Abstract

This chapter offers an examination of the nexus between space and memory by exploring the concepts of lieu and milieu de mémoire. My aim is to show how, in memory-making processes, these two semiotic configurations are not mutually exclusive, as Pierre Nora argues, but mutually articulated. In the first part of the chapter, I will discuss Nora's definitions, comparing them to Michel de Certeau's articulation of lieu and espace and through the lens of Algirdas J. Greimas's model of narrativity. In the second part, I will translate theoretical and methodological reflections into a practical analysis, specifically through an exploration of the case of the Italian concentration camp of Fossoli.

Keywords: Place of Memory; Fossoli; Algirdas Julien Greimas; Pierre Nora; Michel de Certeau.

Ever since the publication of Pierre Nora's monumental collection (Nora 1996 [1984]), the category of lieu de mémoire – translated as ‘place’ or ‘site’ of memory – has offered one of the main conceptual prisms through which to analyse the space–memory nexus. In the introduction to the collection, Nora explains that ‘collective memory was rooted, in order to create a vast topology of French symbolism’, and that the aim of his work is to analyse how ‘the collective heritage of France was crystallised in places of memory’ (Nora 1996 [1984]: xv). According to the historian, the category of lieu de mémoire describes the way memory assumes and reaches a cultural and collective dimension in our times. Despite the focus on France, the category of lieu de mémoire has been used to interpret the meaning of tangible and intangible heritage in other, sometimes very different, national contexts (for Italy see, for example, Isnenghi 1996–1997).

This chapter argues for a semiotic reinterpretation of the notion of lieu de mémoire in terms of a particular and specific way of – among others – forming space and memory, and the nexus between them. In fact, Nora's concept ‘tends to emphasise one layer only, one point in the entire life cycle of a given location’, preventing any acknowledgment of ‘the coexistence of a plurality of meanings and experiences’ (Arrigoni and Galani 2019: 164) in the way we produce and connect spatiality and memory.

Abstract

In this paper I analyse an ‘imagined space’, based on an application – AppRecuerdos – that involves installations in the centre of Santiago, Chile. The application contains 129 recordings of short narratives in the first person, told by someone directly involved in episodes referring to the years of Pinochet's dictatorship. Once it is downloaded on a smartphone, the app is automatically activated when the user passes a location where the narrative was originally recorded. In this way, the location is simultaneously the place of a past event from the dictatorship, the place of its enunciation and the place where it is listened to. AppRecuerdos is a political and memorial creation that re-signifies urban space, and is a testament to the capacity of digital devices for political engagement.

Keywords: Chile; Pinochet Dictatorship; Digital Device; Enunciation; Imagined Space.

Memory, Space and Technology

What happens when new technologies allow us to construct a virtual space in our imagination that is somehow suspended between the past and the present? When places literally start to speak their various embedded memories thanks to digital devices? When technology allows contrasting narratives from the past to reach our present, involving our senses and shaping our movements in the public space, forcing us to confront unexpected narratives?

These are among the many questions raised by AppRecuerdos in Santiago, a work that is at once an artistic installation, an anthropological experiment, an unusual archive of ‘minor memories’, both personal and anonymous, and a challenging proposal for a new way to imagine and explore an urban landscape.

From a technical point of view, AppRecuerdos is an application that can be downloaded onto any smartphone without the need to connect to the internet. The app contains 129 recorded files – 33 songs and official speeches, and 96 short personal but anonymous narratives – that can be listened to once the app has been downloaded. Every narrative is recorded in a specific location in the centre of Santiago, and is automatically activated as the user passes by with the app turned on. All the recordings are represented on a map that shows the locations where they can be listened to.

The recordings last a maximum of 15 minutes and can be listened to within a few metres from the source. Outside that area, the recording cannot be heard anymore; a new recording can be listened to when the user approaches a new transmitting position.

Abstract

This chapter provides a semiotic investigation of an emblematic space in Palermo, the Foro Italico. After the Second World War, this space was occupied for many years by the ruins left when the city was bombed. Analysing the diachronic evolution of the Foro Italico, the author examines the semantic categories that have defined the space, exploring how the memory of the war has been concealed and inscribed in the post-war rewritings of the place. The chapter reads this space as ‘a mysterious island’, caught between nature and culture. Referring to different kinds of texts, Marrone illustrates how the practices of various local and migrant communities contribute not only to the resemantisation of space but also to the production of new memories.

