Toxic Memories?

2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (6) ◽  
pp. 27-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
María Eugenia Ulfe ◽  
Vera Lucía Ríos

Memory museums exist as markers in the public domain; meanings and practices are created around them and assigned uses and silences. The Museum of the National Directorate against Terrorism in Peru displays artworks and archives seized from members of the Shining Path Communist Party of Peru and the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement and can be visited only with a special permit. The memories it contains are considered “toxic” and are exhibited in a private instead of a public space. This space cannot be understood as a “museum of conscience” or a “site of memory.” Victims are not dignified there, and no symbolic reparations are made. It houses memories in the form of artwork, books, and memorabilia of those who because of their participation in the armed groups during the conflict have been denied the status of victims as defined in the country’s reparations program. Los museos de la memoria funcionan como marcadores simbólicos en el ámbito público; se construyen significados y prácticas alrededor de ellos y se les asignan usos y silencios. El Museo del Directorio Nacional en Contra del Terrorismo en el Perú muestra el trabajo artístico y los archivos incautados a los miembros del Partido Comunista del Perú-Sendero Luminoso y del Movimiento Revolucionario Tupac Amaru. El museo sólo puede visitarse con un permiso especial. Los objetos que se exhiben son considerados “tóxicos” y se exhiben en un espacio privado en vez de un espacio público. Este espacio no se puede entender como un “museo de la conciencia” o un “lugar de la memoria.” Aquí las víctimas no son dignificadas, y tampoco reciben reparaciones simbólicas. El museo alberga memorias o recuerdos (libros, dibujos, recuerdos personales) de aquéllos a quienes se les ha negado la condición de víctimas, tal como está definida en el programa de reparaciones del país, debido a su participación en los grupos armados durante el conflicto.

Author(s):  
Aga Skrodzka

This article argues for the importance of preserving the visual memory of female communist agency in today’s Poland, at the time when the nation’s relationship to its communist past is being forcefully rearticulated with the help of the controversial Decommunization Act, which affects the public space of the commons. The wholesale criminalization of communism by the ruling conservative forces spurred a wave of historical and symbolic revisions that undermine the legacy of the communist women’s movement, contributing to the continued erosion of women’s rights in Poland. By looking at recent cinema and its treatment of female communists as well as the newly published accounts of the communist women’s movement provided by feminist historians and sociologists, the project sheds light on current cultural debates that address the status of women in postcommunist Poland and the role of leftist legacy in such debates.


2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-238 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucy Jackson ◽  
Gill Valentine

This article focuses on acts of resistance regarding reproductive politics in contemporary Britain. Drawing on empirical research this article investigates grassroots activism around a complex moral, social, and political problem. This article therefore focuses on a site of resistance in everyday urban environments, investigating the practice and performance involved. Identifying specifically the territory(ies) and territorialities of these specific sites of resistance, this article looks at how opposing groups negotiate conflict in public space in territorial, as well as habitual, ways. Second, the article focuses on questions around the impact, distinction, and novelty both in the immediate and long term of these acts of resistance for those in public space. Here, then, the focus shifts to the reactions to this particular form of protest and questions the “acceptability” of specific resistances in the public imaginary.


2009 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Vaiou ◽  
A. Kalandides

Abstract. This paper deals with the concept of «public space». It works with the ambiguities embedded therein, contrasting material space/s – the streets, squares, parks, public buildings of the city – with the other spaces created through the functions and institutions of the «public sphere» as a site of public deliberation. Focussing on the ambiguities of the concept allow questions of access, interaction, participation, cultural and symbolic rights of passage to be posed. Public space is approached here as constituted through the practices of everyday life: it is produced and constantly contested, reflecting – among other things – relations of power. Differences in gender, ethnicity or sexuality often lead to binary thinking, such as inside/outside, inclusion/exclusion, local/stranger. The way that such categories intertwine in everyday life, though, unsettle easy categorisations and force a questioning of strict lines of division. It is in this context that a proposal is made to discuss the city of «others», drawing from research examples which cross over such lines.


