Violi 2012

Trauma Site Museums and
Politics of Memory
Tuol Sleng,Villa Grimaldi and the Bologna
Ustica 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, New Delhi, and Singapore),
Vol. 29(1): 36^75
DOI: 10.1177/0263276411423035
Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNIV NEBRASKA LIBRARIES on April 8, 2015

Violi ^ Trauma Site Museums and Politics of Memory 37
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
A
MONG THE new museum forms that this article aims to explore, a
special position is occupied by what today are often called memorial
museums, a specific museum type ‘dedicated to historic events com-
memorating mass suffering of some kind’ (Williams, 2007: 8). Over the
last 10 years, we have witnessed an impressive growth in such memorial
museums; it would be difficult to decide whether this proliferation depends
mostly on the obsession with memory that seems to characterize our
shared contemporaneity, or on an increase of ‘mass suffering’ of various
kinds, 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 past
traumatic events. This approach requires a re-categorization of memorials
of 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 of
poet Elizabeth Bishop, or is it something more? My position in this article
is that a close descriptive reading is an indispensable starting point for crit-
ical understanding of the memory politics trauma sites embody in relation
to 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 and
horror that took place there. The fact that 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 taken about which memory politics is to
be adopted in each case. But any given politics of memory is never ‘innocent’
or neutral: the past is always remembered and reconstructed from the
point 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 why
a 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 more
than 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 of
places where slaughter, torture and horror have been carried out are key
points for understanding better the relationship between memory and his-
tory in the case of each post-conflict society.

38 Theory, Culture & Society 29(1)
At the same time, because of their indexical nature, trauma sites force
a reframing of the whole issue of representation, its aesthetic and ethic
dimensions, which will challenge a number of well known contextual
issues from a new and different perspective. In general, memorial museums
open fundamental and difficult questions regarding conservation and trans-
formation of a traumatic past and, in the long run, the very politics of
memory and remembering. What should be transmitted and how? What
kind of attitudes ought to be adopted in relation to victims, in the event
that they want to forget? Ought their will to be respected or should truth
always be asserted? How can we best present testimony of their suffering
without appropriating or even exploiting their experiences? Are justice
and truth always compatible with the needs and interests of post-conflict
societies, or might traumatic memory conflict with social reconciliation? Is
a critical transmission of memory that is capable of overcoming a purely
auto-referential commemoration of the past possible, thus re-locating
memory in a context of new social, political and institutional needs, while
at 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 case
of those memorials that I have initially characterized as trauma sites.
The memorial museum is still rather too large a category, since it may
cover a very broad typology of quite different objects: memorials, mauso-
leums, memory museums, memory parks, and so on. This broad coverage
depends on the fact that the definition itself is based solely on the specific
nature of the ‘content’ of the museum, i.e. a traumatic event, without any
more 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 Jewish
Museum in Berlin, or monuments such as The Memorial to the Murdered
Jews 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, the
Holocaust Museum in Washington, 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, such
as Auschwitz or the Tuol Sleng Museum of the Crimes of Genocide in
Phnom Penh, Cambodia. I will refer to this latter type of museum as
trauma site museums (or simply trauma sites). Obviously, as is always the
case with categorizations of this kind, this distinction is not a completely
clear-cut one, since we can have partial overlapping, as when a completely
new 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 focus
from pure content elements to more formal features that characterize these
places: it is indeed precisely on the diverse semiotic natures of these two
kinds of memorial that my distinction is based.

Indexicality
The 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 question
have occurred, and the demonstration of such a continuity is an essential
part of their inherent and constructed meaning, not to say the very reason
for their existence. Spatial contiguity also implies a different set of relation-
ships within the temporal dimension. Although we, as visitors, are located
in a different time with respect to the traumatic events that took place at
the site, a direct link with the past seems to be activated by the indexicality
of 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 with
the particular embodied instance that, at a particular time, produced them
(Eco, 1975). They maintain, so to speak, an embodied memory of the
actual 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 physical
place: in order to acquire a similar testimonial nature, such places have to
undergo a semiotic process that transforms imprints into traces, i.e signs
recognized and interpreted as such (Eco, 1975). Here there is at work a
double 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 and
this awareness becomes part of her competence as visitor. Through enuncia-
tion the physical space is developed into a narrative, and its indexical
nature is transformed from a purely causal contiguity into a meaningful
element.
In this way indexicality becomes a fundamental component of the
sense of place (see Meyrowitz, 1985) of a trauma site, with important conse-
quences for the positioning of visitors. Independently of how much remains
of the past, and how carefully it is preserved, visitors know they are in
the very place where terrible events occurred, and this knowledge contrib-
utes to a complex, multifaceted perception of it. Visitors not only see
something of this terrible past, they also imagine that which cannot be
seen. The emotional intensity and pathemic effect characteristic of experi-
ences of visiting trauma sites depend crucially on the evocative power of
indexical 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 visible
documentations of the past and powerful activators of imaginary forms
of reconstruction.

The indexical semiotic character of trauma sites affects many impor-

tant dimensions of their analysis, marking a difference at three different
levels with the memorial museum constructed ex novo: at the epistemologi-
cal level, regarding the crucial issue of authenticity, which in turn implies
questioning the politics of conservation and restoration; at the ethical level,
regarding its relationship with the survivors of the place, and the positioning
of 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 difficult
historical 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 exhibited
in quite different forms: the link to the past remains, establishing a certain
degree of ‘fidelity’, and the form of conservation of the original places may
vary greatly, according to what I call a scale of indexicality, that moves
from a maximum of conservation of past traces to a maximum of neutraliza-
tion. These two extremes on the scale of indexicality constitute two quite
different rhetorics of memory and strategies of remembering. On the one
hand, we have sites that conserve almost obsessively all possible elements
of the original place, through a literal and realistic representation of the
past, without any distancing from it. At the opposite end of the scale there
are sites that downplay the rhetoric of original authenticity, operating more
through abstraction and allusion rather than through direct exposure of
past remains, seeking to transpose memories into a different interpretative
framework. The first two cases analyzed in this paper, the Tuol Sleng
museum and Villa Grimaldi, can be taken as prototypical cases of these
two 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 time
transforming it into an experimental field of new discourses, artistic and
aesthetic effects.
The scale of indexicality, and therefore the various ways of using
causal links with space, objects and remains of a traumatic past, can help
in framing some specific dimensions that appear relevant for analysis of
trauma 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 in
such cases lies at the very core of any discussion of traumatic memories
and 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 from
other memorial museums. Strictly speaking, they do not represent anything;
rather, since the traumatic events happened there, they directly expose
some precise material traces of them. In a way, what we have here is a shift
from representation to re-presentation,3 which is a consequence of the
unique indexical nature of these places and the direct links they maintain
with the actual trauma. The re-presentation effect may vary greatly from
site to site, according to the previously mentioned scale of indexicality. The
more faithfully a trauma site maintains an indexical link with the past, con-
serving the actual remains of the original place, the stronger will be the
effect of the rhetoric of re-presentation.
But theoretically speaking, things are rather more complicated than
this. Here we are facing a highly complex issue that goes right to the heart
of the aesthetics of trauma representation, addressing the issue of realistic
versus more abstract representational forms.4 At first sight it appears that
re-presentational sites tend to be more ‘realistic’ than representational ones,
but this question is incorrectly framed, since representational memorials
can also induce highly realistic effects. This is the case, to quote just one
example, of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, a
new museum that has no indexical links at all to a place of extermination.
The opposition between realistic and abstract forms does not coincide with
the semiotic opposition between indexes and symbols, or between indexes
and icons. No semiotic object is entirely reducible to one form of significa-
tion, as it always simultaneously embodies indexical, iconic and symbolic
elements (cf. Peirce, 1931^58); clearly, re-presentational memorials cannot
be 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 by
simulating specific environments, furniture, utensils, clothes and other
kinds of material elements as they effectively were, reproducing them right
down to their most insignificant details, as many contemporary memorials
do. The experiential efficacy of re-presentational or indexical trauma sites
does not lie in their alleged ‘realism’ but elsewhere, more precisely in their
being a trace linking past and present through persistency of material ele-
ments over time. In other words, it relies on the supposed authenticity of
traces, 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, presupposing
the 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 does
not primarily depend on what is exhibited there but on visitors’ knowledge

