5.20. Monuments, sites, mass graves and territorial marks [ES/EN]

This paper problematizes the memory policies of the Association of Family Members and Victims of State Terrorism of Río Negro within the memory site “La Casona Eduardo Bachi Chironi” in Viedma, Río Negro (Argentina). During the last dictatorship, this site functioned as the "Viedma" Intelligence Section of Detachment 181 of the V Army Corps. The study aims to inquire into the ways the Association—as a non-governmental social actor—‘undertakes memory,’ and the meanings surrounding these actions. Among the memorial activities the Association carries out at La Casona, notable examples include permanent and temporary exhibitions, artistic interventions, public commemorations on March 24th and September 16th, and guided tours. Some of these activities are organized in collaboration with other collectives (student, human rights, social movements, etc.) that have diverse political and social demands. Key questions address the tensions, disputes, and/or consensuses that develop between the Association and other governmental organizations regarding management modalities and memory narratives. It also examines what public practices are carried out by the Association in La Casona that involve other social actors, and whether these practices contain a pedagogical dimension that fosters intergenerational transmission of memories. The methodology implemented is qualitative, utilizing various ethnographic techniques for data construction, recording, and analysis, such as participant observation and in-depth interviews. The research analyzed the diverse social representations mobilized—some in instances of heritage activation—to highlight different dimensions of memory processes, including the intergenerational and intersubjective aspects, the biographical, the meanings related to testimonial materiality, and the disputes between dominant and subterranean/dissonant memories.

Postliberation governments cultivate, to varying degrees, a collective identity by constructing a memorial culture based on the memorialization of their liberation struggle. Memories evoked by memorial places commemorating liberation struggles are used as political currency in the present by postliberation regimes trying to sustain their legitimacy and to rewrite the past in a concerted effort of public mythmaking. The notion of memory is central as it speaks to what is remembered and how and why the past is remembered in the way it is. Memory is equal parts remembering and forgetting, inclusion and exclusion. What seems to be excluded from public memorial culture in postliberation polities are the memories and commemorations of women’s experiences in the everyday. The reason for this exclusion likely lies in the compound patriarchal nature of both the colonial regime and of nationalist liberation movements, both often steeped in gender conservatism. Monuments/memorials/museums commemorating liberation struggles are places where space is inscribed with meaningful and persuasive narratives of liberation related to events, people or deliberate acts. This paper considers what happens to women’s experiences and contributions in these collective memory narratives and the making of places. The central question is: In what ways are places and rituals of memorialization gendered and what does it mean for difficult liberation heritage such as sexually based violence experienced by women during liberation struggles? Based on fieldwork from across the African memorial landscape in diverse countries including but not limited to Ethiopia, Namibia, Rwanda, South Africa and Uganda, this paper argues that memorial cultures associated with national liberation movements represent gendered geographies of memory in the privileging of public over private spaces in a gendered spatial binary where gendered commemoration is a function of selective memorializing of particular masculine and feminine virtues determined by how space and gender interact.

This paper examines post-World War II memorial culture in contemporary Croatia by focusing on the installation and public reception of recent Holocaust memorials in Zagreb, such as Gunter Demnig’s Stolpersteine (2020 - ) and the 2022 presentation of the Monument to Victims of the Holocaust and the Ustasha Regime. It explores the impact a nationalistic Croatian state history has had on shaping the public's understanding of the Holocaust and exposes the revisionist tendencies that persist in Croatia when determining historical culpability of World War II crimes. Memory politics is deemed a decisive force in mediating (and implementing) an inclusive commemorative culture in post-World War II Croatia. In this paper Croatian memorial culture is also discussed within a larger theoretical framework to illustrate some of the greater global challenges Holocaust memorialization faces in the twenty-first century, matters that include the trivialization and relativization of Holocaust suffering in view of current events, as well as the inevitable generational remove from the historical occurrence itself.

Since the 1990s, hundreds of mass graves have been documented in Slovenia, more than 200 have been investigated, and more than 100 have been fully or partially exhumed. The process of uncovering and acknowledging these sites—concealed until the 1990s—has gradually but profoundly affected the lives of individuals associated with the graves or the deceased, the local communities in which they were uncovered, and has redefined the broader field of memory politics. This presentation examines personal and embodied encounters with mass graves as sites of memory, death, and pain. It also presents examples of the aestheticization of mass graves, human remains, and related objects. Such artworks do more than represent; they interpret sensory experience, evoke affective responses, mobilize political and social action, and influence commemorative practices and broader politics of memory. I argue that excavations have not only uncovered human remains, but have also facilitated the resurfacing of silenced memories, the revisiting of the past, and compelled a reshaping of relationships with the dead.