Expanded Fields: Postdictatorship and the Landscape

Abstract

This paper aims to recast debates on postdictatorial memory in the Southern Cone, suggesting that the role of landscape alongside the more familiar models and forms of commemoration – archives, museums, monuments – hasn't thus far received the attention it deserves. Landscape, as a surface of inscription and as a spatial opening, encompasses a number of aesthetic registers, from architecture to writing and the visual arts. Here I shall trace its modulations through some of the memorial gardens created in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, to then focus on the poetic œuvre of Raúl Zurita and, finally, on Argentine films made by children of parents disappeared by the dictatorship. Rosalind Krauss's seminal essay ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ (1978) will allow me to think about landscape as a critical interruption of monumental re-inscriptions and emplacements, opening these towards spaces of itinerance with a potentiality for moving beyond the temporality of trauma or at least of rethinking the latter in terms of present political practices.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Carolina Aguilera and Ana Torrealba at Corporación Parque por la Paz Villa Grimaldi (Santiago) and Florencia Battiti at Parque de la Memoria (Buenos Aires), as well as Claudia Feld, Elizabeth Jelin and the members of the Núcleo Estudios de la Memoria at IDES, for their insightful indications about the process of creation of these landscapes of memory, their present and future role. To Daniel Mosquera, Rory O'Bryen and Ben Bollig, I am grateful for their insightful readings and subtle suggestions for improving previous drafts.

Notes

 1 Zurita, ‘Zurita’ and ‘And We Saw the Stars Again,’ in Anteparaíso – Anteparadise: 4–5, 40–1.

 2 Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: 60–3.

 3 Pogue Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead: 20–1.

 4 Heidegger, “Bauen, Wohnen, Denken”: 139–56.

 5 See Avelar, Algorías de la derrota; Reati, Nombrar lo innombrable.

 6 Young, The Texture of Memory: 7.

 7 Thus, the urban park was also a model space for overcoming the tensions resulting from a modernity which, through the expansion of capitalist production, communications and transport and the resultant rural-urban migrations, brought ‘nature’ and the city within reach of one another as never before, confounding their boundaries. The urban park showed how this interpenetration could be turned to the advantage of a ‘national modernity’, clearing a space for development. On the cultural history of parks in South America, see Gorelik, La grilla y el parque.; Mazza Dourado, Modernidade Verde; Rossetti, Arquitectura del paisaje en Chile; Torres Corral, El paisaje y la mirada. On the genealogy of the modern park in the Renaissance garden, as a simultaneous invocation of passion and its taming by virtue, see also Cosgrove, “Gardening the Renaissance World”, in Geography and Vision.

 8 Between its appropriation by the Pinochet regime in 1974 and approximately 1978, Villa Grimaldi, a former country mansion on the outskirts of the national capital, functioned as an experimental space for systematic torture and assassination, soon to be extended to the whole of Latin America. Of an estimated 5,000 detainees at least 240 were killed and ‘disappeared’. In 1987, the then head of the secret service arranged for the site to be ‘sold’ to his family's property development company, which leveled the buildings in order to build upmarket condominiums, provoking a public campaign to expose the compound's recent history of terror. Following the ascension of the Concertación government, in 1995 the grounds were returned to the state and declared a ‘memory site’. As at many similar locales, this ‘recovery’ was surrounded by heated public debates on whether Villa Grimaldi should be left in its ruinous state, reconstructed to document the functioning of the torture centre, or transformed into a park to symbolize life rather than death, the option largely preferred by relatives’ associations. As Teresa Meade argues, the abstract, non-documentary aesthetics of commemoration entrusted to the park also enjoyed favour with the Concertación's non-confrontational approach to political and judicial accountability for the dictatorship's crimes, ‘acknowledging the abuses, while refusing to press for reparations or to hold the military responsible for human rights violations’. Meade, “Holding the Junta Accountable”: 136.

 9 Michael J. Lazzara, “Tres recorridos de Villa Grimaldi”, in Jelin and Langland (eds.), Monumentos, memoriales y marcas territoriales: 133.

10 For an extended review of Torrealba's project, see Rossetti, Arquitectura del paisaje en Chile: 109–11.

11 Arteagabeitía, Parque por la Paz Villa Grimaldi: 38.

12 Moore, Mitchell and Turnbull, Jr., The Poetics of Gardens: 13–14; Aliata and Silvestri, El paisaje en el arte y las ciencias humanas: 21–2.

13 Richard, “Sitios de la memoria, vaciamiento del recuerdo”: 13.

14 Levey, Struggles for Memory, Struggles for Justice: 128–31, 137–41. On the polemic surrounding the selection of the site of Buenos Aires’ Parque de la Memoria, see Silvestri, “Memoria y monumento”.

15 “Memorial de los Detenidos Desaparecidos Uruguay”: n/p.

16 Huyssen, “Memory Sites in an Expanded Field: The Memory Park in Buenos Aires”, in Present Pasts: 106–7. See also Maestripiero, “Memoria y paisaje,” 43–5.

17 Young, The Texture of Memory: 14.

18 Kraus, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field”, in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths : 282–4.

19 Pogue Harrison, Forests: 81–7.

20 Neruda, Canto General: 5.

21 Zurita, Anteparaíso: 106, 108. All following quotes referenced in brackets with the letter A and page numbers.

22 The reference here is, above all, to ‘Canción desesperada’ in its engagement with parting, separation and severance, although several other Cantos of a more overtly political nature, foremost among them ‘Canto a Estalingrado’, are implicitly invoked as well. I thank Rory O'Brien and Ben Bollig for pointing me to these intertextual crossings.

23 Zurita, Canto a su amor desaparecido: 8, 9.

24 Rowe, “Zurita and American Space”, in Poets of Contemporary Latin America: 286–8.

25 Zurita, In Memoriam: 31, 65, 19, 15.

26 Zurita, Purgatorio: 32. All following quotes referenced in brackets with the letter P and page numbers.

27 Stoker, Differential Geometry: 294–9.

28 Richard, “Sitios de la memoria”: 12.

29 Marcelo Brodsky, Nexo (Buenos Aires: La Marca, 2008), 78.

30 Wolf, “The Aesthetics of New Argentine Cinema”.

31 Aprea, Cine y políticas en Argentina: 69.

32 On Cazadores de utopías, see Aguilar, “Maravillosa melancolía”.

33 Amado, La imagen justa: 165.

34 Aguilar, Otros mundos: 41.

35 For Gundermann, in acts of melancholy, ‘la incorporación de las imágenes del pasado no cumple con una función de collage nostálgico […] sino que emerge coom estrategia melancólica […], es decir, re-presentación del pasado con el fin de reanudar las luchas previas que fueron derrotadas (las de los padres desaparecidos), pero cuya derrota sigue afectando negativamente el presente (en forma de explotación neoliberal), imponiendo como necesidad el retorno al momento histórico de la derrota para deshacerla’. See his Actos melancólicos: 25.

36 Barthes, La chambre claire: 23; Mulvey, Death 24x Second.

37 Ver Jacques Rancière, La fable cinématographique (Paris: Seuil, 2001).

38 Page, “Memory and Mediation in Los rubios”: 31.

39 See Reisz and Millar, The Technique of Film Editing: 216; also Heath, Questions of Cinema:19–75.

40 Deleuze, Cinéma I: 155.