of its indexical character. This knowledge facilitates specific modes of

interpretation, reading and fruition of the site: in this sense indexicality
represents a unique interpretative function that creates a semiotic bridge
between the place itself, the knowledge of the visitor and her positioning
within it. Accordingly, the principal question in these cases is not ‘how to
represent 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: instruments
of torture and suffering, for example? The meagre everyday belongings of
people who lost their lives there? Their mortal remains? All difficult deci-
sions, since the main ‘exhibits’ are indeed often the few traces that remain
of people killed in these places.
As Primo Levi first pointed out, a fundamental paradox seems to be
lurking here: the dead are the only possible, the ultimate witnesses, while
at the same time they cannot themselves bear witness, they have no voice.
Only their traces can speak for them, and about them. But which traces
are 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? remains
of the dead? This ethical dimension is inextricably intertwined with an aes-
thetic dimension, since each choice is at the same time a choice about what
to show and how to show it.
The second, highly relevant question is that of the conservation and
authenticity of the sites in question. Compared to more traditional
museums, trauma sites are more difficult to define and have a rather
hybrid character: they are neither real museums nor cemeteries, nor places
of worship, nor monuments ^ they are all of these together, and perhaps
even more. But first and foremost, they were once places of extermination.
For the people who visit them, this implies a kind of overlap between what
the place once was and what it now is, between being in a prison and
being 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 maintain
the ‘authenticity’of such places, or does their conversion into a museum inev-
itably transform them into something other than themselves? Behind the
apparently technical question of restoration are hidden other, more engag-
ing, issues, such as the ethical legitimacy or aesthetic value of the trauma
sites 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 profound
paradox that we could call the authenticity paradox, already noted by
Assmann (1999): the action of trying to conserve the authenticity of such
places 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 often
seem unable to tell the story and speak of the life-experiences of the real
people who encountered their final destiny there. Facing such a paradox,
two different answers are possible. The first is to assume as unavoidable
the impossibility of recreating the past, emphasizing the distance that sepa-
rates us from the traumatic events and, possibly, allowing that time gap to
create 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: the
past is made present and re-actualized through a variety of devices aiming
at strong emotional involvement on the part of the visitor.
These two options are not necessarily coincident with the two
extremes of the previously mentioned indexicality scale, although these
may well overlap. But not necessarily so. For example, the effect of actualiz-
ing the past can be obtained through a transforming intervention altering
the past traces, as it is in the case of San Saba, to be shortly discussed in
what 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 and
the emotional effects produced by this.
Among the most representative advocates of the first position is Ruth
Klˇger, one of the most acutely attentive witnesses of the Holocaust. In
Klˇger’s (1992) view, places of this kind cannot be conserved, since it is
impossible to recreate any immediate contact with the full reality of
trauma, and any attempt in this direction is only an illusion. It should be
noticed that comments of this kind are often made from the perspective of
a survivor-witness, such as Ruth Klˇger. This is, however, a very particular
perspective which is not generalizable: trauma sites are after all not kept
and maintained only for their survivors. These sites primarily serve a func-
tion related to the transmission of documented traumatic events of the past
to future generations, as well as potentially playing a role in an extended
geopolitical 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 other
functions, over and above allowing for remembering. Limiting the discus-
sion here to one case study: Tuol Sleng, particularly in the early days after
its opening, was for example primarily designed for members of the interna-
tional community, not for the survivors themselves or the Cambodian
people. In this specific case the memory of a traumatized society became
an 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 Ruth

Klˇger appears to be that of a minority. Today, the second option mentioned
above is largely predominant and is generally adopted and diffused with
the aim of not only preserving the basic authenticity of the sites just as
they were, but also of recreating a complex authenticity effect by way of a
wide range of different enunciatory strategies. What I refer to here as an
authenticity effect is a meaning effect produced in the experience of visi-
tors, rather than an abstract form of correspondence with some pre-existing
reality. It is based mainly on a strong pathemization of the actual experience
of the visit to the site, which, in some cases, becomes a form of re-enactment
of aspects of the trauma itself. We shall see, in both the case of the Tuol
Sleng prison and particularly in the case of the Ustica Memorial Museum
in Bologna, Italy, two different instances of this: in both these museums
visitors are offered an emotional, embodied experience which, in the case
of the Bologna museum, is certainly also an aesthetic experience.
Offering strong emotional and even corporeal involvement through
specific elements that allude to the dreadful experience of victims now
seems a recurrent tendency in contemporary memorial museums. At the
US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, for example, each vis-
itor is given an ID card of a person who actually lived during the
Holocaust, some Jewish, some not, some adult, some children, some survi-
vors, some not, in order to evoke a more personal sense of identification
with individual victims.
The desire to evoke an emotional sensory response of this kind has
implications for the material form of the restoration itself, as is the case
with 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 a
national 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 high
walls 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 of
oppression and claustrophobic enclosedness that may be something like
what prisoners of the Nazi camp might have felt themselves, though for
very different reasons. This is another example of an attempt to reproduce
in the actual bodies of visitors an almost unimaginable felt reality of the
past. Using the theoretical notion created by Le¤vi-Strauss (1958) to describe
the effect of the Kuna singing, we could say that this type of restoration
has 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 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) located in Bologna, Italy.

