Sites of Violence, Sites of Peace, Sites of Justice: Transforming the Relational Landscape of Yogyakarta

The collaborative “Sites of Violence, Sites of Peace” project seeks to transform the relational landscape of Yogyakarta by enabling new intergenerational conversations about the 1965 politicide in Indonesia and further injustices with other marginalized communities. This community-engaged project developed walking tours of (largely unacknowledged) sites of historic violence: a colonial fort turned national museum, a derelict office building, a refurbished bank. Through these tours, sites of past suffering are activated by unheard survivor testimonies, making visible historical injustice and its contemporary and enduring significance. Unsettling the dominant spatial arrangement of Yogyakarta, the tours rewrite the city as a space where injustice and persecution are experienced. Crucially, the tour is also a relational encounter, facilitating intergenerational conversations that challenge social and political exclusionary norms. It, thereby, enables a form of relational justice, which requires active involvement from fellow citizens, not solely redress from the state.

The Persistence of the Victorian Prison: Alteration, Inhabitation, Obsolescence, and Affirmative Design

Prior scholarship tracing the origins and architecture of prisons has tended to focus on how and why prisons are built—what they are intended to achieve and their construction as an expression of the punitive philosophies of their age. It does not consider how prisons persist as time passes, perhaps beyond their anticipated operational life span, and into “obsolescence.” Focusing on the archetypal Victorian prison, and considering the alteration and inhabitation of such prisons through time, this article critically reinterprets notions of obsolescence in the built environment and explores an enduring cultural attachment to a particular and arguably archaic material manifestation of punishment.

Långbro Hospital, Sweden—From Psychiatric Institution to Digital Museum: A Critical Discourse Analysis

Sites of oppression might be remembered in ways that contribute to dialogues about human rights and justice, exemplified by Sites of Conscience. Oppression was commonplace in former psychiatric institutions, yet such institutions are often subject to strategic forgetting and transformed into business parks, hotels, or residential areas. This article concerns Långbro Hospital, a digital museum presenting the former psychiatric institution Långbro, Sweden, now transformed into a residential area. I discuss how the former institution becomes a digital nonplace in which patients tend to be objectified or excluded, and the park and the buildings in which oppression occurred are reduced to representing beauty and functionality. I relate the analysis to digital Sites of Conscience such as British Museum of Colonialism and Pennhurst Memorial and Preservation Alliance and, thereby, show that thoughtful digitization might recognize prior as well as current injustice and oppression and contribute to change.

Memory Surrounding a Mausoleum: Transforming Spain’s Valley of the Fallen Into a Site of Conscience

Francisco Franco announced the construction of the Valley of the Fallen in 1940, a year following the end of the Spanish Civil War, and incorporated overt iconography that honored the struggle of Nationalists without memorializing the Republican victims during this war. This memorial distinguished the names of two fascist leaders, Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera and Franco, buried in the center of the basilica in 1959 and 1975, respectively. However, this site, as of June 2021, has failed to acknowledge the over 33,000 victims, both Nationalists and Republicans, interred in this site, many of whom remain unidentified. The signification of the Valley of the Fallen has transformed since the turn of the 21st century due to recent memory practices that increasingly commemorate Republican victims of the Spanish Civil War. This article illustrates how the persistence of memory and counter-memory practices have shifted the meaning of the Valley of the Fallen, creating a site of conscience through changes affecting place and space, particularly in light of Franco’s legacy.

A Suitable Place to Remember? Derelict Magdalen Laundries as Possible Sites of Conscience in Contemporary Ireland

It is less than a decade since the Irish government published the McAleese Report, which accepted the state’s role in facilitating abuse in Catholic Church-run Magdalen Laundries. At the time the then Taoiseach Enda Kenny tearfully apologizing for the state’s involvement, alongside promising redress for survivors. Although much has been achieved since that time, one aspect that has not been resolved is how we remember and memorialize that past. Of the 10 Magdalen Laundries that operated in postindependence Ireland, seven have been demolished or substantially redeveloped and three are currently in various degrees of dereliction. This article considers the potential for extant Magdalen Laundries to become sites of conscience. It will explore this potential through the lens of temporality, materiality, and spatiality and will ultimately argue for the need to explore scalar power relations if Magdalen Laundries are to truly reflect past injustices as well as become meaningful places in the contemporary.

