trauma site museums and politics of memory tuol sleng,villa grimaldi and the bologna ustica...

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Trauma Site Museums andPolitics of MemoryTuol Sleng,Villa Grimaldi and the BolognaUstica Museum

Patrizia Violi

Abstract

This article aims to analyse one specific type of memorial site that furnishes

an indexical link to past traumatic events which took place in precisely these

places. Such memorials will be defined here as trauma sites. It will be shown

how the semiotic trait of indexicality produces unique meaning effects, forc-

ing a reframing of the issue of representation, with all its aesthetic and eth-

ical dimensions. In contrast to other forms of memorial site, trauma sites exist

factually as material testimonies of the violence and horror that took place

there. The fact they still exist, more or less as they were, implies a precise

choice on the part of post-conflict societies regarding which traces of the past

ought to be preserved and in which ways. In other words, a decision is made

about what politics of memory to adopt in each case. Trauma sites thus

become unique, privileged observatories that allow us to understand

better the emergence of post-conflict societies. The various forms of conser-

vation, transformation, memorialization of places where slaughter, torture

and horror have been carried out are key clues to better understandings

of the relationship between memory and history in each post-conflict society

studied. This article presents a close reading of three very different trauma

sites: the Tuol Sleng Museum of the Crimes of Genocide in Phnom Penh,

Cambodia; Villa Grimaldi in Santiago, Chile; and a third, more recent,

museum: The Ustica Memorial Museum (Museo per la Memoria di Ustica)

in Bologna, Italy. These memorials represent instances of three very differ-

ent traumatic memory politics: in Tuol Sleng, visitors are relocated in the

trauma space, in a sort of ‘frozen past’ ; in Villa Grimaldi, a process of atten-

uation is at work, the traces of the past are less evident, and their emotional

j Theory, Culture & Society 2012 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London, NewDelhi, and Singapore),Vol. 29(1): 36^75DOI: 10.1177/0263276411423035



effects weaker. The Ustica Museum represents yet another option, a move-

ment towards an artistic and creative reinterpretation of the traumatic event

itself.

Key words

indexicality j memory j memorials j museums j trauma

Trauma Site Museums

AMONGTHE new museum forms that this article aims to explore, aspecial position is occupied by what today are often called memorialmuseums, a specific museum type ‘dedicated to historic events com-

memorating mass suffering of some kind’ (Williams, 2007: 8). Over thelast 10 years, we have witnessed an impressive growth in such memorialmuseums; it would be difficult to decide whether this proliferation dependsmostly on the obsession with memory that seems to characterize ourshared contemporaneity, or on an increase of ‘mass suffering’ of variouskinds, from genocides to ferocious repressions by dictatorial regimes.

This paper presents an analytical descriptive reading of three memo-rial sites characterized by a specific semiotic trait: an indexical link to pasttraumatic events. This approach requires a re-categorization of memorialsof this type, which I shall refer to in what follows as trauma sites.

Is this ‘just description’, a kind of aesthetic device, to use the words ofpoet Elizabeth Bishop, or is it something more? My position in this articleis that a close descriptive reading is an indispensable starting point for crit-ical understanding of the memory politics trauma sites embody in relationto other memorials and the specific connection between memory and his-tory these places index. In contrast with other forms of memorial sites,trauma sites exist factually as material testimonies of the violence andhorror that took place there. The fact that they still exist, more or less asthey were, implies a precise choice on the part of post-conflict societiesregarding which traces of the past ought to be preserved and in which ways.

In other words, a decision is taken about which memory politics is tobe adopted in each case. But any given politics of memory is never ‘innocent’or neutral: the past is always remembered and reconstructed from thepoint of view of the future, of the new post-conflict society to be built,where a need for political reconciliation may play a crucial role. This is whya close reading of these sites must be carried out in parallel with close read-ings of the specific political conditions of actual post-conflict societies.Once such a situated reading is carried out, trauma sites reveal much morethan their structural organization; they become unique and privileged obser-vatories that allow us to understand the evolution of post-conflict societies.The various forms of conservation, transformation, memorialization ofplaces where slaughter, torture and horror have been carried out are keypoints for understanding better the relationship between memory and his-tory in the case of each post-conflict society.

Violi ^ Trauma Site Museums and Politics of Memory 37



At the same time, because of their indexical nature, trauma sites forcea reframing of the whole issue of representation, its aesthetic and ethicdimensions, which will challenge a number of well known contextualissues from a new and different perspective. In general, memorial museumsopen fundamental and difficult questions regarding conservation and trans-formation of a traumatic past and, in the long run, the very politics ofmemory and remembering. What should be transmitted and how? Whatkind of attitudes ought to be adopted in relation to victims, in the eventthat they want to forget? Ought their will to be respected or should truthalways be asserted? How can we best present testimony of their sufferingwithout appropriating or even exploiting their experiences? Are justiceand truth always compatible with the needs and interests of post-conflictsocieties, or might traumatic memory conflict with social reconciliation? Isa critical transmission of memory that is capable of overcoming a purelyauto-referential commemoration of the past possible, thus re-locatingmemory in a context of new social, political and institutional needs, whileat the same time developing a rigorous and respectful dynamics of remem-bering? Can memorials escape the risk of ritual forms of commemoration?These and similar questions appear even more crucial in the specific caseof those memorials that I have initially characterized as trauma sites.

The memorial museum is still rather too large a category, since it maycover a very broad typology of quite different objects: memorials, mauso-leums, memory museums, memory parks, and so on. This broad coveragedepends on the fact that the definition itself is based solely on the specificnature of the ‘content’ of the museum, i.e. a traumatic event, without anymore formal distinction. It can thus extend from the transformation of con-centration camps into museums, as is the case for Auschwitz or Treblinka,to more recent purpose-built institutions, such as Libeskind’s JewishMuseum in Berlin, or monuments such as The Memorial to the MurderedJews of Europe by Peter Eisenman, also in Berlin.

At this point I shall make a categorical distinction between (i) memo-rial museums created ex novo, like the Libeskind museum in Berlin, theHolocaust Museum inWashington, DC, or Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, and(ii) memorials built on sites of historical traumas, transforming places orig-inally designated for imprisonment and extermination into museums, suchas Auschwitz or the Tuol Sleng Museum of the Crimes of Genocide inPhnom Penh, Cambodia. I will refer to this latter type of museum astrauma site museums (or simply trauma sites). Obviously, as is always thecase with categorizations of this kind, this distinction is not a completelyclear-cut one, since we can have partial overlapping, as when a completelynew museum is being built on the site of a massacre.1 I believe, however,that a distinction along these lines may be useful, as it helps shift focusfrom pure content elements to more formal features that characterize theseplaces: it is indeed precisely on the diverse semiotic natures of these twokinds of memorial that my distinction is based.

38 Theory, Culture & Society 29(1)



IndexicalityThe most relevant feature of trauma sites resides in their indexical charac-ter: these places maintain a real spatial contiguity with the trauma itself;indeed, they are the very places where the traumatic events in questionhave occurred, and the demonstration of such a continuity is an essentialpart of their inherent and constructed meaning, not to say the very reasonfor their existence. Spatial contiguity also implies a different set of relation-ships within the temporal dimension. Although we, as visitors, are locatedin a different time with respect to the traumatic events that took place atthe site, a direct link with the past seems to be activated by the indexicalityof the places and the objects present there: they are signs of a very particu-lar nature ^ traces of the past, imprints of what actually happened there.Such traces and imprints are endowed with a direct, causal connection withthe particular embodied instance that, at a particular time, produced them(Eco, 1975). They maintain, so to speak, an embodied memory of theactual agent that caused them.The past they reveal to us is not a reconstruc-tion or a ‘re-evocation’ of what is no more, as is the case in more common-place museums or memorials, but something much more cogent,something they have directly witnessed: these places are themselves testimo-nies of the past.

This is not, however, a property ‘naturally’ embedded in the physicalplace: in order to acquire a similar testimonial nature, such places have toundergo a semiotic process that transforms imprints into traces, i.e signsrecognized and interpreted as such (Eco, 1975). Here there is at work adouble semiotic process of interpretation (trace recognition) and enunciation(transformation of traces into a memorial or a museum). Through interpre-tation the visitor becomes aware of the indexical nature of the place andthis awareness becomes part of her competence as visitor.Through enuncia-tion the physical space is developed into a narrative, and its indexicalnature is transformed from a purely causal contiguity into a meaningfulelement.

In this way indexicality becomes a fundamental component of thesense of place (see Meyrowitz, 1985) of a trauma site, with important conse-quences for the positioning of visitors. Independently of how much remainsof the past, and how carefully it is preserved, visitors know they are inthe very place where terrible events occurred, and this knowledge contrib-utes to a complex, multifaceted perception of it. Visitors not only seesomething of this terrible past, they also imagine that which cannot beseen. The emotional intensity and pathemic effect characteristic of experi-ences of visiting trauma sites depend crucially on the evocative power ofindexical traces to activate the imagination of the visitors. Visible and invis-ible aspects of visitor experience become inextricably intertwined. Traces,in virtue of their indexical ‘authenticity’, are at one and the same time visibledocumentations of the past and powerful activators of imaginary formsof reconstruction.




The indexical semiotic character of trauma sites affects many impor-tant dimensions of their analysis, marking a difference at three differentlevels with the memorial museum constructed ex novo: at the epistemologi-cal level, regarding the crucial issue of authenticity, which in turn impliesquestioning the politics of conservation and restoration; at the ethical level,regarding its relationship with the survivors of the place, and the positioningof the visitors, entangled as they are between memory, awe and ‘dark tour-ism’; and finally at the political level, regarding the role and identitary func-tion that such places play in countries that often are facing a difficulthistorical transition period in a wider post-conflict context.