Figure 1 The restored entrance at Risiera San Saba, Trieste
The first two sites are interesting examples of very different ways of
using traumatic memories in post-conflict societies; the third represents a
case of discursive displacement into an artistic form of experimentation. In
this last case, the wreckage of an aircraft is itself the spatial location of the
traumatic event to be remembered, which is an air crash involving precisely
this aircraft. Although, in this case, the ‘site’ is constituted by an object
and not a physical place, from the point of view of the formal categorization
suggested above, based on the dimension of indexicality, the Ustica
Museum belongs to the same conceptual category and is from all points of

view a trauma site. Moreover, the Ustica Memorial Museum exhibits in an

exemplary way key tendencies now characterizing contemporary trauma
sites and memorial museums. Before returning to the Ustica Museum, and
considering how it might challenge the aesthetics of memory, the Tuol
Sleng 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 Penh

The Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide Crimes in Phnom Penh is on the site
of the infamous ‘S-21’, the largest centre of detention, interrogation and tor-
ture established by the Khmer Rouge secret police in Democratic
Kampuchea during their dictatorship period from 1975 to 1979.8 The full
extent 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 victims
was somewhere between 15,000 and 17,000 persons, mainly intermediate
cadres of the Party. Only seven survivors were discovered in S-21 by the
Vietnamese 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-Khmer
Rouge allies faced a completely devastated country, with no infrastructure,
hospitals, schools, or state organization of any kind. Despite the fact that
an emergency situation of this kind might have suggested other priorities,
the interim administration and the Vietnamese decided to immediately
transform S-21 into a museum; in March 1979, less than three months
after the liberation of Phnom Penh, the first visitors entered the museum,
which at that time was open only to foreign journalists and international
delegations.
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 horrors
of S-21, would appear not only justified but almost a humanitarian duty,
transforming them from foreign invaders into liberators. Something similar
held for the new government that followed the Khmer Rouge dictatorship,
the Cambodian People’s Republic of Kampuchea, whose role had to be
transformed from collaborators with invaders to liberators of their own
country 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 strategy
of identity construction for the new Cambodia, involving a complex rewrit-
ing of its past, its national identity, its international legitimacy. The
museum 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 crucial
element 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 most
elegant 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 certain
architectural 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 did
not alter the external appearance of the place, which was in turn also kept
intact during the later reconfiguration of the place as museum. Everything
is now as it was then: we can see some of the instruments of torture, the
narrow cells where prisoners were huddled, the interrogation rooms. Even
the bloodstains on the floor and on the walls have not been cleaned up, but
rather carefully preserved, exactly as they were upon the entry of the
Vietnamese troops into S-21 in 1979. When moving inside the museum, a
first important element that one notices is the almost total absence of infor-
mation material. Visitors who do not yet know about the history of
Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge regime will not find any help here to
understand the fundamental roots of the genocide, its causes, or the complex
network 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 cultural
backgrounds than the one to which the museum belongs. Nothing of this
kind 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 or
understood. 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 tour
are fully occupied by huge colourful paintings by Vann Nath, one of the
seven survivors of S-21 (see Figure 3).
Over and above direct exposure to a glass case display of human
remains, the most striking feature of Tuol Sleng is probably the thousands
and thousands of photographic portraits of victims covering the walls of
the four main buildings of the museum, particularly Building B (see
Figures 4 and 5).
These portraits were taken by a special service unit of the Khmer
Rouge when prisoners entered S-21. Although all the photos were carefully
stored together with their personal data, those currently on display in the
museum offer no indication of the name of the victim, place of birth or
any other demographic data. The absence of prisoners’ names is somewhat
surprising because it contradicts a well established tradition that was
Figure 3 Tuol Sleng Museum. Painting by V ann Nath

Figure 4 Tuol Sleng Museum. ID photos of prisoners
Figure 5 Tuol Sleng Museum. ID photos of prisoners
initiated at the beginning of the 19th century. The names of the fallen or the
victims play an important role in all contemporary monuments and memo-
rials, where a ‘Wall of Names’ is a constantly recurrent element, from Yad
Vashem to the monument in Washington, DC, for American soldiers killed
during the war in Vietnam.9

The vast majority of the photographs at Tuol Sleng are full frontal por-
traits of faces that are apparently dispassionate, without any visible trace
of 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 the
prisoners themselves could not have avoided having) is certainly one of the
main reasons for the strong emotional impact these photographs produce.
Luc Boltanski (1992), in his seminal work on the representation of
pain, refers to three different thematic narrative roles: the persecutor, the
victim 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 into
the camera at the time the picture was being taken, visitors find themselves
in precisely the same visual position as the persecutors at the time, gazing
at the victim from exactly the same point of view, almost as if through the
eyes of the persecutors themselves.
When looking at these images, the space of enunciation once occupied
by the persecutor-photographer becomes coincident with that of the specta-
tor-visitor: we are essentially seeing ‘what he saw’. In this way the actors
involved in the scene are not only visitors and absent victims: this visual
device 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 the
two gazes of victim and spectator opens a virtual space filled by the third
role, that of the persecutor, a space ambiguously occupied by the viewer at
the actual moment of his or her gazing at the victim. The visual artefact
operates as an activator of implicit traces of the original act of enunciation
inscribed 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 soon
going to die, and are now dead as we look at them. This brings to the fore
a quite complex and difficult issue, a basic ambiguity characterizing all
trauma sites: the making visible of traces of bodies of those who have lost
their lives there. Gazing at these photographic images brings into question
our 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 cannot
remain purely ‘outside observers’ ^ we are, paradoxically, located in a kind
of 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 to
our naked gaze, sometimes to the point of feeling actual physical discomfort
in our bodies, while at the same time gazing at them from the outside, just
as their persecutors did.
This mechanism of multiple gazes, and the particular positioning of
the visitor within this complex semiotic system, makes Tuol Sleng a very
special place that transcends the logic of pure representation and becomes
a device for presentification of trauma, where the dead are not only repre-
sented, but also re-presented ^ made present for us through each new gaze
that 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 of
the 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 sense
of discomfort. Visitors are invited to participate, at least for the duration of
their visit, in a fully embodied immersive experience that can be seen as a
form of re-enactment of the traumatic experience itself; in doing so they
change roles ^ they are no longer merely visitors looking around and gather-
ing information, they become, at least to some extent, a part of the historical
narrative itself. They become, in a sense, witnesses themselves.
Empirical research recently conducted on visitors to Tuol Sleng by
Hughes (2008) confirms these impressions: almost all visitors interviewed
complained about the lack of information on the museum but considered
the experience of the visit as a significant act of testimony, a symbolic ges-
ture of solidarity and a form of responsible humanitarian tourism. What is
perceived as relevant after the visit is not ‘I learned more’, but rather ‘I’ve
seen’, which is precisely the personal positioning that qualifies the role of
the witness.
Other elements contribute to the special effect of presence elicited by
the photographs of the victims at Tuol Sleng. Firstly, there is the quantita-
tive dimension: thousands of faces cover the walls of the museum, each
one different in all their individuality, yet all the same. Here quantity
becomes 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 individual
differences and give back to the visitor only one face, one general type
instead of a multitude of single tokens: the victim type. This is not a casual
choice, but it is part of a complex ideological reconstruction of the past
brought into operation through the creation of the Tuol Sleng Museum.
Indeed, the multiple S-21 victims may not have been so completely innocent
as 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 the
past remains, as if it all happened without any individualized apportion-
ment of responsibility.
Perhaps precisely because it does not question the complexity of the
past and the controversial nature of the traumatic events that occurred
there, Tuol Sleng was able to become a national monument that is now part
of contemporary Cambodian identity. It is ‘the central symbolic site of the
founding of the modern Cambodian nation, the ruling Cambodian People’s
Party (CPP) and, officially, of the population’s gratitude to Vietnam and
the CPP for their defeat of the Khmer Rouge’ (Hughes, 2003: 186).
The powerful symbolic relevance and emotional value of a site of this kind
operates as a potent device for constructing a common collective memory
instead 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 of
responsibility for the genocide (it must be remembered that it was only in
2009 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 for
Cambodian 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 that
the visual integrity of this place has been carefully preserved over time guar-
antees its integral recognizability and symbolic value as perhaps the most
emblematic monument of Phnom Penh and its past history. We could say
that Tuol Sleng lies, physically and symbolically, at the very core of the city
itself: all the discourses of self-representation of the city ^ from websites to
tourist guides ^ emphasize the importance for tourists and other visitors to
visit the museum.
Tuol Sleng is a museum designed to activate emotions rather than give
information, a place that depicts the horror instead of explain why it hap-
pened; to use Hughes (2008) words, Tuol Sleng is more ‘testimonial that
epistemological’. Visitors learn very little about the historical background
and 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, Chile

