Hablando de memoria e internet: el International Center for Transitional Justice acaba de lanzar su nuevo proyecto memory and justice. El sitio busca ofrecer "a forum to exchange views and learn about the emerging field of memorialization as a form of accountability for past atrocity". Hay una base de datos sobre sitios de memoria y se puede buscar por orden alfabético, por región o país, o por tópico. A mí, personalmente, me encanta el monumento Bruce Lee Statue en Mostar (Bosnia y Hercegovina) que es el resultado de una búsqueda por "un héroe que todos los vecinos de la ciudad dividida de Mostar puedan compartir".Reproduzco una entrevista a Louis Bickford del ICTJ Memory, Museums and Monuments Program. La entrevista fue publicada en la edición actual de la revista "ICTJ Transitions" de dicho centro.
Q. ICTJ’s Truth and Memory program is at work on a project to provide an online database of memory sites around the world. How did the project begin?
A. For the past seven years, I’ve been collecting information about memory sites. All the data was on a computer hard drive. When I would get questions from our global partners about memory sites, I realized that the way we catalogued this information didn’t allow for easy comparisons among sites or regions. There was a clear need to reorganize the information as a dynamic database, ideally using the internet to make it accessible around the world. It's now making its debut as an ICTJ website, www.memoryandjustice.org.
Q. What would do you want users to get out of the database?
A. Often we say that there’s an explosion of memory sites and memory initiatives in the world today. When people create them, they naturally look to existing sites. Many look to the most obvious examples—Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in Washington, D.C., or some of the Holocaust memorials in Germany or Poland. A certain percentage look for less publicized but equally profound examples, and they track me down for information. The main goal of the database will be to provide quick, easy, user- friendly access to this collection of different materials and opinions to who are creating and carrying out memory initiatives and site development around the world.
Q. Are you looking to provoke conversations about these sites?
A. That’s right. It became clear to us that there really wasn’t an arena for debate and discussion about a major component of accountability work. We’re not looking to create a dispassionate collection of materials; we want to create a vibrant discussion space about them. We may be a little controversial at times. We’re interested in giving opinions on best practices and other issues, and we want people to respond to our thoughts and experiences.
Q. Who is the main audience for the project?
A. There are three different audiences. The first is people developing memory sites—less the architects than municipal councils, victims’ associations or NGOs. The second group is professionals who are thinking about this issue, whether graduate students or people in the field of architecture, design or human rights. A third audience is more general: journalists and other non-experts who are interested in exploring these sites. That group also includes people who have attended sites as travelers and would like to engage in a discussion about their experience.
Q. You mentioned the question of best practices in developing memory sites. How do you go about developing those?
A. It’s hard to talk about best practices because there are so many ways of doing things depending on your goals. The way we’re going to get at them is by having a discussion, not by presenting answers. We can ask provocative questions that will generate a conversation from which best practices will emerge. Is it better to keep the actual physical skulls at a genocide site rather than having facsimiles? There’s not a “yes” or “no” answer to these kinds of questions, but there’s going to be an interesting discussion.
The best practices we’re pushing are more about processes than results. They’re about consultation and looking at different examples—while not being overly influenced by those examples. In the same way that when some people form truth commissions, they’re inclined to imitate the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, people sometimes build memorials and say, “What did Maya Lin do? Let’s do the exact same thing.” They build a wall out of black granite and engrave it with names. In a way we’re pushing against that impulse, and encouraging developers not to go with some generic international model, but to do what is right for their particular context.
Q. You’ve collected information about a wide range of memory sites and initiatives, from the Hiroshima Peace Museum to a Bruce Lee statue in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Are there particular sites you think are particularly instructive, for positive or negative reasons?
A. My personal favorite memorial is the AIDS Quilt, although it’s not about the same kind of mass atrocity that ICTJ usually focuses on. It’s participatory, very creative, and specifically breaks with the traditions that also inform its aesthetic appeal for surviving loved ones. It’s not
made of granite; it’s made of cloth. It’s not meant to be permanent. If there’s a monument you walk by every day that gets more attention from pigeons than from spectators, that certainly constitutes a kind of literal permanence, but in the long-term, the narratives associated with
these objects are forgotten. Whereas with the AIDS Quilt, they bring it out, and suddenly everyone remembers, then they put it away, then later they bring it out again. That iterative process is very interesting. The quilt has both individual components and collective components.
And it’s directly tied to changing the world. It’s directly tied to a future orientation.
Q. Which many traditional memorials are not?
A. That’s right. There is a paradigm of memorials—which has been around in the past but is now newly ascendant—that asserts they are about the future. The classic way we think about memorials is that they’re all about marking the past, but the new ones are all about inspiring future activity, and that’s what makes them so interesting. They’re saying: “This is about ‘never again.’” The AIDS Quilt, for instance, is about creating awareness and action for the future. At the same time, the whole idea of a somber, reflective monument that speaks to people’s pain is still very important. In the same way a cemetery is a private space and a public space at the same time, many people still need monuments to offer accessible spaces for ceremonial or spiritual activity, or provide emotional solace. These kinds of projects are also very connected to the idea of symbolic reparations.
Q. And the less successful memorials?
A. There’s one in Capetown that is my favorite example of a failed monument. The monument itself was abstract and unattractive, and the process was done very badly—in four days, and without any kind of consultation with victims. The victims would say, “This is a monument
about our children—what does it mean?” The artist responded by saying, “I’m the artist, it’s my interpretation. You figure it out yourselves.” It was finally torn down because it was totally abandoned and had trash blowing through it. It was an example of a memory site that didn’t work for very specific reasons that have to do with consultation, the role of the artist, the site’s location and who was driving it.
Q. What’s behind the current explosion of memory sites?
A. Part of it is the whole transitional justice movement. The importance of confronting the past is in the zeitgeist. You can’t pick up a newspaper today without seeing two or three stories about dealing with the past, whether it’s through prosecutions, truth commissions or in other ways.
Memory sites are very much part of the same trend. Another thing is that when more people see the potential of the form, there’s a kind of multiplier effect. This started very slowly in the 1980s with the Holocaust memorials: as people from other parts of the world that had suffered terrible human rights atrocities visited them, they began to think about what sorts of sites they could create in their own countries. The movement has been building in an evolutionary way over the last 20 years. There have been explosions of memorials in the past. A very large number were created in Europe between the two world wars, but they were in a different mode. They were granite stones with people’s names on them that were about dealing with the enormity of loss, dealing with pain, coming to grips with the huge war that had just happened. They weren’t really about saying, “Let’s stop.” Now there are future-oriented memory museums in Chile and Peru, there are initiatives in Morocco, in Cambodia, in Bosnia—they’re all over. Still, there are hard questions to answer as these sites proliferate. One of them is how to handle tourism. On one hand, you want tourists to come; on the other hand, you don’t want people traipsing around in
bikinis and taking pictures in what is in some ways a sacred space. I would go out on a limb and say there are some forms of tourism that are really the raison d’etre of developing some of these sites. The idea is to use the pedagogical power of these sites so that people arrive as tourists but leave as better informed global citizens.
