Memory in the Right Place? The Case of ESMA Museum

Abstract

What should be done with a site where state terrorism was once waged? In the past few decades, many have been transformed into places of remembrance where the traumatic events that affected the whole community can be addressed. During Argentina’s last dictatorship (1976-1983), state terrorism forged a new figure, that of the “detained-disappeared,” and the country’s detention, torture and extermination centres were the last places where these people were seen alive. That materiality, and the resignification of such sites as symbolic, is what make these locations transcendental. Perhaps, then, the question is not what needs to be represented at these sites, but what needs to be represented there that could not be represented in the same way anyplace else. The absence of those who are no longer among us and the absence of a state that laid siege to vast sectors of the population. A meeting point for past and present. How should places of this sort be viewed? How can they be protected in order to maintain them as documents of a period while also avoiding their natural status as monuments? These are some of the questions that will be addressed in this work, which focuses on the most emblematic detention centre in Argentina: the ESMA Museum.