A completely different example of historical trauma site is Villa Grimaldi in
Santiago, Chile. The villa, a large building in elegant Italian style with an
expansive garden full of flowers and trees, was located in the periphery of
the capital city of Santiago. Built in the 19th century by Jose¤ Arrieta, it
passed in the 1960s to the ownership of Emilio Vasallo, who used it as a
weekend 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 Army
secret police, and used as a centre for interrogation and torture until
February 1978. In the 1980s the villa passed to the CNI, the national
Intelligence Council, the successor of the DINA. It has been estimated that
around 4500 persons were imprisoned at Villa Grimaldi, of whom 226 dis-
appeared, either killed during torture, or jettisoned alive into the Pacific
Ocean from military aeroplanes.
This site therefore shows a number of similarities to S-21: it is a civil
building with originally a different function, later transformed into a
centre of interrogation, torture and death. But there is one important

difference: in 1987, near the end of the dictatorship, the last head of the
CNI, General Hugo Salas Wenzel, sold the villa to his relatives, who owned
a construction company. In 1988, just two years before the end of the
Pinochet regime, the villa was completely dismantled and all its buildings
levelled, in order to construct a high priced condominium, but also in an
attempt 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. It
was not until seven years later, in 1997, that the site was transformed into
its present form and opened to the public under the name of ‘Parque por
la Paz Villa Grimaldi’ (Villa Grimaldi Park for Peace).
The history of the transformation of that empty property into the
actual memorial park is worth closer attention, since it casts light on
the complex, nonlinear transition to democracy of the Chilean society after
the end of the Pinochet dictatorship, as well as on the role civil society and
non-governmental social actors can play in preserving and transmitting
memory of victims. In 1989 Chile began a negotiated transition to democ-
racy that ended in 1990 with the first civilian government of Patricio
Aylwin, who established in the same year the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission (Comisio¤n Nacional de la Verdad y la Reconciliatio¤n, or
CNVR) to investigate human rights violations during the Pinochet regime.
Although the CNVR represented an important first step in acknowledging
such violations, its scope was limited and it was not possible to pursue
formal prosecutions of perpetrators. These limits have to be framed within
the 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 a
policy of both justice and peace. ‘This was because there was real fear that
dealing with the past would destabilize the fragile transition to democracy
and 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 have
underlined the fragile character of Chilean democracy during the 1990s
(Drake and Jaksic, 1995; Winn, 2004; Portales, 2000; Paley, 2001), where
pressures to establish justice and truth lived hand in hand with a compul-
sion to forget and block memories of the past dictatorship. President
Aylwin’s discourse on the occasion of release of the CNVR report reflects
well the current governmental policy of putting the past behind and
moving forward. The president said: ‘For the good of Chile, we should look
toward the future that unites us more than to the past which separates us’.
Aylwin continues by saying that Chileans should not ‘waste our energy in
scrutinizing wounds that are irremediable’ (quoted in Paley, 2001: 127). If
‘scrutinizing past wounds’ was perceived as a ‘wasting of energy’, there is
little doubt that any attempt at locating, preserving and transmitting the
memories of abuses and violations was highly controversial in post-
Pinochet Chile, and spaces of memory acquired a residual status, as stated
by many authors.11 Chilean democracy appeared ‘amnesiac about the violent

