materialising memory at Rivesaltes
lejla odobasic novo
courtesy of Passelac & Roques architectes
architecture and materiality
One of the inherent attributes of architecture is its materiality. It is the persistence of materiality that often stands witness to remembrance, be it individual or collective. The relationship between the way we remember, what we remember and how we materialise our remembrance is a subject explored by many scholars including Walter Benjamin in1940, Maurice Halbwachs in 1950, Pierre Nora in1984, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida in 1987, James Young 1992, Reinhart Koselleck 2002, Andreas Huyssen 2003, Aleida Assmann 2008 and Jay Winter in 2009. It is the places of commemoration that take on the most significant role in the materialisation of memory in so far as that is their raison d’être. Through shifting paradigms of the way we commemorate, the architectural and material expression of such places has also morphed, evolving from very static monuments (often celebrating only the victor) to that of much more subtle memorial sites that engage us by asking us to participate in the memory work. Here built form takes on a subordinate role, becoming invisible in favour of experience. Or, to use James Young’s term, the built form becomes a counter-monument. 1
In the field of memory studies, place as a concept is frequently deemed as a lasting and steadfast feature of culture. Thus, place also holds an important commemorative role in the attempt at preserving and honouring certain memory or memories. It also provides a communal spatial framework for what is referred to by Aleida Assmann, a leading scholar in memory studies, as a two-fold memory. 2 Assman’s two-fold memory models indicate two complimentary ways in which she deems cultural memory operates: the inhabited functional memory (Funktionsgedächtnis) and the uninhabited storage memory (Speichergedächtnis). Storage memory is of collective nature, it is selective, normative and future-oriented. It is often the ‘official’ story (memory) of a nation propagated by official government and leading religious institutions. Functional memory is of a material nature which encapsulates and makes tangible stored memory. Memorials and sites of commemoration become places of functional memory that ensure the prorogation of storage memory, which in turn leads to solidification of the stored memory furthering collective identity building.
This solidification of memory, the selection of what and how to remember is widely debated. Jay Winter argues that the way we relate to commemoration has evolved and that ‘from roughly 1970 onwards the politics of remembrance shifted in such a way to make war a landscape of horror at the centre of which are not the heroes, the resister or even the soldiers but the innocent civilians who were massacred in its wake.’ 3 Reinhart Koselleck, in 1985, observed that commemorative places have evolved from memorials that reflect sacrifice and death in the name of a nation, such as the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, to more abstract memorials which still commemorate death, but also the enormity of loss without offering any kind of justification. Holocaust memorials are an example of such approach and he goes on to argue that the new expression of a memorial, through modern palimpsests, is one of multiple layers of meaning and inscription that allows their significance to change with the passage of time. 4
3 Winter, Jay. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1995. p31 4 Koselleck, Reinhart. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time , trans. K. Tribe. Cambridge: MIT Press,1985. p 289
1 Young, James. ‘The counter-monument: Memory against itself in Germany today’, Critical Inquiry , 18:2, 1992. pp 267–96
2 Assmann, Aleida. ‘Canon and Archive’, tr. S B Young, in A Erll & A Nünning (eds) , Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008. p 99
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on site review 36: our material future
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