a predominantly Tamil speaking region, serves not only as a reminder of the civil war, but also a constant symbol of humiliation for the Tamils. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten argue that the state’s support for the settlers through policies and laws over the marginalised communities constitute ‘state violence deputisations’, ignoring the indigenous communities while the ‘settler’ is always provided with privileges. The military occupation, aid in demographic change, honouring the war criminals despised by Tamils constitutes to the reconfiguration of the political landscape of the North creating constituting in ‘state violence deputisations.’ By closely investigating the short story collection Noontide Toll, this paper will delve into understanding the deterioration of democracy in the North and how do these deteriorations gradually render the landscapes as spectral. Drawing on the works of Avery Gordon and Mark Fischer, I intend to look at Jaffna as a spectral place where the haunting persists due to the continued violence through the state apparatus, holding the people of Jaffna captive.

Since 2018, the artist Daniel Blaufuks is working on a visual-textual non-diary composed by landscape A4 sheets containing different archival materials and notes. Every sheet is numbered chronologically and corresponds to one day in the artist’s life. In the non-diary entries, the artist intersects private with public documents, (unreferenced) quotations with newly written fragments, different languages with (snapshot) photographs and old newspaper clippings. Although these collages are numbered and ordered chronologically and dates with references to events on specific days are occasionally inserted, the entries remain fragmentary and diverse. They bring together private memories and mundane objects, material evidences of violent collective history and contemporary world politics. In this paper I will focus on the first larger exhibition of the project, The days are numbered (MAAT, Lisbon, 2024), and the corresponding photobook which contain the entries of the year 2023 (in the case of the exhibition the scope is a little wider). I will draw on Walter Benjamin’s thought on memory, montage and language to analyze how the artist engages with the “vibrancy” (Bannett 2010) of archival material and its translation into memory images. By focusing on the role of materiality and the use of different media, I aim to show how The days are numbered debates the role of archival material in the transmission of memory and historical responsibility. Discussing existing theorizations of the archive by Derrida and A. Assmann among others, I suggest to explore Blaufuks’s work as a form of archival activism that challenges the idea of the passivity of the archive and instead opens debate about how the “things” that surround us inscribe us in complex forms of “implication” (Rothberg 2019) in present and historical forms of injustice and violence.

The presentation focuses on the role of landscape, encompassing toponymy and hodonymy, in borderland literature. The present study will analyse the relationship between the narratives of selected authors of 20th-century Italian and Croatian-language literature from Rijeka/Fiume (Ramous, Madieri, Fabrio, Cuculić, Car Emin, Satarcangeli) and the cityscape. In this regard, methodologies inherent to humanistic geography, encompassing the examination of the nexus between literature and space, in conjunction with the mapping of literature, will be employed. All these aspects will be examined in relation to the development of the position of Rijeka/Fiume as the 'southern pole of Central Europe', the symbol of the myth 'Out to the sea, Hungarians', the area of activity of the 'world's first influencer', Italian poet-soldier Gabriele D'Annunzio, who founded here the symbolism of Fascist Italy, the centre of Yugoslav punk rock and the largest port of Yugoslavia and then Croatia, taking into account the multinational and borderland character of the city. Based on the selected novels, the lecture will attempt to illustrate the identity transition of the city from Austro-Hungary to Italy, Yugoslavia and Croatia. The presentation will include references to other cities that have experienced a similar historical fate, including, among others, Szczecin/Stettin in Poland, Vilnius/Wilno in Lithuania, and Lviv/Lwów in Ukraine.