Museums, presences and handkerchiefs. From official memory to vital memory in two experiences

Abstract

In this work we analyze the drifts that the use of memory has in the discourses inside the museum. In a first part, we describe the functions of the hegemonic museum as a representative of the nation-state and as a legitimizer of the absolute power of dictatorships and monolithic governments. In a second part, we develop the turn of the museum-subordinate where memory - and especially vital memory articulated with the activism of social struggles - enables a shift towards the construction of new aesthetics and ways of making a story and a museum. It is from the emancipation of silenced voices -by deaths and disappearances- when their presences become roots, branches and fruits of a museum-memory that enables the questioning of old customs when building history. With a corpus of empirical elements we will introduce descriptive fields of two exhibitions that approach the subject from the symbolic action of objects and images in the face of pain and memory, on the one hand the "Museum of Memory and Human Rights" of Chile in his series “Presencias” of Graciela Sacco and on the other hand the “Museum of Memory" in Rosario, Argentina with the exhibition Legacies/scarves in struggle.That is where the relevance of the text is inscribed when it poses vital memory as an indispensable break for the construction of new ways of making a plural museum.