ERIC Number: EJ1309981
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2021-Jun
Pages: 18
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0309-8249
EISSN: N/A
Curating the Forensic Gaze in Traumatic Memorial Sites: Recalibrating the Sense of Materiality in Santiago's Londres-38
Journal of Philosophy of Education, v55 n3 p516-533 Jun 2021
This paper focusses on the forensic work put on display at Londres-38, a building in Santiago Chile designated as a National Monument, which once functioned as a torture and extermination centre under Pinochet's dictatorship. Striving to avoid conventional memorial practices, or didactic strategies that would morbidly represent the past horror, Londres-38 curatorially opts for very few educational props, so that visitors can have a peculiarly direct encounter with the materiality of the building. The paper engages with one of the few displays employed at Londres-38: a time-looped video detailing the forensic work undertaken on a small washroom. Despite the years that have passed, remaining within its walls, floors, and on the surfaces of the National Monument are material traces left by the detainees-disappeared: scratches and inscriptions, as well as DNA, that are still being forensically harvested. The paper discusses how the video exhibit documents a pedagogical performance of how the unperceived can come to light, how the erasure of the violent past can be made to re-appear as a matter of public concern through a certain sensibility to materiality that is unique to forensics. At issue in the paper is the curatorial-pedagogical strategy employed that invites us to immerse and try out for ourselves the forensic sensibility that tends to and gazes at the materiality of the building in a particular way so that the embedded evidence therein can come to matter and move us to hear the unsettled call for justice in our present.
Descriptors: Video Technology, Sanitary Facilities, Historic Sites, Violence, History, Authoritarianism, Genetics, Victims, Military Personnel, Crime, Exhibits, Teaching Methods, Justice, Foreign Countries, Buildings, Trauma
Wiley. Available from: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030. Tel: 800-835-6770; e-mail: cs-journals@wiley.com; Web site: https://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2191/en-us
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Chile (Santiago)
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A