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

INTRODUCTION
The mind . . . is like a house – thoughts which the owner no longer wishes to display, or
those which arouse painful memories, are thrust out of sight, and consigned to the attic
or the cellar; and in forgetting, as in the storage of broken furniture, there is surely an
element of will at work. 1
In the name of reconciliation, a blanket amnesia is being imposed on South Africans:
what you forget you forgive, and what you forgive you reconcile yourself to. The only
problem with this rather generous approach to history is that there are lessons to be
learned from the past. This somewhat utilitarian fact aside, there is something distinctly
sad about losing one’s past, however bitter one may feel about some of it. 2
Built form has long been a temporal manifestation of memory. Memorials and museums serve as
furniture in the house of a city, initially new and exciting, then gradually forgotten. They exist, still
present but faded representatives of a different time. This thesis is an examination of the spatial
production of collective memory and its corollary: cultural amnesia. It is an interrogation of the
mechanisms that facilitate the transmission of memory into built form, so that recollection may slip
from the nebulous state of the personal perspective, and assume the significance of cultural and
national artefact. It is based around the assertion that physical space has the capacity to assume
meaning beyond its function as architecture and that built form can be utilised as a vehicle for
conveying specific meaning, for creating and maintaining collective memory and for perpetuating
national narratives.
Memory as it exists within a city operates at almost every level. It occurs for individuals as a form of
private recollection and for communities as a public one. The space of shared memory is deliberately
established to bridge the memories of individuals, to make common a sense of the past and to draw
collective narratives that reiterate recollections. This state of recollection is termed collective memory
(also understood as social or cultural memory) and is broadly defined as widely shared perceptions of
the past. 3 The analysis undertaken in this thesis is confined to an exploration of public sites of
memory - architectural forms - that are intended to affect a community at large. The memorialising
impulse of architecture has made manifest the memorial and the museum as artefacts of the past, so
that in many urban environments these architectures exist as repositories of a historical narrative. This
writing is an examination of ‘memory space’, a term that refers specifically to officially sanctioned
1 Margaret Atwood as quoted in André Brink, ‘Stories of History: Reimagining the Past in post-Apartheid Narrative’, in Sarah
Nuttall and Carli Coetzee (eds.), Negotiating the past: the making of memory in South Africa (Cape Town: Oxford University
Press, 2002), p.35.
2 Achmat Dangor, ‘Apartheid and the Death of South African Cities’, in Hilton Judin and Ivan Vladislavic (eds.), Blank________
Architecture, Apartheid and After (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 1998).
3 Duncan Bell (ed.), Memory, Trauma and World Politics, Reflections on the Relationships between Past and Present
(Basingstoke: Palgrave McMillan, 2006), p.2.
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