2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Isaac Leung ◽  
Andy Buchanan

Screen technologies increasingly permeate the experience of public space in Hong Kong. Large media walls have occupied the façades of many buildings, rendering a cityscape with dynamic information visible as a new urban skin. This article is a case study on Artificial Landscape, a site-specific media art project located on Asia Pacific’s largest LED outdoor screen. The case sets an example of how a public screen can serve as a mediating agent. It provides an opportunity for artists to provoke absent ideas in the public space and explore subversive potential, including critical reflection on issues surrounding surveillance, consumerism and rapid urban growth. The case also exemplifies how a public screen can mediate the public to experience an alternative context through artistic intervention, where negotiations of perceptions and subjectivities are made possible. This article provides insights into a public screen’s mode of spectatorship, quality of public space and curatorial strategies in an urban context. This is achieved by illustrating how various artworks extend the notion of publicness and remediate the mutually constitutive relationship among the built environment, media technologies, artists, public and everyday encounters.


Author(s):  
Vanesa Saiz-Echezarreta ◽  
Belén Galletero-Campos

Public controversies are an analytical opportunity to study the emergence of issues, the creation and alliance of actors, as well as the articulation of public arenas (politics, society, activism, academia, etc.). This paper analyzes how two actors in Spanish academia emerged, and how they became an expression of the polarized conflict on prostitution, sex work, and sex trafficking. Through a case study, this work traces the emergence and consolidation in the public space of the #universidadsincensura initiative and the International Academic Network for the Study of Prostitution and Pornography (Red Académica Internacional de Estudios sobre Prostitución y Pornografía, Raiepp). Methodologically, the technique of controversy mapping is applied through an analysis of the first phase of the controversy on Twitter with the hashtags #universidadsincensura and #universidadsinprostitucion and the monitoring of the platform’s activities based on active participation in the #universidadsincensura initiative. The analysis shows that both actors emerge in line with the logics of the mediatized public space linked to a presence in media and networks. Endowed with different degrees of institutionalization, Raiepp and #universidadsincensura form the same public, that of those directly or indirectly affected by the public problem surrounding the status of prostitution, for which they seek a solution through a process of enquiry and experimentation that defines democratic participation. Resumen Las controversias públicas son una oportunidad analítica para estudiar la emergencia de asuntos, creación y alianza de actores, así como la articulación de arenas públicas (política, sociedad, activismo, academia, etc.). A través de un estudio de caso este artículo rastrea la aparición y consolidación en la Academia de dos actores que visibilizan el conflicto polarizado sobre prostitución, trabajo sexual y trata con fines de explotación sexual, y que se materializan en #universidadsincensura y la Red Académica Internacional de Estudios sobre Prostitución y Pornografía (Raiepp). Metodológicamente se aplica la técnica de mapeo de controversias, a través de un análisis de la primera fase de la polémica en Twitter –con los hashtags #universidadsincensura y #universidadsinprostitucion– y el seguimiento de las actividades de las plataformas, desde la participación activa en la iniciativa #universidadsincensura. El análisis muestra que ambos actores emergen en consonancia con las lógicas del espacio público mediatizado, vinculados a la presencia en medios y redes. Dotados de grados de institucionalización distintos, Raiepp y #universidadsincensura conforman un mismo público, el de los afectados directa o indirectamente por el problema público en torno al estatuto de la prostitución, al que buscan solución a través de un proceso de indagación y experimentación que define la participación democrática.


1995 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 399-421 ◽  
Author(s):  
Orin Starn

AbstractThis article examines the history and ideology of the Communist Party of Peru-Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso). The rebels claim to embody a distinctively Peruvian Marxism. However, a close examination of the party betrays a conspicuous indifference to Peruvian culture and traditions. The distinctiveness of this largest and most diverse of the Andean nations disappears in the orthodoxy of a universal Marxism, in this respect placing the Shining Path within the long legacy of the imperial inscription of Latin American history into the preconceived categories and linear narratives of Western philosophy and science.


