Accounting for Violence: Marketing Memory in Latin America

Marketing and Sacred Space: The Parque de la Memoria in Buenos Aires

n a n c y g at e s - m a d s e n Marketing and Sacred Space The Parque de la Memoria in Buenos Aires I n 2001, shortly after the Parque de la Memoria was inaugurated on the banks of the Río de la Plata, a new advertising campaign was launched by Los Platitos, a popular restaurant located directly across the street from the park. Recognizing that the public memorial had the potential to draw more visitors to the northern section of the costanera river walkway, the restaurant owners distributed flyers that exhorted potential customers to remember its location. While several of the park’s overseers found such a tactic distasteful, many family members of the disappeared were enchanted with the flyers, believing such publicity would help draw visitors to the park itself. The tension between those who believed a space for remembering past horror should not be associated with a marketing campaign, and those who believed such a space might benefit from the free advertising, illuminates some of the inherent and perhaps irresolvable contradictions involved in the “marketing” of memory. Given that the creation of any public memorial space can never remain ideologically pure—outside of market forces—does the influence of external factors that shape any memorial inevitably taint the honorable impulse to remember? Put simply, what is the role of profane market forces in a sacred memorial space? The creation of the Parque de la Memoria, like all other sites dedicated to the memory of past trauma, is fraught with tensions between a pure desire to remember a difficult past and the inevitable external forces (both political and economic) that shape the form of memory. Located on the banks of the Río de la Plata near Ciudad Universitaria (the northern campus of the University of Buenos Aires), the completed park will contain a monument 152 | nancy gates-­madsen to the dead and disappeared victims of state terror, as well as a sculpture garden, intended to provoke reflection upon the difficult years. Additional monuments, including one to remember victims of the 1994 bombing of the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (amia) building and another dedicated to the Righteous Among the Nations, will also occupy the space. To date, a little more than one third of the park has been completed—the access plaza, four of the sculptures, the Monument to the Victims of State Terrorism, and the Centro de Documentación (Information Center)—yet tension regarding the aesthetics and politics of this memorial space remains .1 When one considers that the Parque de la Memoria is one of the few memorials dedicated to the victims of state terror in all of Buenos Aires, if not the entire country, the mere fact of its construction gains significance. Because the park has the extraordinary burden of provoking memory and reflection about a historical period that a significant portion of Argentine society would prefer to forget, its creation has embodied a struggle to “sell” the idea to those parties in a position to help the dream of the park become a reality, as well as to the general public. Yet, paradoxically, the inevitable marketing involved in creating this sacred space for memory both increases and decreases the visibility of the park and its capacity to realize its lofty goals. Commemoration versus Commodification: The Challenge of Marketing Memory The association of memorials and monuments to past trauma with marketing seems at best contradictory, and at worst somehow unethical, for it implies converting traumatic memory into a commodity. “There’s no business like Shoah business” was a critical phrase that arose during the debates regarding the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin to call attention to the tension between the desire to honor a difficult past and the necessary business of getting a memorial built. According to Horst Hoheisel, an artist who has created many memorials to the Holocaust, “the longer I worked in this commemorative business, the more aware I became of the problem. Memory disappears in the commemoration!”2 More precisely, the commodification of memory to a certain extent robs a memorial of its commemorative power, and this tension between commemoration and commodification arises in the Parque de la Memoria as well. Originally proposed by a group of former students of the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires and family Marketing and Sacred Space | 153 members of the disappeared, the impetus to create the park responds to...