Abstract
The article consists of two parts. The first part (§§ 1–2) investigates the indiscriminate and absolute remembering and forgetting of everything, hypermnesia and amnesia as the extreme terms that research has used and uses for the different phenomena of memory, both in individuals and in social and political forms. In the face of these shifts it is thus indispensable to re-establish a critique of the paradoxical effects of memory aids and, at the same time, to seek new forms of remembrance that by mixing an experiential dimension and public sphere refocus the attention on the connection between latency, tension and experiential triggers of involuntary memory and on the ability to break through the fictions of collective memory. On this basis, the second part of the article (§§ 3–4) analyses how the experience of political and racial deportation during World War II drastically changed the idea of memorial architecture. More specifically, the analysis deals with a kind of memorial device that must represent and memorialise persons whose bodies have been deliberately cancelled. The aim is to present and analyse the artistic and architectonic efforts to refer to those forgotten bodies, on the one hand, and on the other hand to point out how for these new kind of memorials the body of the visitor is asked to participate, both physically and emotionally, in this somehow paradoxical search for lost bodies, offering oneself as a substitute.
Highlights
The insurmountable tension between remembering and forgettingThe indiscriminate and absolute remembering and forgetting of everything, hypermnesia and amnesia, are the extreme terms that research has used and uses for the different phenomena of remembrance, both in individuals and in social and political forms
The experience of political and racial deportation during the Second World War generated a break in the conception of memorial architecture, a paradigm shift that became immediately evident in the post-war recovery
On the one hand the central point of the tension between remembering and forgetting is claimed as a dynamism of continuity and discontinuity in contrast with the attempt to equivocate the results of neuroscience in favour of a naturalistic neutralisation of the ethical instance of remembrance derived from the history of the 20th century
Summary
The indiscriminate and absolute remembering and forgetting of everything, hypermnesia and amnesia, are the extreme terms that research has used and uses for the different phenomena of remembrance, both in individuals and in social and political forms. A recent trend has been to consider the results of neuroscientific studies on the functioning of individual memory and the role of forgetting for its physiology as an invitation to sever the internal link between ethics and memory Faced with these shifts it becomes essential to explore the different possibilities of reintroducing an experiential and bodily dimension into the public memorial sphere by focusing attention on the connection between latency, tension and experiential triggers that stimulate all senses. There has been a trend to consider the results of neuroscientific studies on the functioning of individual memory – equivocating the different layers of discourse – as an invitation to sever the internal link between ethics and remembrance, starting from the assumption related to memory according to which remembering and forgetting are human faculties, neither good nor bad. Places that are radically and desperately unique and solitary even though they are close to a community, places that are unrepresentable even though they are composed of matter and bodies, places whose density appears infinite because every slightest act of forgetting can renew that indescribable “offence” of the “demolition of a man”, as Primo Levi described the experience of being held in a concentration camp
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