past’, and reconciliation ‘a form of concealment . . . forcing closure over what

had yet to be revealed’ (Go¤mez-Barris, 2009: 25). A similar point is made
by Meade, who claims that there was ‘a deeply contradictory and tentative
historical account’ in the way Chile constructed the memory of dictatorship
and 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 out
its most egregious acts of violence. . . .The memory sites thus exist as monu-
ments to the contradictions of Chilean society and to the fragility of its
democracy’ (Meade, 2001: 124^5).
The construction of Villa Grimaldi Park for Peace has to be framed
and 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 any
kind of unitary national consciousness. Indeed, despite the CNVR recom-
mendation for an official governmental involvement in symbolic actions
aiming at creation of public monuments and parks dedicated to victims,
the realization of the Park for Peace was mainly due to engagement on the
part of civil society. The government funded the creation of the park as
public property, but the role of the organizations representing victims ^
such as the Association of Relatives of the Detained-Disappeared and the
Association of Relatives of the Executed Political Prisoners ^ was of crucial
importance, as well as action by a number of survivors, in particular Pedro
Matta, a former detainee at Villa Grimaldi.12 Associations of relatives and
survivors played a central role in the decision-making process around how
Villa Grimaldi should be transformed into a memory site, a debate involv-
ing many different positions and, at the end, different policies regarding
traumatic memory. Three different alternatives were discussed: total recon-
struction of the villa exactly as it was as a torture centre; construction of a
sculpture as a monument to the memory of victims; re-semanticization of
the 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 Tuol
Sleng, where initiative to open the detention centre S-21 as a museum was
totally 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: associations
of relatives, survivors, NGOs, etc. Also the actual choice of name for the
site marks an important difference: Tuol Sleng is explicitly defined as a
‘Museum of Genocide Crimes’, while Villa Grimaldi was renamed as ‘Park
for 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 more
different from one another and, indeed, they play a quite different role in
both the overall urban landscapes they belong to and regarding the rele-
vance they assume for the collective memories and cultural identities of
their respective countries.
First of all, there is the issue of their location: while Tuol Sleng lies in
a very central area of Phnom Penh, Villa Grimaldi is situated in a fairly
peripheral area of Santiago. Obviously, these locations were already decided
when 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 the
overall urban landscape. If Tuol Sleng is a fundamental place for the city
and for its self-representation, Villa Grimaldi Park for Peace appears mar-
ginal and almost hidden in relation to Santiago, since, unlike other
memory sites such as the Cementerio General or the Puente Bulnes
Memorial Wall, it is not only physically distant from the city centre but is
also not particularly well known and rather difficult to find. Although
there is a bus route to the area where it is situated, local inhabitants
appear unaware of its precise location. When visiting, I could for example
not find a taxi driver who knew of the place. In the Santiago tourist guide
literature Villa Grimaldi is hardly mentioned at all and it certainly does
not have any of the symbolic relevance for Santiago that Tuol Sleng now
has for Phnom Penh. Indeed, when I visited Villa Grimaldi there were
almost 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 at
Tuol Sleng.
Even more relevant is the temporality and aspectuality characterizing
the two trauma sites.14 In the case of Villa Grimaldi, the choice to make a
park instead of a museum implies a radical shift in the distance between
the actual act of remembering and the past atrocities. In Tuol Sleng there
is a constant attempt to make the past continuously actual in present time,
re-presenting past horrors by keeping everything exactly as it was at the
time when torture and death permeated the place. In this way the site
seeks to annul the gap between these two temporal phases. Visitors are
somehow forced to re-enact the past, in a sort of temporal continuity with
its horror. In Villa Grimaldi an opposite strategy is at work: the visitor
is in a peaceful park, bearing little sign of the atrocities perpetrated there,
located definitely in the past. The act of remembering is situated in a
present time marked as radically different from the past: an unbridgeable
distance being introduced between the two times. Any form of pathemic
re-enactment is in this way foreclosed. The aspectuality dimension is also
very different: in the Park for Peace the past is framed within a terminative
aspect, and the horror of that time is alluded to long after it has come to
an 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 the

park, it is necessary to have a closer look at the park space and the way in
which it has been constructed. The first thing that can be noticed is the
openness of the park, which faces towards the open horizon of the distant
mountains: an imaginary contrast with the closedness characterizing the
earlier use of Villa Grimaldi as a place of imprisonment. Referring to this
particular form of spatialization, Nelly Richard (2001: 254) questions pre-
cisely the relationship between the regular proportions and open plan of
the park and the claustrophobic experience of blindfolded victims impri-
soned in small cells in the villa. According to Richard the open view is a
distancing device producing an effect of remoteness from the traumatic
experiences of the past: ‘The homogeneous and geometric spatiality of
Villa Grimaldi converts into an ordered field of vision what was once a
torn 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 and
coloured mosaics (see Figures 6 and 7) which, at least at first glance, does
not transmit any sense of a traumatic past, nor bear witness to the many
horrendous actions planned and perpetrated there. It is designed in the
form 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 religious
one, a ‘symbolic place of reconciliation’ (Lazzara, 2003: 131). According to
Go¤mez-Barris other interpretations are possible, operative within Chile’s
history of dictatorship and resistance. ‘Meaningfully, the cross summons
the 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 the
empty swimming pool, which during the dictatorship was used to torture
and kill political prisoners, and a small wooden tower, a recent reconstruc-
tion of the original artifact, a water tank for the villa that was transformed
into a claustrophobic prison. In each of these places a stone marker indicates
what the place was used for: ‘Piscina: lugar de amedrentamiento’
(‘Swimming pool: a frightening place’) ‘La torre: lugar de soledad, tortura
y exterminio’ (‘The tower: place of loneliness, torture and extermination’).
These markers are in the form of a mosaic constructed with bricks and
tiles from the former villa bathrooms where prisoners were tortured (see
Figure 8). These tiles were probably particularly meaningful for prisoners
since, 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 the
name 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 a
small basin surrounded by flowers: ‘Todas |¤ bamos a ser reinas’ (We were

Figure 6 Villa Grimaldi, Santiago. Ornamental fountain
Figure 7 Villa Grimaldi, Santiago. Park, detail

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 wall
on 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 for
Peace of Villa Grimaldi. Many criticisms have been advanced by different
authors 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 the
site. Nelly Richard (2001) is among the most critical voices regarding the
arrangement of the park, in particular the ‘aesthetic’ use of the tiles and
bricks from the villa to compose decorative mosaics with the very same
material that belonged to the rooms where prisoners were tortured and
killed. According to Richard, we have a disturbing contrast and a striking
discrepancy here, between what, in semiotic terms, could be defined as the
relationship between expression and content. The result fails to capture the
‘dissolution of the semantic and referential world of the victims, reduced to
silence, babbling and shaking by methodical procedures for the eradication
of consciousness’ (Richard, 2001: 255, my translation). The same happens,
according to Richard, in the rose garden, where the line by Gabriela
Mistral together with the conventional poetic effect of roses produces a rhe-
toric of femininity sharply in contrast with the memory of the abominable
sexual abuse suffered by women prisoners. Similar remarks are made by
Lazzara (2003: 134), who equally objects to the ‘aesthetics of embellishment
and smoothing’ reproduced in the park, arguing for the impossibility of
inscribing 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 seems
to pervade the site. The visitor encounters a pleasant but unspecified
garden, 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. W all 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 is
the conviction that the local ‘community of mourners’ is already intimately
bonded to the place and does not need the kind of documentation that, on
the contrary, would be necessary for a less informed international audience.
But the ‘living memory’ embedded in this and similar places is destined to
slowly dissolve, as living witnesses disappear and time moves towards post-
memory (Hirsh, 1997). The youngest Chilean generation of 20-year-olds
has had no direct experience of the dictatorship and thus may well not
know much about it.
In the face of these criticisms, it should be noted that other, alternative
readings, 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 Villa
Grimaldi, the architectural elements of the park are framed in this limited
understanding 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 form
of realistic representation, or re-presentation, of the horror and atrocities is
a 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, we
can reach a very different, almost oppositional, conclusion, reading the
place as a successful attempt to redesign the landscape of traumatic
memory or as a symbolic monument to the contradictions of Chilean soci-
ety. For Go¤mez-Barris, ‘despite the complexities of representation and
memory, the Peace Park constructs an alternative public sphere that is
enhanced and made salient through spaces of reflection and architectural
design’ (2009: 70). For Meade, on the contrary, ‘Considering its horrific
past, today the well-tended park is itself a contradiction’, a place where
local school children and teenagers come in the early evening to talk and
hang 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 to
which there are no easy answers: is it possible to maintain and transmit
memories of past atrocities while moving away from direct representation
of them, and from an explicit aesthetic of ‘realism of horror’? Can the Park
for Peace be seen as a place of ‘reconciled’ memory, or does it fatally
become 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 as

