Memorials in Berlin and Buenos Aires by Sion Brigitte;

Author:Sion, Brigitte;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Memory Park and the Monument

to the Victims of State Terrorism

In Argentina, political decisions concerning a national self-indicting monument came from the legislature of Buenos Aires, not from the federal government. The Menem administration (1989-99) refused to acknowledge the crimes of the past. “We have to stop this talk of the missing; these individuals are dead. What we need to know is what happened to them, not the persons who did it,”[63] said Alicia Pierini, Under-Secretary for Human Rights under Menem’s presidency. Her argument is typical of a vision that admits the forced disappearances, but avoids naming the perpetrators responsible for them. The text of Law 46 and the official name of the monument, “for the victims of state terrorism,” mark a significant leap in the acknowledgement of the crimes and responsibility of the state.

The name of this site, Memory Park, is deliberately generic, because it originally intended to contain three memorials and to commemorate not just the desaparecidos, but also the victims of the bombing of the 1994 Jewish Community Center in 1994, and the Righteous of the Nations who risked their lives to save Jews during World War II. While the juxtaposition of tragedies would seem to compromise the clear focus of the memorial, all three historical events deal with Argentina’s dark past. Former president Juan Perón’s pro-Nazi sympathies encouraged him to welcome to Argentina Nazis escaping justice and turn a blind eye to them—the most notorious case is Adolf Eichmann. This and the bombing of the Jewish center two years after the 1992 bombing of the Israel Embassy in Buenos Aires are evidence of palpable anti-Semitism in Argentina, as well as of the corrupt power that has prevented proper investigation, arraignments, and prosecutions of these cases. The other two memorials have not received approval or funding from the city; their implementation remains uncertain.

By organizing a landscape competition rather than a design competition for a memorial that would be part of a larger revamping of the city, the city government limited the number of parties involved and insured a smoother procedure: a national competition, mostly addressed to landscape architects, with a clear set of components to be included. Once the landscape design was chosen, another competition was launched, this time worldwide, for the sculpture garden adjacent to the wall of names. An international jury was appointed, composed of eight art historians, curators, and artists, as well as two senior representatives of human rights organizations, but no political appointees.[64] This small and flexible structure allowed the jury and the commission to work quickly. The guidelines for the competition addressed some of the challenges created by the absence of bodies, collective and individual memory, and the relationship between the 1970s and today.

The brief guidelines insisted that “The artists who are invited to participate should keep in mind, when conceiving their concept, both the need to bring these victims out of the anonymity of mere and uncertain statistics that do not reflect each individual story, and the need to convey the causes and ideals of liberty and social justice for which they fought.

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