It should be pointed out, however, that the inherent indexicality char-acterizing the semiotic nature of trauma sites can be exploited and exhibitedin quite different forms: the link to the past remains, establishing a certaindegree of ‘fidelity’, and the form of conservation of the original places mayvary greatly, according to what I call a scale of indexicality, that movesfrom a maximum of conservation of past traces to a maximum of neutraliza-tion. These two extremes on the scale of indexicality constitute two quitedifferent rhetorics of memory and strategies of remembering. On the onehand, we have sites that conserve almost obsessively all possible elementsof the original place, through a literal and realistic representation of thepast, without any distancing from it. At the opposite end of the scale thereare sites that downplay the rhetoric of original authenticity, operating morethrough abstraction and allusion rather than through direct exposure ofpast remains, seeking to transpose memories into a different interpretativeframework. The first two cases analyzed in this paper, the Tuol Slengmuseum and Villa Grimaldi, can be taken as prototypical cases of thesetwo quite different strategies. The third case, the Ustica Museum, repre-sents a very interesting experiment with a new form of rigorous conserva-tion of the indexical link to traumatic reality, while at the same timetransforming it into an experimental field of new discourses, artistic andaesthetic effects.

The scale of indexicality, and therefore the various ways of usingcausal links with space, objects and remains of a traumatic past, can helpin framing some specific dimensions that appear relevant for analysis oftrauma sites:

. conservation vs transformation

. realism vs symbolic abstraction

. relation between actual place and trauma

. relation between present and past time

. visitor’s positioning

. forms of representation

The question of which forms of representation ought to be adopted insuch cases lies at the very core of any discussion of traumatic memoriesand opens up the vexata questio of the representability of the trauma itself.Often addressed by Trauma Studies, it has become known as the ‘crisis of




representation’, alluding to the impossibility of speaking of, or displaying,the horror of the trauma itself, which would be ‘unspeakable’, although prob-ably never before have collective atrocities, beginning with the Holocaust,been more frequently narrated, represented, recounted using different lan-guages and forms of expressions.2

On this issue, trauma sites exhibit a fundamental difference fromother memorial museums. Strictly speaking, they do not represent anything;rather, since the traumatic events happened there, they directly exposesome precise material traces of them. In a way, what we have here is a shiftfrom representation to re-presentation,3 which is a consequence of theunique indexical nature of these places and the direct links they maintainwith the actual trauma. The re-presentation effect may vary greatly fromsite to site, according to the previously mentioned scale of indexicality. Themore faithfully a trauma site maintains an indexical link with the past, con-serving the actual remains of the original place, the stronger will be theeffect of the rhetoric of re-presentation.

But theoretically speaking, things are rather more complicated thanthis. Here we are facing a highly complex issue that goes right to the heartof the aesthetics of trauma representation, addressing the issue of realisticversus more abstract representational forms.4 At first sight it appears thatre-presentational sites tend to be more ‘realistic’ than representational ones,but this question is incorrectly framed, since representational memorialscan also induce highly realistic effects. This is the case, to quote just oneexample, of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, anew museum that has no indexical links at all to a place of extermination.The opposition between realistic and abstract forms does not coincide withthe semiotic opposition between indexes and symbols, or between indexesand icons. No semiotic object is entirely reducible to one form of significa-tion, as it always simultaneously embodies indexical, iconic and symbolicelements (cf. Peirce, 1931^58); clearly, re-presentational memorials cannotbe seen as purely indexical.

A misunderstanding seems to be involved here concerning the mean-ing of ‘real’ and ‘realistic’. A representational site can be highly realistic bysimulating specific environments, furniture, utensils, clothes and otherkinds of material elements as they effectively were, reproducing them rightdown to their most insignificant details, as many contemporary memorialsdo. The experiential efficacy of re-presentational or indexical trauma sitesdoes not lie in their alleged ‘realism’ but elsewhere, more precisely in theirbeing a trace linking past and present through persistency of material ele-ments over time. In other words, it relies on the supposed authenticity oftraces, not the implied truthfulness of the representation.

Both types of sites may potentially create a strong reality effect(Barthes, 1986), but this depends on different mechanisms, presupposingthe activation of different forms of positioning on the part of visitors in rela-tion to the place itself. In the case of trauma sites, the reality effect doesnot primarily depend on what is exhibited there but on visitors’ knowledge




of its indexical character. This knowledge facilitates specific modes ofinterpretation, reading and fruition of the site: in this sense indexicalityrepresents a unique interpretative function that creates a semiotic bridgebetween the place itself, the knowledge of the visitor and her positioningwithin it. Accordingly, the principal question in these cases is not ‘how torepresent the past’ but rather: ‘what aspects of that past should be re-pre-sented, and how?’And more than anything else: ‘are these all authentic?’

Regarding the first issue, an opening to the public of a place of exter-mination in the form of a museum always involves complex decisions regard-ing what can be displayed or exhibited in this kind of place: instrumentsof torture and suffering, for example? The meagre everyday belongings ofpeople who lost their lives there? Their mortal remains? All difficult deci-sions, since the main ‘exhibits’ are indeed often the few traces that remainof people killed in these places.

As Primo Levi first pointed out, a fundamental paradox seems to belurking here: the dead are the only possible, the ultimate witnesses, whileat the same time they cannot themselves bear witness, they have no voice.Only their traces can speak for them, and about them. But which tracesare to be chosen to be exhibited, and what aspect of these traces, ultimately,can actually be shown: images of the dead? artefacts of the dead? remainsof the dead? This ethical dimension is inextricably intertwined with an aes-thetic dimension, since each choice is at the same time a choice about whatto show and how to show it.

The second, highly relevant question is that of the conservation andauthenticity of the sites in question. Compared to more traditionalmuseums, trauma sites are more difficult to define and have a ratherhybrid character: they are neither real museums nor cemeteries, nor placesof worship, nor monuments ^ they are all of these together, and perhapseven more. But first and foremost, they were once places of extermination.For the people who visit them, this implies a kind of overlap between whatthe place once was and what it now is, between being in a prison andbeing in a museum: as visitors we see both a museum exhibit ^ albeit a par-ticular one ^ and an actual place of extermination. Is it possible to maintainthe ‘authenticity’of such places, or does their conversion into a museum inev-itably transform them into something other than themselves? Behind theapparently technical question of restoration are hidden other, more engag-ing, issues, such as the ethical legitimacy or aesthetic value of the traumasites in question.

An obsessively conservative restoration, right down to the most grue-some details as, for example, in the case of Tuol Sleng, implies a profoundparadox that we could call the authenticity paradox, already noted byAssmann (1999): the action of trying to conserve the authenticity of suchplaces inevitably involves a loss of such authenticity. This loss derives pre-cisely from the functional transformation of these places into a museum:what is principally preserved is the physical materiality of these places, not




their inherent meanings. In a way, what is conserved is transformed pre-cisely because it has been conserved.

While risking a process of monumentalization, trauma sites oftenseem unable to tell the story and speak of the life-experiences of the realpeople who encountered their final destiny there. Facing such a paradox,two different answers are possible. The first is to assume as unavoidablethe impossibility of recreating the past, emphasizing the distance that sepa-rates us from the traumatic events and, possibly, allowing that time gap tocreate a new space for critical thinking.The second alternative is of an oppo-site sign, and tries to obliterate the distance between present and past: thepast is made present and re-actualized through a variety of devices aimingat strong emotional involvement on the part of the visitor.

These two options are not necessarily coincident with the twoextremes of the previously mentioned indexicality scale, although thesemay well overlap. But not necessarily so. For example, the effect of actualiz-ing the past can be obtained through a transforming intervention alteringthe past traces, as it is in the case of San Saba, to be shortly discussed inwhat follows. What is relevant for this distinction is not a mere correspon-dence with a pre-existing reality but the attempt to actualize the past andthe emotional effects produced by this.

Among the most representative advocates of the first position is RuthKlˇger, one of the most acutely attentive witnesses of the Holocaust. InKlˇger’s (1992) view, places of this kind cannot be conserved, since it isimpossible to recreate any immediate contact with the full reality oftrauma, and any attempt in this direction is only an illusion. It should benoticed that comments of this kind are often made from the perspective ofa survivor-witness, such as Ruth Klˇger. This is, however, a very particularperspective which is not generalizable: trauma sites are after all not keptand maintained only for their survivors. These sites primarily serve a func-tion related to the transmission of documented traumatic events of the pastto future generations, as well as potentially playing a role in an extendedgeopolitical reality, in what is today seen as a complex domain of post-memory processes (Hirsch, 1997).

In a trans-generational perspective, survivors are no longer ‘ideal visi-tors’5 to sites of this kind, since they are open to a wider, far more differen-tiated audience, who may know very little of the actual historical trauma.Not to mention the fact that the places themselves may have many otherfunctions, over and above allowing for remembering. Limiting the discus-sion here to one case study: Tuol Sleng, particularly in the early days afterits opening, was for example primarily designed for members of the interna-tional community, not for the survivors themselves or the Cambodianpeople. In this specific case the memory of a traumatized society becamean instrumental component in a complex strategic game of political position-ing, aimed at redefinition of core national identity.

For these reasons, which imply a complex politics of memory postulat-ing different kinds of addressees for such museums, and the various




political options and functions involved, the position sustained by RuthKlˇger appears to be that of a minority.Today, the second option mentionedabove is largely predominant and is generally adopted and diffused withthe aim of not only preserving the basic authenticity of the sites just asthey were, but also of recreating a complex authenticity effect by way of awide range of different enunciatory strategies. What I refer to here as anauthenticity effect is a meaning effect produced in the experience of visi-tors, rather than an abstract form of correspondence with some pre-existingreality. It is based mainly on a strong pathemization of the actual experienceof the visit to the site, which, in some cases, becomes a form of re-enactmentof aspects of the trauma itself. We shall see, in both the case of the TuolSleng prison and particularly in the case of the Ustica Memorial Museumin Bologna, Italy, two different instances of this: in both these museumsvisitors are offered an emotional, embodied experience which, in the caseof the Bologna museum, is certainly also an aesthetic experience.

