Abstract

This chapter attempts to revisit some issues related to the recent debate on so-called ‘difficult heritage’ (Macdonald) from a semiotic perspective. More specifically, the symbolic weight of the monumental (especially architectural) material legacy of past totalitarian regimes is examined in terms of a temporal transformation of its ‘ideological voice’. According to this theoretical proposal, the material changes induced by restoration and rehabilitation works can be analysed as operations of ‘remodulation’ of the voice of monumental architectures, which can be framed by a semiotic theory of enunciation. Through the analysis of a series of case studies of Italian Fascist monumental buildings and their subsequent material transformation over time, a typology of different possible forms of remodulation is proposed.

Keywords: Difficult Heritage; Theory of Enunciation; Architecture and Ideology; Voice of Architecture; Semiotics of Architecture

Difficult Heritage and its Conflicting ‘Voices’: an Enunciational Approach to Contested Monumental Architecture

The aim of this paper is to test how analytic tools of narrative semiotics may help in framing and understanding some of the issues related to the preservation of controversial heritage. A semiotic approach will be used to account for the meaning effects determined by different solutions of transformation of architectural and monumental legacies originating from a problematic past, and whose collective perception (and meaning) has changed because they are associated with values which a society does not identify with anymore, such as in democratic countries that have experienced a dictatorship in the past.

My case studies are examples of monumental architecture built in Italy during the Fascist period and restored or refurbished in the last few decades. More specifically, I shall try to describe some cases of ‘difficult heritage management’ in Italy, looking at some solutions of transformation or restoration of Fascist architecture, through the lens of the semiotic notion of ‘enunciation’ (as developed especially in Benveniste's and, later, Greimas's theories and by their followers).

The choice of this analytical angle lies in the central hypothesis of my paper: any monumental architecture has its own ‘voice’, through which it ‘speaks’ in public environments.

Abstract

The absence of written chronicles in Scandinavia during the period in which Islamic silver dirhams were brought from afar and hoarded in pits, necessitates the interpretation of non-verbal data (caches, emission dates of coins, cache distribution in space) and the restitution of actions (maritime and river travel, economic exchange) that produced such results. The interpretation process also needs the consideration of other caches containing precious objects and written sources from the East and the West. The data give us back the of a Scandinavian society in transformation. This chapter presents this study in three phases: physical space (from the Baltic to Baghdad and Tashkent), economic space (predation and/or exchange) and social space (differentiation of society according to collective actors defined by action).

Keywords: Scandinavia; Silver; Dirhams; Dar al-Islam; Frankish Kingdoms; Expeditionary Society.

Archaeological Facts Worthy of Attention

During my study of Umayyad epigraphic coins (Hammad 2018), I was stunned by the discovery that Scandinavian museums kept more silver dirhams, minted in Dar al-Islam, in their vaults than all the countries that minted them in historical times. There are almost five hundred thousand such coins. They were dug out of agricultural lands in the nineteenth century, when technical progress produced ploughshares that could reach new depths. More recent discoveries, made possible by metal detectors, often reveal hoards shattered by the accidental passage of ploughs. The hoard of Stora Velinge, dug up in 1936 on the island of Gotland (Sweden), contained 2,674 dirhams and a silver arm ring (Figure 10.1), with a total weight of eight kilograms; the Spillings hoard (found in 1999) contained 67 kilograms of silver made up of 14,200 dirhams and various ingots and jewellery. 350 dirham hoards have been recorded on Gotland alone, an island located in the Baltic Sea 80 kilometres off the Swedish coast. The coins were first credited to have been brought there by the famed Viking plunderers. But the continued discovery of dirham hoards scattered around the Baltic Sea, along the rivers flowing north into Baltic, or along rivers flowing south into the Black and Caspian Seas, needed another interpretation, that is, the existence, between the eighth and eleventh centuries, of regular commercial routes between the shores of the Baltic and Baghdad, Samarqand and Al-Shash (Tashkent).