schoolboys 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-univocal
reading of the overall ‘sense of place’.
The Park for Peace does not aim to produce in the visitor the kind of
almost 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 by
chance. The park reflects, in this respect, the ambiguity and complexity of
the Chilean transition to democracy: in the first years after the end of the
dictatorship, there were diffuse fears that a too direct representation of
Pinochet’s crimes could destabilize a yet fragile democracy, as many scholars
have pointed out. These worries have certainly not been extraneous to the
choice that led to the transformation of Villa Grimaldi to the Park for
Peace. The difficulties and ambiguities of this process are clearly visible in
the urban landscape itself: it is, for example, worth noticing that one of the
most important avenues in the centre of Santiago is still called Avenida 11
de 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 support
of a considerable number of its citizens.
Tuol Sleng and the Villa Grimaldi Park for Peace demonstrate two
quite different, almost antagonistic, answers to one key problem: how best
to create and transmit a sense of shared memory in a country that still has
not yet managed to come to terms with its own traumatic past. The
Cambodian museum, through a pitiless, disturbing denouncement of what
actually went on there, strongly emphasizes the emotional components
embedded in the indexicality of the trauma site, while the Chilean Park for
Peace 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 national
identity through representation of past horror; Villa Grimaldi forecloses in
the most radical sense the very possibility of reconstructing such a unifying
symbolic representation of identity, opening up for multiple, almost contra-
dictory, readings.
The Ustica Memorial Museum, Bologna, Italy

On 27 June 1980 the Itavia DC-9 aircraft on a regular flight from Bologna
to Palermo disappeared from view in the national air radar control system
and 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 some
fundamental 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 real
cause of the disaster, and other hypotheses began taking form, amongst
these, an explosive device placed in the plane, or a guided missile from
outside.
In 1982 a state commission was charged to investigate what appeared
to be one of the most controversial cases of public catastrophes in Italy in
this historical period.16 For over 15 years a series of inquiries followed one
after another, dogged by various cover-up attempts on the part of the highest
levels of the national military authorities and military aeronautic command,
who, at a certain stage, were accused by the commission of committing
acts 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 what
had happened that night in the sky over the Tirrenian sea: it was not an
accident but a real act of war, in an undeclared war taking place at the
time, unknown to public opinion, that ‘by mistake’ had killed 81 innocent
civilians. The DC-9 was brought down by a missile shot by a military
combat plane of a NATO member nation, probably trying to bring down a
Libyan 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 in
the presumed military action at Ustica is still unknown, and there is consid-
erable uncertainty as to whether it might have been the United States or
France. A claim for compensation has been recently advanced to the French
state, 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 the
Italian military command.
During this long legal inquiry and political process, a central role was
played by the Association of Families of Victims of the Ustica Massacre
(Associazione Parenti delle Vittime della Strage di Ustica), founded on 20
May 1988, whose president, Daria Bonfietti, sister of one of the victims of
the incident and member of the Italian Senate for many years, fought con-
tinually for the establishment of the truth regarding the incident itself and
for the construction of the museum as a place of memory.
At a social and political level, a process has been taking place over all
these years, not only in relation to the Ustica case itself but also regarding
other 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 criminal
activities. On the other hand, there was a displacement of political initiative
on 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 themselves
assuming in many cases a role traditionally occupied by political
institutions.
Space limitations do not permit the discussion of further details of
Italian political life during the last three decades, but some insights from
this 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 project
has 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, the
remains of the aircraft, together with a number of personal belongings of
victims, were recovered from the sea floor, and a skeleton fuselage with
what remained of the DC-9 was reconstructed in a military hangar at
Pratica di Mare, close to Rome. This reconstruction ended in 1991, and at
that point the wreckage was put at the disposal of the Families of Victims
Association, 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 administration
at Bologna. Bologna was not a casual choice: the Itavia flight 870 route was
from Bologna to Palermo, and since Bologna was the point of departure,
most of the victims were from that city. More crucially, the Families of
Victims Association was also based there, and the local municipality had
always been actively involved in supporting the museum project. After
much discussion and a pilot project that was never realized, a final destina-
tion for the museum was found in a disused municipal tram terminal in
the immediate periphery of Bologna.
In June 2006 the plane wreckage was transported to Bologna by 15
fire-trucks while the whole event was recorded on video.18 The artist
Christian Boltanski was invited to design an installation based on the
plane wreckage within the museum, and on 27 June 2007, 27 years after
the disaster, the Ustica Memorial Museum (Museo per la Memoria di
Ustica) was officially opened to the public. From its day of opening the
museum was not connected to other historical museums in the city, but
instead to the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Bologna
(Mambo). Although this choice certainly depended on the participation and
artistic 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 and
other 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 (see
Figure 11). From this gallery, visitors can see the reconstructed plane wreck-
age but cannot approach, touch, or enter it. The wreckage is positioned on
a strewn pebble floor, which reminds us of the sea floor. Around it, nine
large black wooden cases formed like huge coffins are placed side by side
on the floor.
The spatial opposition created between the two spaces ^ the lower
floor with the wreckage and the visitors’ gallery above ^ seems to allude to
a related system of temporal oppositions, where the wreckage represents
the 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 first
impressions 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 pervades
the 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 rhythmically