2010 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 583-600
Author(s):  
Dino Carlos Caro Coria

AbstractThe internal conflict in Peru that ranged from 1980 to the mid 90s entailed serious crimes committed by armed groups, especially "Sendero Luminoso" (Shining Path) and by the state's own armed forces, in particular the military and paramilitary groups such as the "Colina Group". These crimes ranged from attacks against civilians in violation of international humanitarian law, to enforced disappearances of persons, torture, and extrajudicial executions. In some cases, these crimes have even qualified as genocide.


2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 39-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valérie Robin Azevedo

In recent years, exhumation campaigns of mass graves resulting from the armed conflict (1980–2000) between the Maoist guerrillas of PCP-Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) and the States armed forces have increased in Peru. People in rural Andes, the most marginalised sectors of national society, which were also particularly affected by the war, are the main group concerned with exhumations. This article examines the handling, flow and re-appropriation of exhumed human remains in public space to inform sociopolitical issues underlying the reparation policies implemented by the State, sometimes with the support of human rights NGOs. How do the families of victims become involved in this unusual return of their dead? Have the exhumations become a new repertoire of collective action for Andean people seeking to access their fundamental rights and for recognition of their status as citizens? Finally, what do these devices that dignify the dead reveal about the internal workings of Peruvian society – its structural inequities and racism – which permeate the social fabric?


2018 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-107
Author(s):  
Sebastián Calderón Bentin

Peru approached the twenty-first century a polarized country. In the year 2000, with increased authoritarian control over the legislative and judicial branches along with constitutional reforms paving the way for his re-reelection, President Alberto Fujimori campaigned for a third term in office. His main electoral opponent, Alejandro Toledo, along with opposition leaders, spearheaded massive demonstrations in Lima accusing the government of repression, corruption, drug trafficking, and electoral fraud. Opposition figures were joined by grassroots social movements, unions, students, and human rights activists who opposed the regime's repressive and corrupt practices, which included by now reports of torture and extrajudicial killings. When Fujimori first became president a decade earlier he had inherited a country ravaged by widespread poverty, hyperinflation, nearly depleted foreign reserves, a growing narcotics trade, and two armed terrorist groups: the MRTA (Tupac Amarú Revolutionary Movement) and the Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso). Both were on the offensive across the country, the Shining Path most prominently, planting car bombs in the capital, kidnapping and killing civilians, and besieging towns and villages across the country. Looking for a way out of economic and terrorist violence, Peruvians were faced with two options in 1990: Alberto Fujimori, an ex-university president and agricultural engineer of Japanese descent, and Mario Vargas Llosa, a white, upper-middle-class novelist and liberal intellectual. Though Fujimori was less well-known, many Peruvians saw Vargas Llosa's center-right coalition as a repackaged version of the same traditional political groups that had lead the country into crisis. Fujimori would appear much like Hugo Chávez later in Venezuela, a populist outsider ready to challenge the traditional party system. Many saw Fujimori's succinct rhetoric as refreshing when contrasted with Vargas Llosa's elaborate speeches, especially since the former president, Alan García, who fled the country in 1992 on corruption charges, was also well-known for his loquacious disposition.


1986 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 165-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald H. Berg

Since 1980 the maoist party known as Sendero Luminoso, the “Shining Path,” has been waging a guerrilla campaign against the civilian government of Peru. To the surprise of most observers, this group not only has survived but has expanded its scope of operations, kept the military on the defensive, and attracted a small but significant national following.This limited success is puzzling because of the movement's small size, its lack of arms and its extreme radicalism, in a country with a diverse and substantial Left. Sendero Luminoso, calling itself the Communist Party of Peru, holds to an orthodox Maoist philosophy.


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