Building Monuments to Amnesia and Forgetting Where They Put Them.
Is there a civically unhealthy practice of constructing overly politicised nation-building projects after conflict? After each conflict in modern times there have been Internationally led interventions of cultural monuments to conflict commemoration, but do they suffer from convenient or deliberate forgetfulness of socially complicated, often problematic, emotional entanglements of post-conflict trauma?
To answer those questions, I guess one has to wrestle with two more:
What is the relationship between trauma, memory and architecture and, what is the potential for architecture to facilitate healing and reconciliation in the wake of political violence?
In my experience trapped within the architectural residue of political violence, rests legitimate approaches to reading the complex aftermath of conflict, addressing the individual and collective emotional entanglements of trauma whilst acknowledging the everyday impact of war. The material traces of conflict offer communities the opportunity to reconsider approaches to wartime narratives and acknowledge post-conflict memory and meaning and the impact these have on the collective unconscious and archetypal aspects of the human psyche (Gustav Jung).
The built environment post-war represents the entangled emotions felt by victims and perpetrators of political violence and offers an opportunity to explore whether layered environments reduce the impact of trans-generational trauma. Rather than sanitising, silencing and sweeping aside the uncomfortable truths of war let the surviving building heal along with their communities thus providing an honest layer from which to build a new post-conflict, peace-minded layer of hope and recognition.
Violence rendered memories: a triumph for one group but a devastating loss for another, and the shame and ambiguity associated with past wrongs can make memory traumatic, the pain of which produces silences of its own (McDowell, S. and Braniff, M. 2014),
Inviting the existing built environment to tell its story helps recognise and address the uncomfortable reality that in the past “In spaces of conflict, we often find several methods of silencing unwanted narratives to be exercised through physical interventions in the landscape. Most dominant is the violent act of erasure as it is put to work, most notably during projects of nation-building, with the aim of forging a seamless territory that would tell the story of a homogenous nation, sharing a common history, and collectively built identity within the territory in question” (Akawi and Kolowratnik, 2014). The state then becomes the legitimate surface for inscription of events, within the “lieux de memoire” (Pierre Nora’s term for collective places of memory or realm of memory), or theatres of inscription where fabrication of the collective experience is performed, and any conflicting trace to this narrative is erased.
Buildings, space and place, as we know are never neutral, they are socially constructed and will always embody political power, values and symbols which are contested between different voices and interpreters. The post-conflict challenge is “how to remember the atrocity without lessening its horror, without somehow sanitizing it by making it tolerable to remember” (Forty and Küchler,1999).
Therefore, these buildings could offer a more empathetic approach to supporting communities in having ownership over their memories, acknowledging them and realising their potential in helping teach and hopefully heal trauma for future generations to come.
Wegner suggests that “re-experiencing a traumatic event in an otherwise safe context can take out some of the sting. Repetition of just about any stimulus or experience will result in what researchers call habituation – a reduced physiological response to the stimulus” and the, “repeated re-experiencing of a traumatic memory in a safe setting can dampen the initial physiological response to trauma” (Wegner and Gold, 1995), rather than suffering the negative consequences of memory suppression and forced amnesia. One such consequence is what Wegner Calls the ‘rebound effect’, Wagner explains that, “following a period of thought suppression, participants in his experiments usually show a “rebound effect”: they later think about the forbidden subject more often and intensely than they would have if they had never attempted to suppress thinking about it in the first place. “Although not thinking about painful thoughts may seem like a reasonable coping strategy to adopt” “trying to forget might not only prolong the misery but make it worse”. (Wegner and Gold, 1995)
The memories of trauma shouldn’t be a taboo for some and a celebration for others, memory should be allowed to breathe and contribute to cultural development. Cornelius Holtorf argues that “cultural memory is not about giving testimony of past events, as accurately and truthfully as possible, nor is it necessarily about ensuring cultural continuity: it is about making meaningful statements about the past in a given cultural context of the present”. (Holtorf, 2001)
Thus, it’s not about monumental statements, it’s about ordinary buildings becoming those meaningful witnesses. Nevins (2005) has convincingly argued that ‘all memories have a geography’. Much of what we remember is framed within specific places. Our attachment to place is mediated through memory and recollections of the past. The need to give meaning to space and place is especially acute in the aftermath of tragedy and conflict.
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