Offering strong emotional and even corporeal involvement throughspecific elements that allude to the dreadful experience of victims nowseems a recurrent tendency in contemporary memorial museums. At theUS Holocaust Memorial Museum inWashington, DC, for example, each vis-itor is given an ID card of a person who actually lived during theHolocaust, some Jewish, some not, some adult, some children, some survi-vors, some not, in order to evoke a more personal sense of identificationwith individual victims.

The desire to evoke an emotional sensory response of this kind hasimplications for the material form of the restoration itself, as is the casewith the site of the Risiera San Saba in Trieste, in north-eastern Italy ^the only Nazi extermination camp in Italy.6 In 1965 the site was declared anational monument and opened as a museum. In this case the choice of aes-thetic strategy was to modify the entrance to the site, building two highwalls that did not exist in the original camp (see Figure 1).7

This type of intervention can be seen as a form of pathemic restora-tion: its goal is obviously to affect visitors emotionally and even physically,as they will experience while entering this narrow corridor a feeling ofoppression and claustrophobic enclosedness that may be something likewhat prisoners of the Nazi camp might have felt themselves, though forvery different reasons. This is another example of an attempt to reproducein the actual bodies of visitors an almost unimaginable felt reality of thepast. Using the theoretical notion created by Le¤ vi-Strauss (1958) to describethe effect of the Kuna singing, we could say that this type of restorationhas a particular symbolic efficacy in relation to those who visit the site,affecting their feelings, emotions and sensory-perceptual reactions.

The three case studies discussed in this paper include two more ‘classi-cal’ trauma sites: the Tuol Sleng Museum of the Crimes of Genocide inPhnom Penh, Cambodia; Villa Grimaldi in Santiago, Chile; and a third,more recent, museum: The Ustica Memorial Museum (Museo per laMemoria di Ustica) located in Bologna, Italy.




The first two sites are interesting examples of very different ways ofusing traumatic memories in post-conflict societies; the third represents acase of discursive displacement into an artistic form of experimentation. Inthis last case, the wreckage of an aircraft is itself the spatial location of thetraumatic event to be remembered, which is an air crash involving preciselythis aircraft. Although, in this case, the ‘site’ is constituted by an objectand not a physical place, from the point of view of the formal categorizationsuggested above, based on the dimension of indexicality, the UsticaMuseum belongs to the same conceptual category and is from all points of

Figure 1 The restored entrance at Risiera San Saba, Trieste




view a trauma site. Moreover, the Ustica Memorial Museum exhibits in anexemplary way key tendencies now characterizing contemporary traumasites and memorial museums. Before returning to the Ustica Museum, andconsidering how it might challenge the aesthetics of memory, the TuolSleng and Villa Grimaldi museums will be discussed, in order to distin-guish the different poetics of site-specificity that have been tried out.

Tuol Sleng Museum of the Crimes of Genocide, Phnom PenhThe Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide Crimes in Phnom Penh is on the siteof the infamous ‘S-21’, the largest centre of detention, interrogation and tor-ture established by the Khmer Rouge secret police in DemocraticKampuchea during their dictatorship period from 1975 to 1979.8 The fullextent of the Cambodian genocide is still unclear, but it appears to encom-pass almost two million deaths in a population of eight million inhabitants.S-21, rather than a prison, was mainly a locus for interrogation and torture;in particular, it has been estimated that the number of Tuol Sleng victimswas somewhere between 15,000 and 17,000 persons, mainly intermediatecadres of the Party. Only seven survivors were discovered in S-21 by theVietnamese troops that entered Phnom Penh on 7 January 1979, thus mark-ing the end of the Pol Pot regime.

In early 1979, the Vietnamese and their Cambodian anti-KhmerRouge allies faced a completely devastated country, with no infrastructure,hospitals, schools, or state organization of any kind. Despite the fact thatan emergency situation of this kind might have suggested other priorities,the interim administration and the Vietnamese decided to immediatelytransform S-21 into a museum; in March 1979, less than three monthsafter the liberation of Phnom Penh, the first visitors entered the museum,which at that time was open only to foreign journalists and internationaldelegations.

For the Vietnamese, what was at stake here was clearly the need to jus-tify their military intervention in Cambodia that, in the face of the horrorsof S-21, would appear not only justified but almost a humanitarian duty,transforming them from foreign invaders into liberators. Something similarheld for the new government that followed the Khmer Rouge dictatorship,the Cambodian People’s Republic of Kampuchea, whose role had to betransformed from collaborators with invaders to liberators of their owncountry from a prior state of dictatorship.

Right from the start, Tuol Sleng played an important role in the polit-ical framing of the post-Khmer context, as part of a more general strategyof identity construction for the new Cambodia, involving a complex rewrit-ing of its past, its national identity, its international legitimacy. Themuseum is not only a monument to the atrocities of the Cambodian geno-cide but also a symbol of radical discontinuity with the past and a crucialelement in the construction of the future national identity of Cambodia.The museum is located in central Phnom Penh, not far from the Mekong




River, in what, before the advent of the Khmer Rouge, was one of the mostelegant and affluent residential areas of Phnom Penh, inhabited by mem-bers of the middle and upper classes of the Cambodian bourgeoisie.Originally, the building, built in the 1960s, was a French college for educa-tion of the future governing class, and it is thus endowed with a certainarchitectural elegance, a large garden, trees, playing fields and sports facili-ties for students, all perfectly preserved up to the present day (see Figure 2).

The conversion of the college into the notorious torture centre S-21 didnot alter the external appearance of the place, which was in turn also keptintact during the later reconfiguration of the place as museum. Everythingis now as it was then: we can see some of the instruments of torture, thenarrow cells where prisoners were huddled, the interrogation rooms. Eventhe bloodstains on the floor and on the walls have not been cleaned up, butrather carefully preserved, exactly as they were upon the entry of theVietnamese troops into S-21 in 1979. When moving inside the museum, afirst important element that one notices is the almost total absence of infor-mation material. Visitors who do not yet know about the history ofCambodia and the Khmer Rouge regime will not find any help here tounderstand the fundamental roots of the genocide, its causes, or the complexnetwork of responsibilities concealed within it.

In general terms, museum information materials represent an impor-tant interpretative device that makes the place more intelligible by provid-ing historical and geopolitical background for understanding what is

Figure 2 Tuol Sleng Museum, Phnom Penh. Courtyard




displayed there. Explicative documentation of this kind is a semiotic media-tion device, an interpretant, in Peirce’s sense, making fundamental informa-tion accessible for visitors, and also those who come from other culturalbackgrounds than the one to which the museum belongs. Nothing of thiskind is provided for visitors to Tuol Sleng.Without such transcultural trans-lation, visitors only have impressionistic, immediate access to the exhibits,based mainly on sensations and impressions rather than on cognitive con-tent. Tuol Sleng is, then, a museum to be felt rather than to be known orunderstood. Accordingly, the material exhibited is largely visual (images,maps), as well as numerous examples of human remains, skulls and bones,contained in large glass cases. The last few rooms at the end of the tourare fully occupied by huge colourful paintings by Vann Nath, one of theseven survivors of S-21 (see Figure 3).

Over and above direct exposure to a glass case display of humanremains, the most striking feature of Tuol Sleng is probably the thousandsand thousands of photographic portraits of victims covering the walls ofthe four main buildings of the museum, particularly Building B (seeFigures 4 and 5).

These portraits were taken by a special service unit of the KhmerRouge when prisoners entered S-21. Although all the photos were carefullystored together with their personal data, those currently on display in themuseum offer no indication of the name of the victim, place of birth orany other demographic data. The absence of prisoners’ names is somewhatsurprising because it contradicts a well established tradition that was

Figure 3 Tuol Sleng Museum. Painting by V ann Nath




initiated at the beginning of the 19th century.The names of the fallen or thevictims play an important role in all contemporary monuments and memo-rials, where a ‘Wall of Names’ is a constantly recurrent element, from YadVashem to the monument inWashington, DC, for American soldiers killedduring the war in Vietnam.9

Figure 4 Tuol Sleng Museum. ID photos of prisoners

Figure 5 Tuol Sleng Museum. ID photos of prisoners




The vast majority of the photographs at Tuol Sleng are full frontal por-traits of faces that are apparently dispassionate, without any visible traceof emotion or feeling, and the contrast between their apparent lack of emo-tion and the knowledge the visitor has of the place (a knowledge that theprisoners themselves could not have avoided having) is certainly one of themain reasons for the strong emotional impact these photographs produce.

Luc Boltanski (1992), in his seminal work on the representation ofpain, refers to three different thematic narrative roles: the persecutor, thevictim and the spectator. At Tuol Sleng, visitors look at the images of vic-tims from a full frontal position, but since the victims were all staring intothe camera at the time the picture was being taken, visitors find themselvesin precisely the same visual position as the persecutors at the time, gazingat the victim from exactly the same point of view, almost as if through theeyes of the persecutors themselves.

When looking at these images, the space of enunciation once occupiedby the persecutor-photographer becomes coincident with that of the specta-tor-visitor: we are essentially seeing ‘what he saw’. In this way the actorsinvolved in the scene are not only visitors and absent victims: this visualdevice also activates, by way of the positioned gaze of the viewer, the imagi-nary spectre of the absent persecutor. We could say that the meeting of thetwo gazes of victim and spectator opens a virtual space filled by the thirdrole, that of the persecutor, a space ambiguously occupied by the viewer atthe actual moment of his or her gazing at the victim. The visual artefactoperates as an activator of implicit traces of the original act of enunciationinscribed in the photographic text itself.