Keywords: Semiotics; Ruins; Terrain Vague; Semiotic Square; Foro Italico

Introduction: a Bombing

In the spring of 1943, in the middle of the Second World War, the city of Palermo was subjected to a merciless aerial bombing campaign. The Allies had arrived in Africa at the end of 1942 and Palermo, whose port was of particular importance to the Axis powers, had become a crucial point in the anti-aircraft surveillance network organised in the Mediterranean by the Germans. By February 1943, the Allies, having established bases in Morocco and Algeria, were making their presence felt, and in April the destruction of the city began. Over the course of that month, ‘flying fortresses’ struck Palermo four times, using phosphorus and incendiary bombs. On 18 April, a bomb hit an air raid shelter, indiscriminately massacring unknown numbers of people, women and children in particular. But it was on 9 May that the Allies unleashed hell on the city. It was a dark, tragic and unforgettable day for those who experienced the event first hand. Three air raids were carried out. During the first, at noon, 23 Vickers Wellington planes dropped 76 explosive devices, including two 4,000-pound high-capacity bombs that did not penetrate the earth but proved lethally efficient at destroying built-up areas. The incursion by another 90 attack bombers, escorted by 60 twin-engine fighters, came a few hours later. Another 100 Flying Fortresses with their fighter escorts came that same evening.

Palermo was the test site for the first carpet-bombing in Italy. The city and all its military targets were hit by circa 1,110 227-kg bombs and another 460 136-kg bombs.

Abstract

This essay aims at showing how the concept of enunciation can be used to analyse places, by deploying it in the analysis of a museum in Córdoba, Argentina, located inside a former clandestine centre of detention and torture.

The concept of enunciation will prove useful to look at two crucial dimensions of this place of memory: the multiplicity of voices and perspectives that it embodies, together with the display of many different traces of what happened in it. My hypothesis is that both these mechanisms are used to convey a stronger ‘effect of reality’ for the story told, reinforcing each other with mutual connections and shaping a precise narrative of the past.

Keywords: Memory Places; Enunciation; Traces; Museum; Archive; Dirty War

Introduction

The museum known as the Provincial Memory Archive in Córdoba, Argentina (Archivo Provincial de la Memoria, from now on: APM1) is located in a lovely building in the heart of the city's old town. For decades, the building housed the intelligence department of the Córdoba police, also called D2, which in the 1970s worked as a clandestine centre of detention and torture (from now on: CCDT). Nowadays, it hosts a museum and an audio-visual archive of testimonies about its past.

As such, the place is connected to the memory of the atrocities committed by the civilian-military dictatorship that took place in Argentina from 1976 to 1983, enacted by a military council that reunited the chiefs of different armies, self-defined as the National Reorganisation Process. The period is also known as the Dirty War, named after the terrible methods used by the state to destroy any sort of opposition and stay in power for almost seven years. The most common of such means was the disappearance of people: 30,000 men and women were illegally and secretly killed by the state, after having been kidnapped, detained in inhumane conditions and then buried in common graves or thrown into the sea. In this context, in which the state put in place what can be called an invisibility strategy for its own actions (Violi 2015), the search for and discovery of the traces of what happened has been one of the constant objectives of human rights associations from the first days of the restoration of democracy.

Abstract

This chapter reflects on an emblematic sculpture of one of the most controversial Italian memories, that of Fascism: the so-called statue of Bigio in Brescia, a symbol of Fascist values. In particular, I examine – within the framework of a critical analysis of ideological discourse – the public reactions and the negotiation of meaning which, after Fascism, involved the legitimacy of the monument, between the desire for cancellation and attempts at historicisation.

Keywords: Controversial Memory; Monuments; Ideological Discourse; Semiotics; Aesthetic Analysis.

The object of this contribution is an Italian monument: a sculpture emblematic of a controversial memory, Fascism. It is a sculpture that has characterised and marked a very significant public space: a square in the centre of Brescia in northern Italy. Due to its urban location and strongly connotative dimension, I consider it a relevant object for a volume on the spaces of memory.

It is the so-called statue of Bigio of Brescia, made in 1932 by Arturo Dazzi, which was removed from Piazza della Vittoria in 1945 and has never since been returned to its place. I will look at the controversial events in greater detail below; it clearly represents a textbook case study on the problem of the legitimacy of monuments that were the expression of a particular regime, in this case Italy's Fascist regime.

