What role can a museum play in coming to terms with a traumatic past? How can the memory of political violence be preserved, displayed and passed on without reducing it to a historical artefact, but rather keeping it alive as a tool for civic awareness?
Taking these questions as a starting point, María Fernanda García Iribarren, Director of the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, Chile, discusses the experience of an institution inaugurated in 2010 to document the human rights violations committed by the Chilean state between 1973 and 1990, during the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. During those years, more than three thousand people were killed or forcibly disappeared, tens of thousands were imprisoned and tortured, and hundreds of thousands were forced into exile, giving rise to a diaspora that reached many countries, including Italy.
Born out of the testimonies of victims and their families, the museum today faces the challenge of engaging new generations in a context in which memory remains contested terrain: how can an archive of violence be constructed? How do we decide what to display and how to display it? How can memory, also through art, be transformed into an active commitment to truth and justice?
What emerges is a reflection on the role of the museum that transcends the Chilean context and takes on universal significance. In an era in which denialism is resurfacing and the temptation to forget is reemerging, the museum reaffirms its role as a critical space where memory becomes a political and cultural act, a bastion of human rights, and a tool for examining not only the past but also the contradictions of our present.
In collaboration with the Department of Human and Social Sciences at Università di Napoli L’Orientale.
Speakers
Eugenio Viola Director museo Madre
Augusto Guarino Vice-Rector for Internationalisation and Professor of Spanish Literature, Università di Napoli L’Orientale
Maria De Vivo Professor of Contemporary Art History, Università di Napoli L’Orientale