Finally, the images we are looking at are photographs of the dead:people who, when they were photographed, were still alive, but were soongoing to die, and are now dead as we look at them. This brings to the forea quite complex and difficult issue, a basic ambiguity characterizing alltrauma sites: the making visible of traces of bodies of those who have losttheir lives there. Gazing at these photographic images brings into questionour own position as ‘spectator’ with its inevitable ‘voyeuristic’ implications.

In this dynamic movement of meanings, the perspectives of victim,persecutor, and spectator can become superimposed: as visitors we cannotremain purely ‘outside observers’ ^ we are, paradoxically, located in a kindof middle ground where the gaze of the persecutor met that of the perse-cuted. We empathize with the suffering and pain of the victims exposed toour naked gaze, sometimes to the point of feeling actual physical discomfortin our bodies, while at the same time gazing at them from the outside, justas their persecutors did.

This mechanism of multiple gazes, and the particular positioning ofthe visitor within this complex semiotic system, makes Tuol Sleng a veryspecial place that transcends the logic of pure representation and becomesa device for presentification of trauma, where the dead are not only repre-sented, but also re-presented ^ made present for us through each new gazethat focuses on them, while at the same time questioning the meaning of




their demise. This strong effect of presence produces a shift in the role ofthe visitor, who is immersed directly in the experience through their pathe-mic involvement.

Visiting Tuol Sleng can hardly leave us indifferent, quite the opposite:it is a deeply disturbing experience that produces an almost physical senseof discomfort. Visitors are invited to participate, at least for the duration oftheir visit, in a fully embodied immersive experience that can be seen as aform of re-enactment of the traumatic experience itself; in doing so theychange roles ^ they are no longer merely visitors looking around and gather-ing information, they become, at least to some extent, a part of the historicalnarrative itself. They become, in a sense, witnesses themselves.

Empirical research recently conducted on visitors to Tuol Sleng byHughes (2008) confirms these impressions: almost all visitors interviewedcomplained about the lack of information on the museum but consideredthe experience of the visit as a significant act of testimony, a symbolic ges-ture of solidarity and a form of responsible humanitarian tourism. What isperceived as relevant after the visit is not ‘I learned more’, but rather ‘I’veseen’, which is precisely the personal positioning that qualifies the role ofthe witness.

Other elements contribute to the special effect of presence elicited bythe photographs of the victims at Tuol Sleng. Firstly, there is the quantita-tive dimension: thousands of faces cover the walls of the museum, eachone different in all their individuality, yet all the same. Here quantitybecomes quality, producing a particular meaning effect definable as gener-alizing typification.The combination of these thousands of photographs, dif-ferent and similar at the same time, tends to cancel out individualdifferences and give back to the visitor only one face, one general typeinstead of a multitude of single tokens: the victim type. This is not a casualchoice, but it is part of a complex ideological reconstruction of the pastbrought into operation through the creation of the Tuol Sleng Museum.Indeed, the multiple S-21 victims may not have been so completely innocentas it might seem, since prisoners at the centre were intermediate or high-level cadres in the Khmer Rouge apparatus. However, through the cancella-tion of their names and personal life stories, only the endless horror of thepast remains, as if it all happened without any individualized apportion-ment of responsibility.

Perhaps precisely because it does not question the complexity of thepast and the controversial nature of the traumatic events that occurredthere, Tuol Sleng was able to become a national monument that is now partof contemporary Cambodian identity. It is ‘the central symbolic site of thefounding of the modern Cambodian nation, the ruling Cambodian People’sParty (CPP) and, officially, of the population’s gratitude to Vietnam andthe CPP for their defeat of the Khmer Rouge’ (Hughes, 2003: 186).The powerful symbolic relevance and emotional value of a site of this kindoperates as a potent device for constructing a common collective memoryinstead of a chaos of contrasting and conflicting sets of individual memories.




In a way, this museum stands in place of the not yet resolved political pro-cess of rewriting the past conflict by assigning legal and other forms ofresponsibility for the genocide (it must be remembered that it was only in2009 that a legal process was first instituted in order to try the former com-mandant of S-21, Kaing Kek Eav, known as Duch).10

The Tuol Sleng complex is today not only a central symbolic site forCambodian national cultural identity and self representation, but also a top-ical place in the Phnom Penh urban landscape, and is as such both per-ceived and represented in the everyday discourse of the city. The fact thatthe visual integrity of this place has been carefully preserved over time guar-antees its integral recognizability and symbolic value as perhaps the mostemblematic monument of Phnom Penh and its past history. We could saythat Tuol Sleng lies, physically and symbolically, at the very core of the cityitself: all the discourses of self-representation of the city ^ from websites totourist guides ^ emphasize the importance for tourists and other visitors tovisit the museum.

Tuol Sleng is a museum designed to activate emotions rather than giveinformation, a place that depicts the horror instead of explain why it hap-pened; to use Hughes (2008) words, Tuol Sleng is more ‘testimonial thatepistemological’. Visitors learn very little about the historical backgroundand the policies of the Pol Pot regime during their visit, but perform a sym-bolic gesture of re-actualization and re-enactment of the trauma experience,and in doing so they become transformed, during the time of their visit,into witnesses of a trauma whose historical reasons and individual responsi-bility are still partly hidden from both them and the rest of the world.

Villa Grimaldi, Santiago, ChileA completely different example of historical trauma site is Villa Grimaldi inSantiago, Chile. The villa, a large building in elegant Italian style with anexpansive garden full of flowers and trees, was located in the periphery ofthe capital city of Santiago. Built in the 19th century by Jose¤ Arrieta, itpassed in the 1960s to the ownership of Emilio Vasallo, who used it as aweekend house. In the 1970s, during the presidency of Salvator Allende,the villa was transformed into a restaurant and meeting place of intellec-tuals and artists. One year after the Pinochet coup of 11 September 1973,it was acquired by DINA (Direccio¤ n Nacional de Inteligencia), the Armysecret police, and used as a centre for interrogation and torture untilFebruary 1978. In the 1980s the villa passed to the CNI, the nationalIntelligence Council, the successor of the DINA. It has been estimated thataround 4500 persons were imprisoned at Villa Grimaldi, of whom 226 dis-appeared, either killed during torture, or jettisoned alive into the PacificOcean from military aeroplanes.

This site therefore shows a number of similarities to S-21: it is a civilbuilding with originally a different function, later transformed into acentre of interrogation, torture and death. But there is one important




difference: in 1987, near the end of the dictatorship, the last head of theCNI, General Hugo SalasWenzel, sold the villa to his relatives, who owneda construction company. In 1988, just two years before the end of thePinochet regime, the villa was completely dismantled and all its buildingslevelled, in order to construct a high priced condominium, but also in anattempt to cancel all visible signs of the crimes committed there. However,the property speculation project was stopped and after the democratic transi-tion in 1990 Villa Grimaldi was turned over again to the government. Itwas not until seven years later, in 1997, that the site was transformed intoits present form and opened to the public under the name of ‘Parque porla Paz Villa Grimaldi’ (Villa Grimaldi Park for Peace).

The history of the transformation of that empty property into theactual memorial park is worth closer attention, since it casts light onthe complex, nonlinear transition to democracy of the Chilean society afterthe end of the Pinochet dictatorship, as well as on the role civil society andnon-governmental social actors can play in preserving and transmittingmemory of victims. In 1989 Chile began a negotiated transition to democ-racy that ended in 1990 with the first civilian government of PatricioAylwin, who established in the same year the Truth and ReconciliationCommission (Comisio¤ n Nacional de la Verdad y la Reconciliatio¤ n, orCNVR) to investigate human rights violations during the Pinochet regime.Although the CNVR represented an important first step in acknowledgingsuch violations, its scope was limited and it was not possible to pursueformal prosecutions of perpetrators. These limits have to be framed withinthe general context of a difficult transition and a still very fragile democ-racy. Chilean society at the time did not believe it possible to combine apolicy of both justice and peace. ‘This was because there was real fear thatdealing with the past would destabilize the fragile transition to democracyand would sink the country back into a period of terror’ (Baxter, 2005: 124).

This was a not unjustified fear, since Pinochet continued to be sup-ported by a large part of the society and the military. Many critics haveunderlined the fragile character of Chilean democracy during the 1990s(Drake and Jaksic, 1995; Winn, 2004; Portales, 2000; Paley, 2001), wherepressures to establish justice and truth lived hand in hand with a compul-sion to forget and block memories of the past dictatorship. PresidentAylwin’s discourse on the occasion of release of the CNVR report reflectswell the current governmental policy of putting the past behind andmoving forward. The president said: ‘For the good of Chile, we should looktoward the future that unites us more than to the past which separates us’.Aylwin continues by saying that Chileans should not ‘waste our energy inscrutinizing wounds that are irremediable’ (quoted in Paley, 2001: 127). If‘scrutinizing past wounds’ was perceived as a ‘wasting of energy’, there islittle doubt that any attempt at locating, preserving and transmitting thememories of abuses and violations was highly controversial in post-Pinochet Chile, and spaces of memory acquired a residual status, as statedby many authors.11 Chilean democracy appeared ‘amnesiac about the violent




past’, and reconciliation ‘a form of concealment . . . forcing closure over whathad yet to be revealed’ (Go¤ mez-Barris, 2009: 25). A similar point is madeby Meade, who claims that there was ‘a deeply contradictory and tentativehistorical account’ in the way Chile constructed the memory of dictatorshipand portrayed in museums its recent history of human rights abuses.‘Memory sites exist within a society that has not reached any form of recon-ciliation with the dictatorship, nor held accountable those who carried outits most egregious acts of violence. . . .The memory sites thus exist as monu-ments to the contradictions of Chilean society and to the fragility of itsdemocracy’ (Meade, 2001: 124^5).