changing, which is due to 81 hanging lamps that are slowly and regularly
pulsating with greater or lesser intensity.
However, the most intense sense impression is certainly due to the
first sight of the immense plane wreckage itself, which occupies the whole
of the main museum space. The skeletal mass of wreckage is made up of
more than 2000 fragments recovered from the sea at Ustica, each labelled
with a small piece of paper containing the notes and numbers used by the
investigators while they were creating a complete inventory of the found
remains of the aircraft. The indexical meaning effect of the wreckage is
astonishingly powerful: it is almost impossible not to imagine what it was
like to be there, and what must have been experienced by the unknowing
passengers 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 least
what was left of it, patiently reassembled, piece by piece over time.
But is this the ‘real’ aircraft? Here again one faces the authenticity
dilemma mentioned previously. Indeed, the remains of the plane retrieved
from the ocean floor originally included much more than what can now be
seen in the museum: tons of different materials, including seats, cables,
and many other components belonging to the destroyed aircraft. What we
see here is therefore a reconstruction of only a part of that reality rather
than reality itself, which is due to a careful selection process and systematic
choices made to produce a very precise reality effect.
Walking along the gallery, the visitor soon realizes that the sounds she
has heard when entering the room come from 81 black mirrors, hung in a
row along two of the walls of the rooms, with the other two walls occupied
by large windows covered by translucent white curtains (see Figure 12).
Behind each of the black mirrors is hidden a loudspeaker diffusing the
sound of one recorded voice, all of which are different: some men, some
women, 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 that
the 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 Boltanski
installation: the artist has given voice to all 81 victims, attributing one imag-
inary sentence to each, and having a professional actor or actress record
these 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 a
long-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 ice
cream in town’).
In this way the gallery becomes the place where the different temporal
dimensions in play confront one another: the voices come from the past,
but are enunciated in a circular, repetitive durative present, which in its

Figure 12 Ustica Memorial Museum, Bologna. Black mirror balcony
turn confronts the present time of visitors circling around the wreckage. In
this 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 all
whispering about possible futures, part of the larger life project in which
all human beings are immersed.
In this complex intertwining of the past moment from which all the
voices come, the present moment with their own enunciation in the
museum space, and the future they refer to ^ a future never to be ^ a
kind of temporal rupture begins to materialize. This is the punctual time
of the catastrophe itself, absent from the words of the voices since all come
from a time just before the crash. It is the visitor, the visitor alone, who
bridges 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 terminative
moment of the crash, the final closure that put an end to all their futures.
Similarly to what occurred in the Tuol Sleng Museum, although
through different means, here too the particular positioning of the visitor
within the installation system operates as a meaning device that re-enacts
one aspect of the victims’ experience. However, in the case of the Ustica
Museum, 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 what
was about to happen to them. The visitor in this way becomes, rather than

a spectator of a represented trauma, a witness of a fragment in time before a

tragedy endlessly re-presenting itself.
There is one other very important feature in Boltanski’s installation
that powerfully reinforces this particular reading of the role of visitors as
witnesses, bonding them even more intimately to the position of the victims.
In the Ustica Memorial Museum the victims are, apparently, absent: they
are never represented, their names are never revealed, their photographs
never shown. While the wreckage can be seen from all possible positions
in the room, the victims are invisible: they occupy the place of absence,
they are outside of the realm of representation, the non-representable side
of the massacre. However, despite this absence, they are constantly made
present through various meaning displacement devices and rhetorical sub-
stitution. Indeed, the museum itself could be read as a sophisticated device
for creating a displaced re-presentation of the traumatic event, rather than
as 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 shift
from 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 their
names were, but we are constantly prodded to imagine what kinds of con-
cerns and thoughts might possibly have occupied them in the last moments
of their lives.
A second meaning displacement is present in the sphere of images
and visual representations. As mentioned above, no photographs or other
representational devices regarding the victims are provided for visitors; the
loudspeakers that, in a way, speak for them are all hidden behind 81 black
mirrors, which correspond to the number of victims. The mirrors clearly
act as an implicit substitution for actual images of each of the victims, and
vaguely recall a similar number of gravestones in a cemetery. But at the
same time, they are real mirrors that create a reflection of the visitors as
they look into them. What the visitor sees when facing one of the mirrors
is not the image of a victim but his or her own face looking back. This
forces a powerful identification with the victim, bringing into play the possi-
bility of becoming a casual victim oneself of an unexpected massacre of
this kind. It is interesting to compare this meaning effect with what was
going on in the case of the use of visual imagery of victims at the Tuol
Sleng Museum (absent at Villa Grimaldi). At Tuol Sleng, a visitor looking
at the photographs of the dead prisoners occupies an ambiguous position
previously occupied by a photographer-persecutor. At the Ustica Museum
the space of representation of the victim is an empty space, an absence
filled by the reflected image of the visitor. Another short-circuit seems to
take 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 alongside
the 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-multiple
of 81. These cases contain all the passengers’ personal belongings recovered
from the crash site, but these will never be directly subjected to the view
of the visitor. A choice of this kind seems to extend to these material objects
the same sacredness attributed to dead bodies that should be preserved,
but out of sight, and thus piously hidden. Personal belongings as well as
bodies appear to be seen as too intimate, too personal to be exposed to our
view.
Visitors discover what is inside the nine black cases only at the very
end of their visit, when they each receive a small booklet entitled: Lista
degli oggetti personali appartenenti ai passaggeri del volo IH870 (‘The list
of the HI870 flight passengers’ personal belongings’). All the objects were
carefully photographed before being put into the cases, and are reproduced
in the book in the form of sub-lists according to their general categories
(e.g. shoes, bags, glasses, wallets) without any further reference to their
individual owners. The photographs remind us in a way of police photos
and, being thus de-contextualized from their normal areas of use and their
absent owners, produce a powerful type of meaning effect involving both a
sense of estrangement and one of involvement (see Figure 13). Visitors are
allowed to keep the booklet when they leave the museum, as a kind of rhe-
torical substitute for the characteristic photographs of the dead persons
that in Italy are distributed after a funeral to people who attend.
To conclude, the visit to the Ustica Museum is first and foremost an
intense, complex aesthetic experience, in apparent contradiction to the wide-
spread idea that we do not visit memorial museums because they contain
powerful works of art (Young, 1993). It might be argued that the Ustica
Memorial Museum, in that respect, is an extreme example: after all, not all
memorials have been designed by famous contemporary artists such as
Boltanski, or are administratively connected to local institutions for promot-
ing contemporary art.
In this sense the Ustica Museum differs considerably from both the
other two case studies mentioned above, and represents a ‘third’ alternative
to both the realism of Tuol Sleng and the representational rarefaction of
Villa Grimaldi. It may well be the case that the Boltanski installation repre-
sents an exceptional and particular case not quite common in the ‘memorial
museum landscape’; it certainly challenges this paradigm in its two main
variations of figuration of, or abstraction from, past horrors occurring at
the 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

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

tion booklet
place in this museum is mediated through this fictional work of art, and not
through any direct or realistic representation of horror and death.
Conclusion: Beyond Indexicality

