The ESMA: From Torture Chambers into New Sites of Memory

Abstract

The twenty-first-century has brought a new era of commemoration to Latin America, where totalitarian governments maneuvered numerous disappearances, violent acts, tortures, and denial of basic human rights, during the latter half of the twentieth century.2 Within traumatic memory studies, historical narratives are part of the search for answers to these actions in the past perceived from the present. The expression of these narrative memories takes place through commemorations and museums of memory as well as through embodiment, in both the performative and the architectural sense. For Pierre Nora, the era of commemoration reflects the prevalence of lieux de memoire: “hybrid places, mutants, compounded of life and death, of the temporal and the eternal,”3 a lieu in which commemorations and museums are “part of the every day experience.”4 For him, these lieux de memoire become part of an archive “if imagination invests it with a symbolic aura.”5 For Nora, “lieux de memoire thrive only because of their capacity for change, their ability to resurrect old meanings and generate new ones.”6 While his argument is compelling, I suggest, following Diana Taylor, that Nora expands a binary between history and memory, or lieux de memoire and mileux de memoire, which are “the real environments of memory.” This opposition can become problematic since it reproduces the hierarchy between the archival hegemonic place (lieux) and the non-archival, antihegemonic practices (mileux).7