The construction of Villa Grimaldi Park for Peace has to be framedand understood within such a larger political and cultural background,where the debate over public history and the way in which victims of the dic-tatorship should be remembered does not seem to have resulted in anykind of unitary national consciousness. Indeed, despite the CNVR recom-mendation for an official governmental involvement in symbolic actionsaiming at creation of public monuments and parks dedicated to victims,the realization of the Park for Peace was mainly due to engagement on thepart of civil society. The government funded the creation of the park aspublic property, but the role of the organizations representing victims ^such as the Association of Relatives of the Detained-Disappeared and theAssociation of Relatives of the Executed Political Prisoners ^ was of crucialimportance, as well as action by a number of survivors, in particular PedroMatta, a former detainee at Villa Grimaldi.12 Associations of relatives andsurvivors played a central role in the decision-making process around howVilla Grimaldi should be transformed into a memory site, a debate involv-ing many different positions and, at the end, different policies regardingtraumatic memory. Three different alternatives were discussed: total recon-struction of the villa exactly as it was as a torture centre; construction of asculpture as a monument to the memory of victims; re-semanticization ofthe villa in a park, while keeping the few traces left after its dismantle-ment.13 The last option was the one which was finally adopted.

There is here another profound difference from what happened at TuolSleng, where initiative to open the detention centre S-21 as a museum wastotally driven by an official policy of the new government, as a tool of polit-ical propaganda. In the case of Villa Grimaldi, the agency behind the pro-cess was provided by social actors and grass root organizations: associationsof relatives, survivors, NGOs, etc. Also the actual choice of name for thesite marks an important difference: Tuol Sleng is explicitly defined as a‘Museum of Genocide Crimes’, while Villa Grimaldi was renamed as ‘Parkfor Peace’. The different denominations imply a radical shift in the categori-zation of the place itself, according to a double system of oppositions:‘museum’ versus ‘park’ on the one hand, and ‘genocide crimes’ versus ‘peace’on the other, forcing in this way a completely different reading of the site.Starting with the name itself,Villa Grimaldi seems to refuse any externali-zation of the horror in the form of a trauma site museum, by re-landscaping




the estate and reclaiming a primacy of leisure over horror. Despite func-tional similarities with Tuol Sleng, these two museums could not be moredifferent from one another and, indeed, they play a quite different role inboth the overall urban landscapes they belong to and regarding the rele-vance they assume for the collective memories and cultural identities oftheir respective countries.

First of all, there is the issue of their location: while Tuol Sleng lies ina very central area of Phnom Penh, Villa Grimaldi is situated in a fairlyperipheral area of Santiago. Obviously, these locations were already decidedwhen these places were first chosen to be used as prisons, but physical loca-tion comes to play an important role when we look at them in terms of theoverall urban landscape. If Tuol Sleng is a fundamental place for the cityand for its self-representation, Villa Grimaldi Park for Peace appears mar-ginal and almost hidden in relation to Santiago, since, unlike othermemory sites such as the Cementerio General or the Puente BulnesMemorial Wall, it is not only physically distant from the city centre but isalso not particularly well known and rather difficult to find. Althoughthere is a bus route to the area where it is situated, local inhabitantsappear unaware of its precise location. When visiting, I could for examplenot find a taxi driver who knew of the place. In the Santiago tourist guideliterature Villa Grimaldi is hardly mentioned at all and it certainly doesnot have any of the symbolic relevance for Santiago that Tuol Sleng nowhas for Phnom Penh. Indeed, when I visited Villa Grimaldi there werealmost no other visitors there, as opposed to the very large numbers of tour-ists, Cambodian citizens and school-classes that can be seen each day atTuol Sleng.

Even more relevant is the temporality and aspectuality characterizingthe two trauma sites.14 In the case of Villa Grimaldi, the choice to make apark instead of a museum implies a radical shift in the distance betweenthe actual act of remembering and the past atrocities. In Tuol Sleng thereis a constant attempt to make the past continuously actual in present time,re-presenting past horrors by keeping everything exactly as it was at thetime when torture and death permeated the place. In this way the siteseeks to annul the gap between these two temporal phases. Visitors aresomehow forced to re-enact the past, in a sort of temporal continuity withits horror. In Villa Grimaldi an opposite strategy is at work: the visitoris in a peaceful park, bearing little sign of the atrocities perpetrated there,located definitely in the past. The act of remembering is situated in apresent time marked as radically different from the past: an unbridgeabledistance being introduced between the two times. Any form of pathemicre-enactment is in this way foreclosed. The aspectuality dimension is alsovery different: in the Park for Peace the past is framed within a terminativeaspect, and the horror of that time is alluded to long after it has come toan end, and thus does not have any degree of continuity with the present,while in the case of Tuol Sleng the past is actualized as a continuous,never-ending present.




Before discussing in more detail the overall meaning effects of thepark, it is necessary to have a closer look at the park space and the way inwhich it has been constructed. The first thing that can be noticed is theopenness of the park, which faces towards the open horizon of the distantmountains: an imaginary contrast with the closedness characterizing theearlier use of Villa Grimaldi as a place of imprisonment. Referring to thisparticular form of spatialization, Nelly Richard (2001: 254) questions pre-cisely the relationship between the regular proportions and open plan ofthe park and the claustrophobic experience of blindfolded victims impri-soned in small cells in the villa. According to Richard the open view is adistancing device producing an effect of remoteness from the traumaticexperiences of the past: ‘The homogeneous and geometric spatiality ofVilla Grimaldi converts into an ordered field of vision what was once atorn texture of experience, disembodying the living matter of memory’(Richard, 2001: 255, my translation).

The park appears as a pleasant garden full of trees, plants, flowers andcoloured mosaics (see Figures 6 and 7) which, at least at first glance, doesnot transmit any sense of a traumatic past, nor bear witness to the manyhorrendous actions planned and perpetrated there. It is designed in theform of a cross, with a fountain at the crossing point of the two main diago-nal paths. The symbolism of the cross is easily interpreted as a religiousone, a ‘symbolic place of reconciliation’ (Lazzara, 2003: 131). According toGo¤ mez-Barris other interpretations are possible, operative within Chile’shistory of dictatorship and resistance. ‘Meaningfully, the cross summonsthe slogan ‘‘Nunca +’’, meaning ‘‘Never again’’ or ‘‘No more’’ that was popu-larly used by the human rights movement during the military dictatorship’(Go¤ mez-Barris, 2009: 62). It seems quite difficult for the visitor, however,to retrieve a similar sense without any more specific information.

Among the few visible signs of what actually happened there is theempty swimming pool, which during the dictatorship was used to tortureand kill political prisoners, and a small wooden tower, a recent reconstruc-tion of the original artifact, a water tank for the villa that was transformedinto a claustrophobic prison. In each of these places a stone marker indicateswhat the place was used for: ‘Piscina: lugar de amedrentamiento’(‘Swimming pool: a frightening place’) ‘La torre: lugar de soledad, torturay exterminio’ (‘The tower: place of loneliness, torture and extermination’).These markers are in the form of a mosaic constructed with bricks andtiles from the former villa bathrooms where prisoners were tortured (seeFigure 8). These tiles were probably particularly meaningful for prisonerssince, being blindfolded, the floor was the only thing they could see(Lazzara, 2003: 134). Other signs of what happened are in the rose garden( Jardin de las rosas) where each rose has a small terracotta pillar with thename of one of the women prisoners who disappeared at Villa Grimaldi(see Figure 9). A line from a poem by Gabriela Mistral is written in asmall basin surrounded by flowers: ‘Todas |¤ bamos a ser reinas’ (We were




Figure 7 Villa Grimaldi, Santiago. Park, detail

Figure 6 Villa Grimaldi, Santiago. Ornamental fountain




Figure 8 Villa Grimaldi, Santiago. Mosaic information plate

Figure 9 Villa Grimaldi, Santiago. Rose garden




all going to be queens). Finally, at one end of the park there is a large wallon which are engraved the names of the 226 victims (see Figure 10).

It is not easy to draw a unitary conclusive reading of the Park forPeace of Villa Grimaldi. Many criticisms have been advanced by differentauthors on what appear to be the two most critical aspects: the overall aes-thetic of the place and a general difficulty in reading and interpreting thesite. Nelly Richard (2001) is among the most critical voices regarding thearrangement of the park, in particular the ‘aesthetic’ use of the tiles andbricks from the villa to compose decorative mosaics with the very samematerial that belonged to the rooms where prisoners were tortured andkilled. According to Richard, we have a disturbing contrast and a strikingdiscrepancy here, between what, in semiotic terms, could be defined as therelationship between expression and content. The result fails to capture the‘dissolution of the semantic and referential world of the victims, reduced tosilence, babbling and shaking by methodical procedures for the eradicationof consciousness’ (Richard, 2001: 255, my translation). The same happens,according to Richard, in the rose garden, where the line by GabrielaMistral together with the conventional poetic effect of roses produces a rhe-toric of femininity sharply in contrast with the memory of the abominablesexual abuse suffered by women prisoners. Similar remarks are made byLazzara (2003: 134), who equally objects to the ‘aesthetics of embellishmentand smoothing’ reproduced in the park, arguing for the impossibility ofinscribing horror within the category of ‘beauty’.

The second criticism is related to what could be considered a general‘lack of sense’, or perhaps more appropriately ‘a sense of lack’, that seemsto pervade the site. The visitor encounters a pleasant but unspecifiedgarden, lacking any internal tracks, pathways or other meaningful direc-tions to help ‘read’ the place. Little concrete information is provided to

Figure 10 Villa Grimaldi, Santiago. Wall with victims’ names




contextualize both the narrative and the history of the place. Interestingly,the only guidebook to the park is in English, by Pedro Alejandro Matta(2000), a former detainee at Villa Grimaldi and one of the most active volun-teers promoting the park. It is possible that the rationale for this choice isthe conviction that the local ‘community of mourners’ is already intimatelybonded to the place and does not need the kind of documentation that, onthe contrary, would be necessary for a less informed international audience.But the ‘living memory’ embedded in this and similar places is destined toslowly dissolve, as living witnesses disappear and time moves towards post-memory (Hirsh, 1997). The youngest Chilean generation of 20-year-oldshas had no direct experience of the dictatorship and thus may well notknow much about it.

