Making Memory Space: Recollection and Reconciliation in Post ...

Site, space and architecture can wordlessly convey the realities of a regime. As Nick Sheppard and
Noelene Murray write,
We view cities as sites of memory and desire (and also fear and forgetting); as contested
spaces given to plays of power and privilege, identity and difference; as palimpsests of
historical experience, in which underlying strata disconcertingly erupt into those above;
and as lived spaces in the everyday performance of urban life. 61
Official totems of the past, sanctioned structures that convey a specific narrative operate within the
context of the city, where placement, siting and production all contribute to the significance or power of
their narrative. The relationship of these totems to the city and the city’s relationship to the past are
vital in determining the nature of their narrative and in acknowledging the state of memory that they
produce. Thus a brief examination of the relationship between memory and the city assists in locating
the specific dialogue around officially-sanctioned memory space and the city itself.
Lewis Mumford identifies the city as simultaneously a site of endurance and transformation. He
presents the urbanscape as a palimpsest of meaning to be revealed and concealed according to
different viewpoints. 62 Mumford argues that the city operates as a repository for human recollection, a
physical manifestation of the past. The role that physical form plays in recollection contributes to the
emotive environment of the city and which assists in generating the unique identity of each one. Local
and national identity are largely constructed and maintained through the built form of the city
environment that generates a specificity of ‘place’ based on the relationship between physical form
and the narratives that exist around the events that occurred there. Eric Sandweiss suggests that the
definitions of self and statehood are not random but are the result of a human compulsion to add a
level of explicit meaning through the construction of sites of unchanging memory to the fluidity of the
city. 63 In this respect the human desire to memorialise aspects of the city occurs as a means of
preserving the past. The city may operate as a living repository for human experience, and yet as a
living entity it is susceptible to change. Consequently the need to exercise the memorialising impulse
of architecture emerges within that environment, to generate unchanging markers in the landscape of
time – a visual timeline - which assist in perpetuating long-held recollections of past experiences. This
desire to protect aspects of the city from the inevitable destruction of time parallels the role of the
museum, namely to operate as repository for cultural objects held steady in a constantly shifting
context. 64
61
Noeleen Murray, Nick Shepherd, and Martin Hall (eds.), Desire Lines, Space, Memory and Identity in the Post Apartheid City,
(Oxon: Routledge, 2007), p.1.
62
Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its transformations, and Its Prospects (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World,
1961), p.569.
63 Eric Sandweiss, Op cit, p.26.
64 Ibid.
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