There has been a very strong revival of this practice of ‘monumental aggression’ just recently, starting in the summer of 2020, when, following the killing of George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter movement called for the demolition of statues glorifying persons guilty of racism, slave ownership and other dubious acts, setting off an international tendency to de-monumentalise racist and Fascist symbols (so that in Italy, for example, the statue of the journalist Indro Montanelli was attacked, as he was guilty of having married a 12-year-old girl in Ethiopia during the Fascist colonial era, within the framework of the legal practice of the ‘madamate’ at the time).

The case of Bigio in Brescia seems to be a textbook example of the polarisation of a debate between on the one hand the supporters of the cultural legitimacy of Fascist monuments, and on the other those who consider expressions of Fascist propaganda unacceptable.

Abstract

In this contribution, I discuss two places of memory in Berlin: the Jewish Museum, designed by the architect Daniel Libeskind (2001), and the Holocaust Memorial, designed by Peter Eisenman (2005), that have become well-known landmarks of the German capital, both for the importance of the subject matter and for their decidedly innovative architectural quality. The comparative analysis I propose focuses in particular on the visitor paths that architectural morphologies prompt and at times prescribe. Where the Jewish Museum induces memory through an obligatory sensorial path, the Holocaust Memorial leaves the visitor freer to move around the large esplanade on which it stands, suggesting more general reflections on the communication strategies of spatial artefacts and on their effectiveness.

Keywords: Places of Memory; Contemporary Museums; Urban Identity; Sensory Paths; Spatial Effectiveness; Free Interpretation.

The Places of Memory

In this contribution, I will discuss two places of memory: the Jewish Museum and the Holocaust Memorial, both shrines to the same story, both in Berlin, both designed by two important architects: the first by Daniel Libeskind, the second by Peter Eisenman, with a very different slant, obviously linked to the specificity of the proposed theme and the personality of the two designers, but also to the type of interpretation to which these places are subjected by the public. Both were inaugurated in the early twenty-first century (2001, 2005), and both have become well-known landmarks of the German capital, essential tourist destinations. In this sense, the absolute, disruptive novelty that they represented in many aspects has perhaps faded over time, and their very persistence has partly tarnished the strength of the architectural ‘gesture’ they represent. But this is probably the destiny of every monument, a sign of memory, a reminder of the past immersed in turn in the flow of time and its changes, as a recent book edited by Anne Beyaert also demonstrates with a wealth of examples (Beyaert-Geslin 2019).

All museums are places of memory to some extent, but only a few are explicitly dedicated to the memory of a specific event. The construction of a monument or memorial expresses the need to identify ‘memory stabilisers’, which Aleida Assmann has broken down into the categories of affection, symbol and trauma (Assmann 1999).

Abstract

This chapter offers an introduction to the semiotic approach to the space of memory. After defining in what terms space is a language, we focus on two key concepts: narrativity and enunciation. The former, which should not be equated with a story or plot, is understood as the fundamental organisation of meaning, the form that structures our experiences. The latter concerns not the physical production of a text but the traces left by the enunciator in the text, and, more specifically, it may be represented by the architectural style of a building, the form of an urban plan or the display in a museum. In the second part, we present the theoretical and methodological specificities of the contributions in this volume.

Keywords: Semiotics of Space; Semiotic Methodology; Cultural Memory; Narrativity; Enunciation.

This Book

This book aims to present the most relevant concepts of semiotic methodology to a wide audience of scholars and researchers working on memory who may not be familiar with a semiotic approach. In order to do so, we have decided to focus on space, analysing different kinds of spaces, real and virtual, from cities to monuments, from architecture to urban practices, from museums to spaces represented in documentary films or imagined through digital devices. Such a choice implies two main questions: why space? And why semiotics?

As we will briefly explain in this introduction, from a semiotic perspective space is in itself a language, or, to use Jurij Lotman's words (1992), a modelling system, capable of giving shape to the world and at the same time of being modelled by it. Space talks about our values and the structure of our society, but also, and maybe in the first place, about what we have been, about our past and the transformations it has undergone. Space therefore represents a highly privileged vantage point for the understanding of our memory of the past, as well as – as we shall see throughout the chapters of this book – of the way in which space itself produces memory, rewriting, transforming, interpreting and sometimes erasing it. Space is indeed the storage of our collective memory, where we can find and read the traces of memorial processes: no study of cultural memory can neglect the spatial traces left by it.

Why can semiotics be important to scholars working on these topics within different frameworks and even different disciplines?