In the face of these criticisms, it should be noted that other, alternativereadings, are possible. For example, according to Go¤ mez-Barris (2009: 66)the Peace Park

brackets the experiences at Villa Grimaldi as those of trauma, loss, and vic-timhood. That is, rather than highlight the national issue of domination,resistance, revolution, and counterrevolution that was at stake at VillaGrimaldi, the architectural elements of the park are framed in this limitedunderstanding of the multifaceted history that the place represents, present-ing an important, albeit ultimately limited, view of the past.

In this vein, one could claim that the decision to move away from any formof realistic representation, or re-presentation, of the horror and atrocities isa political decision against representation and its rhetoric, and thus a con-scious turning away from the memorial museum aesthetic.

Depending on which of these two lines of interpretation we adopt, wecan reach a very different, almost oppositional, conclusion, reading theplace as a successful attempt to redesign the landscape of traumaticmemory or as a symbolic monument to the contradictions of Chilean soci-ety. For Go¤ mez-Barris, ‘despite the complexities of representation andmemory, the Peace Park constructs an alternative public sphere that isenhanced and made salient through spaces of reflection and architecturaldesign’ (2009: 70). For Meade, on the contrary, ‘Considering its horrificpast, today the well-tended park is itself a contradiction’, a place wherelocal school children and teenagers come in the early evening to talk andhang out, but where it ‘is unclear how much the park’s young visitors under-stand the history commemorated there’ (2001: 132).

A similar diversity of interpretations opens a series of questions towhich there are no easy answers: is it possible to maintain and transmitmemories of past atrocities while moving away from direct representationof them, and from an explicit aesthetic of ‘realism of horror’? Can the Parkfor Peace be seen as a place of ‘reconciled’ memory, or does it fatallybecome a place of oblivion? A possible answer may lie precisely in the mul-tiple readings, users and practices that the park seems to enable.




Survivors and relatives of victims can come to mourn, equally well asschoolboys can come to play football. In this sense the openness characteriz-ing the park space could be taken as a metaphor for an open, non-univocalreading of the overall ‘sense of place’.

The Park for Peace does not aim to produce in the visitor the kind ofalmost unbearable emotional effect that Tuol Sleng does; on the contrary,it constructs a distancing space from past horror and can thus risk becom-ing perceived as a space of indeterminacy and contradiction. This is not bychance. The park reflects, in this respect, the ambiguity and complexity ofthe Chilean transition to democracy: in the first years after the end of thedictatorship, there were diffuse fears that a too direct representation ofPinochet’s crimes could destabilize a yet fragile democracy, as many scholarshave pointed out. These worries have certainly not been extraneous to thechoice that led to the transformation of Villa Grimaldi to the Park forPeace. The difficulties and ambiguities of this process are clearly visible inthe urban landscape itself: it is, for example, worth noticing that one of themost important avenues in the centre of Santiago is still called Avenida 11de Septiembre (Avenue September 11), in memory of the Pinochet coup(11 September 1973). Various attempts on the part of democratically ori-ented political parties to change the name of this street have not succeeded,due to opposition from the Santiago administration, who have the supportof a considerable number of its citizens.

Tuol Sleng and the Villa Grimaldi Park for Peace demonstrate twoquite different, almost antagonistic, answers to one key problem: how bestto create and transmit a sense of shared memory in a country that still hasnot yet managed to come to terms with its own traumatic past. TheCambodian museum, through a pitiless, disturbing denouncement of whatactually went on there, strongly emphasizes the emotional componentsembedded in the indexicality of the trauma site, while the Chilean Park forPeace neutralizes and distances itself from the same elements.

The two sites can also be read on the background of two different pol-itics of memory: Tuol Sleng aims to reconstruct a unified, univocal nationalidentity through representation of past horror; Villa Grimaldi forecloses inthe most radical sense the very possibility of reconstructing such a unifyingsymbolic representation of identity, opening up for multiple, almost contra-dictory, readings.

The Ustica Memorial Museum, Bologna, ItalyOn 27 June 1980 the Itavia DC-9 aircraft on a regular flight from Bolognato Palermo disappeared from view in the national air radar control systemand plunged into the Mediterranean between the small islands of Ustica,close to Sicily, and Ponza, which lies midway between Rome and Naples.All 77 passengers, amongst them 11 children between the ages of 2 and 12,and two under 24 months, together with the four members of the crew,died in the crash.15




The first hypothesis after the crash was of a sudden collapse of somefundamental bearing structures of the plane; and, indeed, due to this partic-ular suspicion the Itavia company went bankrupt shortly after the event.However, from the very beginning there were serious doubts about the realcause of the disaster, and other hypotheses began taking form, amongstthese, an explosive device placed in the plane, or a guided missile fromoutside.

In 1982 a state commission was charged to investigate what appearedto be one of the most controversial cases of public catastrophes in Italy inthis historical period.16 For over 15 years a series of inquiries followed oneafter another, dogged by various cover-up attempts on the part of the highestlevels of the national military authorities and military aeronautic command,who, at a certain stage, were accused by the commission of committingacts of high treason.

It was in 1999 that a final sentence, handed down on the case by mag-istrate Rosario Priore at the Rome Tribunal, stated the real nature of whathad happened that night in the sky over the Tirrenian sea: it was not anaccident but a real act of war, in an undeclared war taking place at thetime, unknown to public opinion, that ‘by mistake’ had killed 81 innocentcivilians. The DC-9 was brought down by a missile shot by a militarycombat plane of a NATO member nation, probably trying to bring down aLibyan plane, supposedly transporting General Gaddafi, and possibly con-cealing itself behind the Itavia flight.

At the present moment, the identity of the NATO nation involved inthe presumed military action at Ustica is still unknown, and there is consid-erable uncertainty as to whether it might have been the United States orFrance. A claim for compensation has been recently advanced to the Frenchstate, but since the case is classified as an international military affair,common law regulations have no jurisdiction over foreign military com-mand authorities, as is also the case regarding internal affairs of theItalian military command.

During this long legal inquiry and political process, a central role wasplayed by the Association of Families of Victims of the Ustica Massacre(Associazione Parenti delle Vittime della Strage di Ustica), founded on 20May 1988, whose president, Daria Bonfietti, sister of one of the victims ofthe incident and member of the Italian Senate for many years, fought con-tinually for the establishment of the truth regarding the incident itself andfor the construction of the museum as a place of memory.

At a social and political level, a process has been taking place over allthese years, not only in relation to the Ustica case itself but also regardingother massacres in Italy. On the one hand there was a fundamental delegiti-mization of the authority of the state itself, which was seen as inadequate,perhaps even directly involved in perpetuation and covering up of criminalactivities. On the other hand, there was a displacement of political initiativeon the part of the state regarding such cases over to civil society organiza-tions, for example the Families of Victims Association, and, with regard to




management of legal inquiries, over to the magistrates courts. Legal dis-course thus became more and more a substitute for a general lack of politi-cal recognition and action at state level, with the courts themselvesassuming in many cases a role traditionally occupied by politicalinstitutions.

Space limitations do not permit the discussion of further details ofItalian political life during the last three decades, but some insights fromthis are nonetheless necessary in order to frame the basic cultural back-ground within which the idea of a museum took root. They are also neces-sary in order to understand the complex role the Ustica museum projecthas come to assume in this context, since it has mutated into a postponed,prolonged funeral rite, as well as functioning as an elementary form of com-pensation for a fundamental lack of publicly enunciated truth.17

During the long years of the investigation, starting in 1987, theremains of the aircraft, together with a number of personal belongings ofvictims, were recovered from the sea floor, and a skeleton fuselage withwhat remained of the DC-9 was reconstructed in a military hangar atPratica di Mare, close to Rome. This reconstruction ended in 1991, and atthat point the wreckage was put at the disposal of the Families of VictimsAssociation, rather than being destroyed, which would normally have hap-pened in a less controversial case.

Meanwhile, the idea of constructing a museum to conserve the wreck-age and maintain a memory of the event was put to the local administrationat Bologna. Bologna was not a casual choice: the Itavia flight 870 route wasfrom Bologna to Palermo, and since Bologna was the point of departure,most of the victims were from that city. More crucially, the Families ofVictims Association was also based there, and the local municipality hadalways been actively involved in supporting the museum project. Aftermuch discussion and a pilot project that was never realized, a final destina-tion for the museum was found in a disused municipal tram terminal inthe immediate periphery of Bologna.

In June 2006 the plane wreckage was transported to Bologna by 15fire-trucks while the whole event was recorded on video.18 The artistChristian Boltanski was invited to design an installation based on theplane wreckage within the museum, and on 27 June 2007, 27 years afterthe disaster, the Ustica Memorial Museum (Museo per la Memoria diUstica) was officially opened to the public. From its day of opening themuseum was not connected to other historical museums in the city, butinstead to the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Bologna(Mambo). Although this choice certainly depended on the participation andartistic renown of Boltanski, it also represents an implicit indication regard-ing an intended reading of the museum itself.