Memory, Imagination, and Resistance in Canada’s Prison for Women

A group of women who were incarcerated at Canada’s first federal Prison for Women (P4W) have been fighting to create a memorial garden since the prison closed in 2000. In 2017, the prison was sold to a private developer who plans to convert the historic building and grounds into condos, retail, and office space. What does it mean to remember the dead, and to fight for the living, at a time when neoliberal common sense demands the efficient conversion of a place of suffering and death into a “heritage building” on “prime real estate”? How might a collective practice of radical imagination help to resist the commodification of memory into a tourist attraction or an aesthetic improvement of private property? And what is the relation between memory, healing, and accountability in a place where state violence, gender domination, and settler colonialism intersect?

Memories of State Terrorism in Chile: Dark Ruins at Villa Grimaldi

In this short essay, I explore the recent reassessment of ruined sites haunted by the echoes of State terrorism across the Southern Cone of Latin America, asking what is at stake in the conservation of former detention centers and focusing on Villa Grimaldi in Chile. The site was initially transformed into a green park but has subsequently become a museum in which remains of the original buildings and artifacts from the repressive past are publicly accessible. I draw on perspectives that claim that even ruins that portray past acts of inhumanity do not necessarily need to evoke melancholic or traumatic retrospection; rather, they are sites of alternative pasts and futures. The transition from the original green park design to a more prominent use of the ruins speaks of an invitation to reassess the past, addressing marginal aspects of emblematic memories, including the political conflict that underpinned the repression.

Situated Testimony: Forensic Architecture’s Memory Objects

“Forensic Architecture” describes both the research agency, founded in 2011, as well as its investigative method and aesthetic practice. As an emerging discipline, forensic architecture exploits the relation between space, material, and memory. My aim in this article is to consider how the agency’s “memory objects”—aestheticized virtual renderings of their investigations—operate as testimonial objects, evidentiary archives, and simulated sites of conscience. I attend to one “memory object” in particular, a film titled “Drone Strike Investigation Case no. 2: Mir Ali, North Waziristan, 4 October 2010; The Architecture of Memory,” an investigation which the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Counter Terrorism and Human Rights commissioned Forensic Architecture to undertake. This article suggests that this virtual “memory object” troubles the status of both the human witness and the physical landscape to which it refers.

Keepers of the Grave: Ritual Guides, Ghosts, and Hidden Narratives in Indonesian History

The 1965 killings in Indonesia brought about the incarceration, disappearances, and deaths of 500,000 to one million alleged members of the Indonesian Communist Party. This article concentrates on several suspected mass graves in Central Java reputed to have supernatural energy emanating from the violent deaths of the individuals buried there. These sites also have gatekeepers or juru kunci bridging the living and the spirits inhabiting these spaces. This research asks, How do these sites, through their juru kunci, elucidate a past which continues to be silenced? I posit that through contact with the souls of the executed, these gatekeepers utilize an ethereal connection to subvert the state’s enforced silence. These sites also provide a ritual space transforming these ghosts into ancestors worthy of remembrance. By reclaiming the identities of those murdered, the living and the dead can achieve a kind of localized spiritual reconciliation.

The Representation and Agency of Artistic Interventions in Community in Mainland China

Based on immersive participatory observation of the curatorial practice of the 2019 OCAT exhibition Rural Construction through Art in Shenzhen, we identified two modes of community-based artistic interventions: a cultural “governance/capital” intervention deeply embedded in the social structure and a collective experimental art production intervention dissociated from the social structure. However, both forms of “production art” are essentially “unities of opposites” integrating incorporation and resistance, consistent with the socialist art policy of promoting the flourishing of all types of arts. Though the aesthetic divide between “art for society’s sake” and “art for art’s sake” positions these artistic interventions in different places in society, we argue that the domain of Chinese contemporary art is shifting away from the studio and toward scenes, events, experience, and dialogue. The approach of “the era of mass art” also means that “art-as-resistance” is being legitimized as “art-as-incorporation” in a subtle but unremitting way.