Buenos Aires: hurtful memories in the urban landscape

Abstract

This research project intends to study the dynamic relations, sometimes conflictive, that history and memory establish in the urban space. The central object of the present research are the memories related to the last and most violent military dictatorship that Argentina has ever lived, occurred between 1976 and 1983. With the end of the dictatorship, the sites of collective memories rationed to this kind of State violence were reclaimed for juridical proposes and as symbolic and political significant places. In this context, disputes between different social groups, with different versions about the same history facts, came out. This study, focused in the city of Buenos Aires, can be divided in two parts: the first one pretends to understand how the conformation of trajectories and ways that form a hurtful topography happens; and the second one intends to get close to one or more specific cases, to understand how conflicts happened in the recognition process of these places as sites of hurtful memories. In conclusion, we are going to be looking for the way these memories were socially and spacially constructed by and thru the city. (AU)