The Ustica Memorial Museum comprises only one single large instal-lation space, plus a small lateral room where video documentaries andother digital documentation of the Ustica case can be viewed by visitors.The installation space is a rectangular room, dominated by the immense




reconstruction from the wreckage of the plane, occupying the entire area,situated at a level of one meter below the visitors’ walking space, a nar-row elevated gallery surrounding the space containing the wreckage (seeFigure 11). From this gallery, visitors can see the reconstructed plane wreck-age but cannot approach, touch, or enter it. The wreckage is positioned ona strewn pebble floor, which reminds us of the sea floor. Around it, ninelarge black wooden cases formed like huge coffins are placed side by sideon the floor.

The spatial opposition created between the two spaces ^ the lowerfloor with the wreckage and the visitors’ gallery above ^ seems to allude toa related system of temporal oppositions, where the wreckage representsthe time of the past, while the gallery is the present time of the living visi-tors. But things are far more complex than that, and the mutual intertwin-ing of present and past, life and death, is much more rich and intriguing.

Before entering into a more detailed discussion of the above men-tioned matters, it is necessary to describe in more detail the very firstimpressions that a casual visitor experiences.19 Entering the large room con-taining the installation, the visitors are captured by a poly-sensorial environ-ment affecting their most primary senses, in particular, sight and hearing.Only slowly is one able to disambiguate the many different sensory effects,by localizing their diverse sources. A strange auditory impression pervadesthe room: rhythmic whisperings that are not clearly distinguishable as any-thing meaningful to begin with, but which bring to mind the murmur

Figure 11 Ustica Memorial Museum, Bologna. Interior




of ocean waves. The lighting in the space also seems to be rhythmicallychanging, which is due to 81 hanging lamps that are slowly and regularlypulsating with greater or lesser intensity.

However, the most intense sense impression is certainly due to thefirst sight of the immense plane wreckage itself, which occupies the wholeof the main museum space. The skeletal mass of wreckage is made up ofmore than 2000 fragments recovered from the sea at Ustica, each labelledwith a small piece of paper containing the notes and numbers used by theinvestigators while they were creating a complete inventory of the foundremains of the aircraft. The indexical meaning effect of the wreckage isastonishingly powerful: it is almost impossible not to imagine what it waslike to be there, and what must have been experienced by the unknowingpassengers on that last, tragic flight.This intense reality effect depends pre-cisely on the fact that what one is seeing is the ‘real’ aircraft, or at leastwhat was left of it, patiently reassembled, piece by piece over time.

But is this the ‘real’ aircraft? Here again one faces the authenticitydilemma mentioned previously. Indeed, the remains of the plane retrievedfrom the ocean floor originally included much more than what can now beseen in the museum: tons of different materials, including seats, cables,and many other components belonging to the destroyed aircraft. What wesee here is therefore a reconstruction of only a part of that reality ratherthan reality itself, which is due to a careful selection process and systematicchoices made to produce a very precise reality effect.

Walking along the gallery, the visitor soon realizes that the sounds shehas heard when entering the room come from 81 black mirrors, hung in arow along two of the walls of the rooms, with the other two walls occupiedby large windows covered by translucent white curtains (see Figure 12).

Behind each of the black mirrors is hidden a loudspeaker diffusing thesound of one recorded voice, all of which are different: some men, somewomen, some children, all whispering a series of different sentences.Approaching each mirror, the visitor can hear better what is said and under-stand what the sentences are: fragments of conversations, or thoughts thatthe passengers might possibly have exchanged with one another (or them-selves) during the flight before the crash.

These voices constitute the aesthetic core of the original Boltanskiinstallation: the artist has given voice to all 81 victims, attributing one imag-inary sentence to each, and having a professional actor or actress recordthese for use in the installation. All these sentences are related to passen-gers’ possible everyday concerns, small talk and, more than anything else,their plans and projections of their lives into the future, whether part of along-term plan or just a minor detail in a short-term future never to be real-ized (‘tomorrow I’ll put on my white dress’, ‘in Palermo I’ll eat the best icecream in town’).

In this way the gallery becomes the place where the different temporaldimensions in play confront one another: the voices come from the past,but are enunciated in a circular, repetitive durative present, which in its




turn confronts the present time of visitors circling around the wreckage. Inthis way an initial short-circuit is produced between the past and an endless,circular present, where the different voices are ‘condemned’ to repeat for-ever their very own same sentence. But at the same time the voices are allwhispering about possible futures, part of the larger life project in whichall human beings are immersed.

In this complex intertwining of the past moment from which all thevoices come, the present moment with their own enunciation in themuseum space, and the future they refer to ^ a future never to be ^ akind of temporal rupture begins to materialize. This is the punctual timeof the catastrophe itself, absent from the words of the voices since all comefrom a time just before the crash. It is the visitor, the visitor alone, whobridges this gap, connecting, through the immediacy of her presence, differ-ent temporal dimensions: the unending projection of the dead passengers’voices into their never accomplished future lives, and the terminativemoment of the crash, the final closure that put an end to all their futures.

Similarly to what occurred in the Tuol Sleng Museum, althoughthrough different means, here too the particular positioning of the visitorwithin the installation system operates as a meaning device that re-enactsone aspect of the victims’ experience. However, in the case of the UsticaMuseum, the pathemic effect in the visitor is enhanced by a painful aware-ness that victims of the crash at that time had no awareness at all of whatwas about to happen to them. The visitor in this way becomes, rather than

Figure 12 Ustica Memorial Museum, Bologna. Black mirror balcony




a spectator of a represented trauma, a witness of a fragment in time before atragedy endlessly re-presenting itself.

There is one other very important feature in Boltanski’s installationthat powerfully reinforces this particular reading of the role of visitors aswitnesses, bonding them even more intimately to the position of the victims.In the Ustica Memorial Museum the victims are, apparently, absent: theyare never represented, their names are never revealed, their photographsnever shown. While the wreckage can be seen from all possible positionsin the room, the victims are invisible: they occupy the place of absence,they are outside of the realm of representation, the non-representable sideof the massacre. However, despite this absence, they are constantly madepresent through various meaning displacement devices and rhetorical sub-stitution. Indeed, the museum itself could be read as a sophisticated devicefor creating a displaced re-presentation of the traumatic event, rather thanas a representational instance of it.

The first meaning displacement is the substitution of unnamed vic-tims by their whispered voices, bringing to our present time sonic frag-ments of their imagined life stories. This at the same time produces a shiftfrom the real world the victims belonged to, over to the fictional world con-structed by the artist. We are not told who the victims were, or what theirnames were, but we are constantly prodded to imagine what kinds of con-cerns and thoughts might possibly have occupied them in the last momentsof their lives.

A second meaning displacement is present in the sphere of imagesand visual representations. As mentioned above, no photographs or otherrepresentational devices regarding the victims are provided for visitors; theloudspeakers that, in a way, speak for them are all hidden behind 81 blackmirrors, which correspond to the number of victims. The mirrors clearlyact as an implicit substitution for actual images of each of the victims, andvaguely recall a similar number of gravestones in a cemetery. But at thesame time, they are real mirrors that create a reflection of the visitors asthey look into them. What the visitor sees when facing one of the mirrorsis not the image of a victim but his or her own face looking back. Thisforces a powerful identification with the victim, bringing into play the possi-bility of becoming a casual victim oneself of an unexpected massacre ofthis kind. It is interesting to compare this meaning effect with what wasgoing on in the case of the use of visual imagery of victims at the TuolSleng Museum (absent at Villa Grimaldi). At Tuol Sleng, a visitor lookingat the photographs of the dead prisoners occupies an ambiguous positionpreviously occupied by a photographer-persecutor. At the Ustica Museumthe space of representation of the victim is an empty space, an absencefilled by the reflected image of the visitor. Another short-circuit seems totake place here, not on the temporal but rather on the visual plane.The vis-itor is positioned in precisely the same space where the image of the victim‘ought’ to be, framed in their empty image. At the same time, in confront-ing their own face in the mirror, visitors are able to see, reflected in the




background over their shoulders, the massive volume of the wreckage,reminding them of the reality of what happened in the past.20

Finally, a third displacement involves a metonymical rhetorical substi-tution from persons to objects: the personal belongings of the DC-9 passen-gers recovered from the sea floor. As mentioned initially, placed alongsidethe wreckage of the plane are nine huge wooden cases lying on the floor,each covered with black cloth ^ nine, of course, being an exact sub-multipleof 81. These cases contain all the passengers’ personal belongings recoveredfrom the crash site, but these will never be directly subjected to the viewof the visitor. A choice of this kind seems to extend to these material objectsthe same sacredness attributed to dead bodies that should be preserved,but out of sight, and thus piously hidden. Personal belongings as well asbodies appear to be seen as too intimate, too personal to be exposed to ourview.

Visitors discover what is inside the nine black cases only at the veryend of their visit, when they each receive a small booklet entitled: Listadegli oggetti personali appartenenti ai passaggeri del volo IH870 (‘The listof the HI870 flight passengers’ personal belongings’). All the objects werecarefully photographed before being put into the cases, and are reproducedin the book in the form of sub-lists according to their general categories(e.g. shoes, bags, glasses, wallets) without any further reference to theirindividual owners. The photographs remind us in a way of police photosand, being thus de-contextualized from their normal areas of use and theirabsent owners, produce a powerful type of meaning effect involving both asense of estrangement and one of involvement (see Figure 13). Visitors areallowed to keep the booklet when they leave the museum, as a kind of rhe-torical substitute for the characteristic photographs of the dead personsthat in Italy are distributed after a funeral to people who attend.

To conclude, the visit to the Ustica Museum is first and foremost anintense, complex aesthetic experience, in apparent contradiction to the wide-spread idea that we do not visit memorial museums because they containpowerful works of art (Young, 1993). It might be argued that the UsticaMemorial Museum, in that respect, is an extreme example: after all, not allmemorials have been designed by famous contemporary artists such asBoltanski, or are administratively connected to local institutions for promot-ing contemporary art.

