Abstract

In recent years, Portugal and Spain have witnessed a very public and at the same time contentious unfolding of politics of memory concerning their violent (colonial, fascist) pasts. If in Portugal the current commemorations of the 50 years of the Carnation Revolution and the independence of its former colonies has raised debates regarding hegemonic and official versus alternative and silenced remembrances of its colonial past, in Spain the social trajectory of the Law of Historical Memory since its implementation in 2007 has been marked by different instances of political dispute and lawfare. This reminds us (pun intended) that not only memory is a "disputed territory" (in both a Freudian and sociological sense), but also that memory and heritage processes are contingent interventions and mobilizations into ‘available’ pasts determined by political hegemonies (Samuels 2018). The question remains pertinent and active: what motivates mobilizations to preservation and archive (Derrida 1996), and which mobilizations become hegemonic or marginalized in the memory field that is generated? And more importantly, what are the epistemological, political and ethical costs of such mobilizations? Which memories are rendered invisible/indetectable/impossible in the process? This formulation therefore equates memory and heritage processes, in particular those related to past violence, as necessarily conflictual social mobilizations that embody problems of justice, human rights and reparation. In this respect, however, while the contribution of heritage to peace, democracy and human rights has been recurrently formulated across political and academic channels since its formulation in the UNESCO realm, there is insufficient knowledge and understanding of contexts where heritagization contributes to social injustice through processes of imposition, hegemony, amnesia and silencing – in particular in what concerns memories of violence and trauma. In this project, combining empirical and experimental laboratory approaches, a team of anthropologists, historians, archaeologists, visual studies and art/literature studies scholars sets out to address the problem by proposing an experimental research inquiry into heritage as a socio-political mobilization, focusing on what is ‘left out’ of public and private processes of heritagization and memorialization. Looking specifically at the heritage of violent and traumatic pasts in the post-colonial and post-authoritarian contexts of Portugal and Spain, we question: to what extent, and in what terms, do such memory processes entail dynamics of amnesia, silence, taboo or epistemic obliteration? And what are the consequences of this forgetting in terms of social justice, reparation and human rights? Our proposal is therefore situated in the intersection of memory and epistemology, exploring the ‘available histories’ (Koselleck 2004) of violent pasts and their social trajectories in the present. To do so, we promote an interdisciplinary debate around the working concept of ‘impossible archives’, with which we explore what is ‘left out’ of heritage and memorialization processes. We develop empirical case study research across Portugal, Spain and the Portuguese-speaking African Countries (PALOP), currently in the process of commemoration of the 50 years of the Carnation Revolution and the independence of former colonies, and subsequently perform a collective experimental brainstorm towards exploring in/detectable dimensions of memory across multiple media and platforms. Our goal is to propose a research agenda on ‘impossible archives’ and to develop heuristic and methodological strategies towards the future study of other examples of heritage impossibilities.

Team