Ephemeral and Ludic Strategies of Remembering in the Streets: A Springboard for Public Memory in Chile

Abstract

This article examines a profound turn in the commemoration and representations of the dictatorial past in Chile (1973–1990), where young people who did not experience firsthand the authoritarian order are publicly creating fleeting images, practices, and objects to remember the military dictatorship. These are urban ephemeral and ludic mnemonic assemblages (Freeman, Nienass, and Daniell 2015) that connect past and present events and demand new ways of talking, acting, and thinking about the past, thereby appropriating the public space. The participants in these actions stress the original, carnivalesque, and public dimensions of their practices, challenging the official politics of memory that has focused on the recognition of victims within the walls of museums or memorials. The following question guides this article: How do new public, ludic, and ephemeral strategies interact with and potentially change official ways of narrating the past? How do they create the space for political participation in postconflict societies? Drawing upon a qualitative and multimethod study that combines 60 in‐depth interviews, participant observations, and archival work, I maintain that, although this blossoming of the Chilean public memory has opened up new territories for activating memory, it has a transient temporality and, consequently, may have transitory political potential.

Make It Till You Break It: Toward a Typology of De‐Commemoration

“…Vernacular memory (Bodnar 1992) is suggested in contrast, referring to alternative narratives of the past produced by groups within societies. Forming a central theme in memory studies, the differences and competition between “top‐down” and “bottom‐up” kinds of memory (Badilla Rajevic 2019, 2020; Iturriaga 2019; Wagner‐Pacific and Schwartz 1991) demonstrate that each society can have many different collective memories. It also demonstrates how memory activists “mobilize around the reinterpretation of the past and how they participate in the construction of public memory about past contentions and other historical events” (Daphi and Zamponi 2019:402–403).…”