In this sense the Ustica Museum differs considerably from both theother two case studies mentioned above, and represents a ‘third’ alternativeto both the realism of Tuol Sleng and the representational rarefaction ofVilla Grimaldi. It may well be the case that the Boltanski installation repre-sents an exceptional and particular case not quite common in the ‘memorialmuseum landscape’; it certainly challenges this paradigm in its two mainvariations of figuration of, or abstraction from, past horrors occurring atthe trauma site. The wreckage exhibits all the features of indexical realism,while at the same time transcending reality with a move towards a creative,imaginative, fictional work of art. The re-enactment of the past that takes




place in this museum is mediated through this fictional work of art, and notthrough any direct or realistic representation of horror and death.

Conclusion: Beyond IndexicalityThe three site analyses presented here have shown the high level of culturaland political relevance that trauma sites have gained, particularly in the con-text of post-conflict societies, and their central role in developing a wide

Figure 13 Ustica Memorial Museum, Bologna. Detail of informa-tion booklet




range of culturally diverse memory politics that affect in significant waysthe national, and global, identities of these societies.

In bearing direct witness to the past, trauma sites do not merely depicta given historical and political situation, but they actually take part in itscultural reconstruction and transformation. This active role depends cru-cially on their indexical nature. Trauma sites are in this respect much morepowerful semiotic devices than any other kind of memorial site, since theyalready exist as genuine signifiers and testimonials of the past inscribed inthe urban landscape, and deeply embedded in their wider historical and cul-tural context. The many complex and quite different strategies of conserva-tion, transformation, museification or, alternatively, cancellation, becomean integral part of the memorialization, or obliteration, of the traumaticpast, linking past memory to present history. Tuol Sleng, Villa Grimaldiand the Bologna Ustica Museum each bring into play three quite differentmemory politics, in this order: (i) re-enactment and re-presentation; (ii) dis-tancing; (iii) symbolic transformation into aesthetic experience.

In the first case, at Tuol Sleng, visitors are relocated in the traumaspace, in a sort of ‘frozen past’ where they are subject to a strong sense ofemotional and sensorial involvement. In the second, Villa Grimaldi, a pro-cess of attenuation is at work, since the traces of the past are less visibleand their emotional effects weaker. In a way,Villa Grimaldi presents a lesspre-determined and less univocal reading of its material and historicalspace when compared with Tuol Sleng, but there is also a potential risk ofneutralizing the past. The Ustica Museum represents yet one more, differ-ent, option, a movement towards an artistic and creative reinterpretation ofthe traumatic event. The Ustica Museum is also just one more instance of alarger, more pervasive tendency to emphasize pathemic, emotional andother forms of sensory experience ^ a tendency shared by many othermemorial museums and trauma sites today. The visit to both Tuol Slengand the Ustica Museum, although in quite different ways, offers a kind of‘total immersion experience’ for visitors, involving all their senses, theirsomatic participation, and their emotions. In this way visitors becomeliving witnesses of the traumatic past, iteratively re-enacted through theirembodied experience.What might be missing in this flow of immediate sen-sory experience is, paradoxically, a more detailed understanding of thetrauma itself as a historical event ^ i.e. its broader cultural, political andother contextual aspects and connotations. The Ustica Museum in thisrespect is an exemplary case, since its powerful portfolio of complex senseeffects seems to rest mainly in its capacity to capture what is most universalin the fundamental incomprehensibility of all forms of dramatic suddendeath, rather than informing us about specific details of this massacre asembedded in its unique historical and cultural context.

It is worth noticing that, with regard to this particular point, all threesites analysed above exhibit one key feature: none really take into accountthe dense informational dimension of the complexity of the combined his-torical facts. Although in quite different ways, and perhaps for quite




different reasons, in all three trauma sites there is a general lack of factualinformation and any other kind of instructional materials. As a result, itmay become rather difficult to understand the historical, cultural and polit-ical network of reasons and causes that underlie these events, as well astheir internal dynamics. All this is largely left up to the evocative power ofthe place itself, to its unique capacity for bringing events of the past forwardinto our present time by way of its indexical links with what happened.But emotional evocation is something quite different from deep under-standing. In this sense the power of indexicality as a signifying device maybecome a limit, a sort of mono-dimensional enclosure system, lacking anyactive links to the wider historical, cultural and political context that pro-duced the traumatic event.

The Ustica Museum experiment can be seen, from this point of view,as an attempt to open for a new type of discursive dimension, in this caseaesthetic and artistic. In this sense the Ustica case may provide us with animportant new methodological development. Obviously it is not a questionof transforming all trauma sites into artistic installations, but rather to con-ceive of, and perhaps invent, a memory politics able to go beyond pure fixa-tions on the past, opening up new dimensions and practices, connectingwhat went on in the past to the present, and the future.

On a recent visit to Chile, in January 2011, I witnessed a similar caseof displacement. Villa Grimaldi, like other smaller trauma sites in theSantiago area, was made the location of an extremely engaging theatre per-formance, as part of the annual Santiago International Theatre Festival.This performance was Villa, written and directed by Guillermo Caldero¤ n,which brings to the centre of focus a debate regarding how Villa Grimaldiought to be preserved and transformed. The three young actresses play thedaughters of three women formerly imprisoned and abused in VillaGrimaldi. The trauma site in this case is exploited as both the stage forand subject of a meta-reflection on the very politics of memory behind thetransformation of such places into museums or parks, questioning criticallypositions that may be taken, and choices that may be made, from a political,existential, and aesthetic viewpoint.

This experiment carried out with Villa Grimaldi suggests a new andchallenging way to give life to re-actualization of historical memory, con-necting traumatic experiences of past generations with the lives and experi-ences of new ones. Through engaging in such intergenerational encounters,memory politics may escape from a too rigid conception of the past as some-thing fixed in stone for once and for all, weaving into it new creative formsfrom the present, opening up for new discourses, practices and directionsfor the future.

Notes1. This is, for example, the case of the Memorial Hall in Nanjing (see Violi, 2009).

2. Trauma Studies have been largely dominated by a strong anti-representational,if not openly iconoclastic, bias against visual representation of




traumatic experience. It is generally maintained that no representation can trans-mit the truth of the traumatic experience which is, in fact, unrepresentable.However, more recently, this position has been challenged (see for exampleGuerin and Hallas, 2007).

3. The distinction between representation and re-presentation has already beendiscussed by Derrida (1982). Discussing the concept of representation in the phil-osophical tradition, Derrida claims that ‘Vorstellung seems not to imply immedi-ately the meaning that is carried in the re- of re-praesentatio. Vorstellen seems tomean simply, as Heidegger emphasizes, to place, to dispose before oneself, a sortof theme or thesis. But this sense or value of being-before is already at work in‘‘present’’. Praesentatio signifies the fact of presenting and re-praesentatio that ofrendering present, of a summoning as a power-of-bringing-back-to-presence’(Derrida, 1982: 307).

4. The issue of realism in relation to representation of trauma is a much discussedtopic in Trauma Studies: see for example the notion of traumatic realism discussedby Rothberg (2000).

5. I am using here the notion of ‘ideal’ visitor paralleling that of ‘ideal reader’ or‘model reader’ (see Eco, 1984).

6. I am indebted to Francesco Mazzucchelli, whom I would like to thank for sug-gesting this interesting site example.

7. All figures in this article are based on the author’s photographs.

8. For a discussion of Cambodian history from the middle of last century seeChandler (1991, 1999).

9. For the war memorial in Vietnam seeWagner-Pacifici and Schwartz (1991).

10. Kaing Kek Eav was eventually sentenced to 35 years imprisonment on 27July 2010, to be calculated from the day of his arrest on 10 June 1999. Of thistotal confinement period, with 5 years remisssion for cooperation with the courtand his recognition of the crimes detracted, 19 years of prison now remain (seehttp://cambodiamirror.wordpress.com/2010/07/28/the-former-tuol-sleng-prison-chief-is-sentenced-to-serve-35-years-in-prison-tuesday-27-7-2010/.)

11. See on this point, among others: Richard (1998, 2000, 2001), Lira (2001),Illanes (2002), Paley (2001), Meade (2001), and Go¤ mez-Barris (2009).

12. See on this point Baxter (2005: 128).

13. See on this specific point both Baxter (2005: 129) and Lazzara (2003: 131),who give a slightly different account of this discussion.

14. I am using here two notions borrowed from linguistics, time and aspect, inorder to analyze the semantics of space. In linguistics, temporality refers to therelation between the time of utterance and the action expressed by the verb.Aspectuality refers to the different perspectives from which an action can bedescribed, focalizing on the beginning of an action (I started reading), on its dura-tion (I was reading), on its final state (I finished reading). The same action canbe described as punctual (I read) or as progressive and continuous (I was readingfor ten hours).

15. See: http://www.museomemoriaustica.it/storia.htm




16. Less than two months after the Ustica disaster, on 2 August 1980, a bombexploded in Bologna railway station, killing 82 people and wounding more than200. After three levels of judicial process, a fascist terrorist group was found tobe guilty and condemned for mass murder.

17. See on this point Salerno (2010).

18. The record is now visible in a documentary movie shown in the documenta-tion room of the museum.

19. I am using a first-person description here since I am relying on my own per-sonal experience of my first visit to the museum, when I carefully took notes doc-umenting all my impressions.

20. I am indebted to Daniele Salerno for this observation.

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Patrizia Violi is Professor of Semiotics at the University of Bologna,Department of Communication, and Coordinator of the PhD Program inSemiotics at the Italian Institute of Human Sciences. She is the Directorof TRAME, Interdisciplinary Centre for the Study of Memory andCultural Traumas (www.trame.unibo.it) at the University of Bologna. Hermain areas of research include text analysis, language and gender, andsemantic theory, on which themes she has published numerous articles andvolumes. She is currently working on cultural semiotics and traumaticmemory. [email: [email protected]]




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