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

range of culturally diverse memory politics that affect in significant ways

the national, and global, identities of these societies.
In bearing direct witness to the past, trauma sites do not merely depict
a given historical and political situation, but they actually take part in its
cultural reconstruction and transformation. This active role depends cru-
cially on their indexical nature. Trauma sites are in this respect much more
powerful semiotic devices than any other kind of memorial site, since they
already exist as genuine signifiers and testimonials of the past inscribed in
the 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, become
an integral part of the memorialization, or obliteration, of the traumatic
past, linking past memory to present history. Tuol Sleng, Villa Grimaldi
and the Bologna Ustica Museum each bring into play three quite different
memory 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 trauma
space, in a sort of ‘frozen past’ where they are subject to a strong sense of
emotional and sensorial involvement. In the second, Villa Grimaldi, a pro-
cess of attenuation is at work, since the traces of the past are less visible
and their emotional effects weaker. In a way, Villa Grimaldi presents a less
pre-determined and less univocal reading of its material and historical
space when compared with Tuol Sleng, but there is also a potential risk of
neutralizing the past. The Ustica Museum represents yet one more, differ-
ent, option, a movement towards an artistic and creative reinterpretation of
the traumatic event. The Ustica Museum is also just one more instance of a
larger, more pervasive tendency to emphasize pathemic, emotional and
other forms of sensory experience ^ a tendency shared by many other
memorial museums and trauma sites today. The visit to both Tuol Sleng
and the Ustica Museum, although in quite different ways, offers a kind of
‘total immersion experience’ for visitors, involving all their senses, their
somatic participation, and their emotions. In this way visitors become
living witnesses of the traumatic past, iteratively re-enacted through their
embodied experience. What might be missing in this flow of immediate sen-
sory experience is, paradoxically, a more detailed understanding of the
trauma itself as a historical event ^ i.e. its broader cultural, political and
other contextual aspects and connotations. The Ustica Museum in this
respect is an exemplary case, since its powerful portfolio of complex sense
effects seems to rest mainly in its capacity to capture what is most universal
in the fundamental incomprehensibility of all forms of dramatic sudden
death, rather than informing us about specific details of this massacre as
embedded in its unique historical and cultural context.
It is worth noticing that, with regard to this particular point, all three
sites analysed above exhibit one key feature: none really take into account
the 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 factual
information and any other kind of instructional materials. As a result, it
may become rather difficult to understand the historical, cultural and polit-
ical network of reasons and causes that underlie these events, as well as
their internal dynamics. All this is largely left up to the evocative power of
the place itself, to its unique capacity for bringing events of the past forward
into 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 may
become a limit, a sort of mono-dimensional enclosure system, lacking any
active 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 case
aesthetic and artistic. In this sense the Ustica case may provide us with an
important new methodological development. Obviously it is not a question
of 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, connecting
what went on in the past to the present, and the future.
On a recent visit to Chile, in January 2011, I witnessed a similar case
of displacement. Villa Grimaldi, like other smaller trauma sites in the
Santiago 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 Grimaldi
ought to be preserved and transformed. The three young actresses play the
daughters of three women formerly imprisoned and abused in Villa
Grimaldi. The trauma site in this case is exploited as both the stage for
and subject of a meta-reflection on the very politics of memory behind the
transformation of such places into museums or parks, questioning critically
positions 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 and
challenging 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 forms
from the present, opening up for new discourses, practices and directions
for the future.
Notes
1. This is, for example, the case of the Memorial Hall in Nan jing (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 example
Guerin and Hallas, 2007).
3. The distinction between representation and re-presentation has already been
discussed 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 to
mean simply, as Heidegger emphasizes, to place, to dispose before oneself, a sort
of 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 of
rendering 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 discussed
topic in Trauma Studies: see for example the notion of traumatic realism discussed
by 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 see
Chandler (1991, 1999).
9. For the war memorial in Vietnam see Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz (1991).
10. Kaing Kek Eav was eventually sentenced to 35 years imprisonment on 27
July 2010, to be calculated from the day of his arrest on 10 June 1999. Of this
total confinement period, with 5 years remisssion for cooperation with the court
and his recognition of the crimes detracted, 19 years of prison now remain (see
http://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, in
order to analyze the semantics of space. In linguistics, temporality refers to the
relation between the time of utterance and the action expressed by the verb.
Aspectuality refers to the different perspectives from which an action can be
described, 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 can
be described as punctual (I read) or as progressive and continuous (I was reading
for ten hours).
15. See: http://www.museomemoriaustica.it/storia.htm

16. Less than two months after the Ustica disaster, on 2 August 1980, a bomb
exploded in Bologna railway station, killing 82 people and wounding more than
200. After three levels of judicial process, a fascist terrorist group was found to
be 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 in
Semiotics at the Italian Institute of Human Sciences. She is the Director
of TRAME, Interdisciplinary Centre for the Study of Memory and
Cultural Traumas (www.trame.unibo.it) at the University of Bologna. Her
main areas of research include text analysis, language and gender, and
semantic theory, on which themes she has published numerous articles and
volumes. She is currently working on cultural semiotics and traumatic
memory. [email: patrizia.violi@unibo.it]

Violi 2012

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Trauma Site Museums and

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Trauma Site Museums

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The indexical semiotic character of trauma sites affects many impor-

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representation’, alluding to the impossibility of speaking of, or displaying,

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of its indexical character. This knowledge facilitates specific modes of

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their inherent meanings. In a way, what is conserved is transformed pre-

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political options and functions involved, the position sustained by Ruth

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Figure 1 The restored entrance at Risiera San Saba, Trieste

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view a trauma site. Moreover, the Ustica Memorial Museum exhibits in an

Tuol Sleng Museum of the Crimes of Genocide, Phnom Penh

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Figure 2 Tuol Sleng Museum, Phnom Penh. Courtyard

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displayed there. Explicative documentation of this kind is a semiotic media-

Figure 3 Tuol Sleng Museum. Painting by V ann Nath

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Figure 4 Tuol Sleng Museum. ID photos of prisoners

Figure 5 Tuol Sleng Museum. ID photos of prisoners

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Villa Grimaldi, Santiago, Chile

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past’, and reconciliation ‘a form of concealment . . . forcing closure over what

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Before discussing in more detail the overall meaning effects of the

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Figure 6 Villa Grimaldi, Santiago. Ornamental fountain

Figure 7 Villa Grimaldi, Santiago. Park, detail

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Figure 8 Villa Grimaldi, Santiago. Mosaic information plate

Figure 9 Villa Grimaldi, Santiago. Rose garden

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Figure 10 Villa Grimaldi, Santiago. W all with victims’ names

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Survivors and relatives of victims can come to mourn, equally well as

The Ustica Memorial Museum, Bologna, Italy

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management of legal inquiries, over to the magistrates courts. Legal dis-

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Figure 11 Ustica Memorial Museum, Bologna. Interior

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of ocean waves. The lighting in the space also seems to be rhythmically

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Figure 12 Ustica Memorial Museum, Bologna. Black mirror balcony

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a spectator of a represented trauma, a witness of a fragment in time before a

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background over their shoulders, the massive volume of the wreckage,