Thema Transitional Justice - juridikum, zeitschrift für kritik | recht ...

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design contemplates building a museum caved under the hill
and covered by grass. This merging the park, monuments and
buildings will be accomplished mixing stone and grass along
the zigzag line which, carved bellow the level of the street,
would express the violence of a scar. Systems of ramps caved
in the hill prevent the visitor from seeing the landscape until
arrival to the top. During most of their route, people are thus
“condemned” not to accomplish a holistic view of the park
–nor of the river. Where there is nothing to be seen, where
missing people are being remembered, the users of the space
should not see either. The absence of meaning is understood
as a way to express the past.
But, why choosing a park as a way of representing memory?
Parks can be seen as spaces defined by its capacity
to introduce geometry into nature through a process of dismantling
chaos – as a radical “other” – in order to recreate
a public space as a landscape. However, the architects of the
Park of Memory, appeared to have decided to use this concepts
rather as a point of departure to dismantling the same idea
of “park”. The project reveals that geometry had to express
silence, introspection, that it should exorcise the presence of
the word itself. Therefore, the project of the Park seems to be
able both to express the absence and to criticise the need to fill
every space with an organised logic. The incomplete resists
the closure. The need “to hold open the work of memory” 2
imposes some sort of alterity, a distance where identities – and
concepts – should be seen as in conflict.
Libeskind’s emphasis on expressing the mysterious aspect
of the past has defined the principles chosen by the architects
of the Park of Memory: to exhibit the impossibility to tame
events, invoking the otherness and the contradiction of redemption
itself. One of the key features of Libeskind’s proposal
is based on the possibility of expressing not an absolute
void, but one that includes some experience: a meaning introduced
by its radical innovation; the expression of a community
called up not through its memory but through its absence.
Libeskind and the Argentine architects Baudizzone, Lestard,
Vara, Ferrari and Becker evoke the Platonic conception of
chora as a way of expressing this particular void: something
where “nature is to be available for anything to make its impressions
upon, and it is modified, shaped and reshaped by
the things that enter in it.” 3
The project of the Park of Memory – as we shall later scrutinise
– appears to challenge the logic on which the city of
Buenos Aires and the Argentine state were based: strictly modern
and determined to deny the void. Conversely, the design
of the Park of Memory chose a strategy that tried to deal with
the void. But, as we shall now see, the final results express
an impossibility that may lead to a radical configuration of
the political field.
In August 2001, the first part of the park was opened to the
public: a square that was supposed to be the future entrance to
the park. The space, surrounded by a wire fence and closed to
the public after 8 p.m., has been filled with the first sculptures
chosen by a commission who worked without having any substantial
contact with the architects. The Commission For the
Victims of State Terrorism chose 15 sculptures out of 565 projects
to transform the park into a “promenade”. Why choosing
sculptures to represent the Argentine genocide? Why insisting
on the radical presence of the tridimensionality to express an
absence?
The group of sculptures chosen for the park seems to reproduce
this logic of the collection of meaningful artefacts
on which the modern museum was based. However, the void
does not vanish easily, it keeps returning 4 , and so does the
fragments of the past: both in the instability of the chora,
and in the aspirations of the designers of the Park to build an
autonomous sense of memory. The actual park ends up reproducing
the logic of the city and of the legitimisation of the state
itself, mainly, due to the fact that the design did not manage
to express the tensions of the link between past and future.
But, as we shall see, it is also a point of departure capable of
challenging its principles and become, in some way, ironic.
3. Filling the Void – Beyond Nature
The Argentine state was constituted on the basis of a strictly
modern project guided by one basic premise: to fill the
void of the pampa, this infinite horizon where nothing and
nobody seemed to be the only shadows with a name. Most
of the Argentine literature, visual arts and politics was based
on an obsession for dealing with the tensions resulting from
constructing an organised totalising place capable of counteracting
that absence. In many cases, there was not even an
attempt to represent that void. After the Civil Wars of the first
half of the 19 th century, the legitimisation of the Argentine
state was constructed on the basis of a modern pattern. Since
no previous identity was seen as a means of justification, the
principles might be the ones of the absolute invention 5 .
Mastering of nature then became a key factor for the national
project. The void of the pampa had to be erased and the
traces of the Spanish domination forgotten. Native-Americans
seemed to be invisible, though.
Since then, the locus of the void of the pampa has been a
traditional resource for Argentine literature and politics. The
only way out was then to transform this space in a radical
way: imposing some sort of filling, inventing citizens for “the
desert” and dissolving any trace of this absolute void linked to
“barbarism”. The void is then far from being seen as a platonic
chora, the space that generates the operative terms that cannot
be – or have been – subject to the regulative principles. As “the
void of all forms”, the place of chora, although delimited by
the outside, expresses an absence that creates the possibility
of the conception of presence. This abyss or chasm is not the
other of anything: it is “a receptacle of all becoming – its wetnurse,
as it were” 6 .
The constitution of the Argentine state was then based on
a radical opposition between void and presence. But, this
absolute dichotomy is then a sort of obstacle for the same
representation of the absence that defines the desert. If, in
2) A. Benjamin, Architectural Philosophy
(2000) 184.
3) Plato, Timaeus in Cooper (ed), Complete
Works (1997) 50, c.
4) Casey, The Fate of Place. A Philosophical
History (1998) 17.
5) The strategy was clearly based on a concept
of radical discontinuity with the past – being
Hispanic or pre-Hispanic. However, since then,
it established a consensual principle on Argentine
process of legitimisation.
6) Plato, Timaus 49-a.
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