These facts call for an explanation.

Abstract

Every monument is designed with a specific meaning that seeks to define a system of values (institutional purposes, political reason, cultural self-celebration). In this chapter I will investigate how empirical users may choose either to conform to that ideological proposal or to reinvent it through multifaceted practices. Theoretically based on the ideas of the Model Reader and of interpretation and use as proposed by Umberto Eco, this essay proposes to consider the ways in which the ideal subject and the empirical subject can interpret and use the space differently. In particular through the analysis of two case studies related to the memory of Italy's colonial past, I demonstrate how bottom-up protests and practices trigger a resemantisation and stratification of the space of monuments.

Keywords: Model Reader; Interpretation; Umberto Eco; Semiotics; Monument; Practices.

Introduction (or Frozen Memories)

These pages are devoted to the study of protest practices in relation to two monuments that represent figures tied to the Italian colonialist past, thereby affirming that they are worthy of being remembered.

Drawing from Umberto Eco's semiotic theory of textual analysis, the general aim of this chapter is to investigate forms of resemantisation of these monuments: actions of meaning and memory reversal by subjects that seek to undermine the celebrative representations otherwise ‘cast in stone’, which conceal Fascist Italy's troubling past in Africa.

I focus on these kinds of ‘unpredictable’ practices for two main reasons:

• – they create the possibility to investigate different types of subjectivity that can be ‘activated’ by the monumental space. This includes, on the one hand, the expected audience whose specific beliefs are confirmed in the monument, and on the other, the undesirable audience, which positions itself as antagonistic to the narrative told in the urban space;

• – they help to understand the cultural mechanism of magnification of events which remain ‘unsaid’ by the monument, either because of the economy of the monument's enunciation, or due to choices that lead to the ideological filtering of memory. As such, they also provide a greater awareness of the narrative make-up of specific memories.

As they can activate or extinguish particular meanings related to certain past events, these practices fuel the reversal of the memories transmitted at an institutional level, instead turning the spotlight on frozen memories.

Abstract

How might cinema turn a space into a mediated landscape of memory? How can it interrogate what is remembered in a lieu de memoire? Could the role of cinema be that of a monument or, even, a counter-monument? I address these questions through the semiotic analysis of the ways in which ESMA – Space for Memory and for the Promotion and Defence of Human Rights in Buenos Aires has been framed by two documentaries by Jonathan Perel: El Predio (2010) and Tabula Rasa (2013). Both films deal with the large, stratified trauma site of the former ESMA compound – the Escuela Superior de Mecánica de la Armada the most notorious clandestine centre of detention, torture and extermination that was operational in Argentina during the military regime.

Keywords: Documentary Cinema; ESMA – Space for Memory and for the Promotion and Defence of Human Rights; Jonathan Perel; Counter- Monument; Desaparecidos.

How might cinema turn a space into a mediated landscape of memory? How can it interrogate what is remembered there, and intervene in the porous borders that, simultaneously, separate and connect an event, its experience and its representation – that is, the multiple temporalities defining the very act of media witnessing? Could the role of cinema be that of a monument or even a counter-monument?

These questions guide my analysis of the ways in which ESMA-Space for Memory and for the Promotion and Defence of Human Rights, a memory site located in Buenos Aires, has been framed by two documentary films directed by Jonathan Perel: El Predio (“predio” means the “site”, the “place”, 2010) and Tabula Rasa (2013). Both films deal with the large, stratified and troubled trauma site of the former ESMA compound – the Escuela Superior de Mecánica de la Armada (Naval Academy of Mechanics) – arguably the most notorious of the clandestine centres of detention, torture and extermination that operated in the capital during the military regime's ‘Dirty War’ (1976–1983) (on this, see Sozzi supra). In this place, over 5,000 prisoners were detained, 90 per cent of whom were murdered. The ESMA compound was also the departure point of the aeroplanes from which drugged prisoners were thrown – still alive – into the River Plate.