Memory Sites: Negotiating Protest in Urban Space

Abstract

In a recent volume on Grassroots Memorials, Peter Jan Magry and Cristina Sánchez-Carretero explore the phenomenon of grassroots memorials — i.e., the act of ‘placing memorabilia, as a form of social action, in public spaces, usually at sites where traumatic deaths or events have taken place’ (2011, p. 2). Building on Jack Santino’s concept of ‘spontaneous shrines’, which he applied in an analysis of ‘temporary monuments’ to political assassinations in Northern Ireland, grassroots memorials reflect a process of participation which is to some extent ‘disconnected from traditional classes, ethnicities, and other imagined communities’ (ibid., p. 29). There are two types of grassroots memorial: monuments of mourning, on the one hand, and what Magry and Sánchez-Carretero define as ‘foci of protest and resentment, instrumentalized to articulate social or political disaffection’, on the other (ibid., p. 2). This reflects the dichotomy of mourning and moral duty we also came across in the analysis of Lorusso’s family’s memory work, in Chapter 4, which represents — when applied to ‘memory sites’ — a ‘performative event in public space’ and, in the second category, an attempt at social change and hence a duty to remember (ibid.). In this final chapter I will consider a number of memory sites that were proposed, debated and created in Bologna to commemorate Francesco Lorusso as a person and the incidents of March 1977 more generally, and explore the extent to which they represent a grassroots memorial in the terms suggested by Magry and Sánchez-Carretero.KeywordsPublic SpaceUrban SpaceCollective MemoryMoral DutyLecture HallThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.