Clandestine Captivity, Testimony, and Construction of Truth in a Memory Site: Narrative Strategies and Memory Work at the ESMA Site Museum’s Permanent Exhibition (Buenos Aires)

Abstract

Testimonies of Argentine Clandestine Detention Centers´s survivors constitute irreplaceable voices for the construction of truth about last military dictatorship´s crimes (1976-1983) and the development of justice processes. Despite the early suspicions about the reasons for their release (Longoni, 2007), "there was a clear recognition of the suffering experienced by the survivors and an acceptance as ´truth´ of the descriptions of detention camps´s conditions" (Jelin, 2017: 207). In this context, their complaints and demands constitute also key pieces both for the identification of spaces that served as CDC and, in some cases, for their transformation into memory sites. In this chapter proposal, we will address the specific case of the ESMA Memory Site Museum, located in the former Officers´s Casino at the Navy Mechanics School (ESMA) since 2015, where one of the major CDC operated between 1976 and 1983. Our objective is to understand the uses and meanings that testimonial voices assume within the museum´s narrative, departing from the analysis of violence experiences´s modes of incorporation, the spatialities that host them, the truth´s supports that were included, and temporalities and meanings that are configured in this memorial iniciative. Our corpus of study is composed of observational records made in December 2018, March 2019 and March 2020, an interview with its director, Alejandra Naftal -museologist and survivor of the former Vesubio CDC-, and documental and audiovisual material from the permanent exhibition. As we will argue, the elaboration of the Museum´s curatorial script depended on the confluence of two different processes: in the first place, it had to do with the discussions and agreements between the different actors that have intervened in ex-ESMA since its “recovery”, and secondly, with the specific socio-political and memorial conditions in which this Museum was designed and inaugurated, particularly marked by the rise of right-wing political projects which culminated in the presidential triumph of Mauricio Macri. As a result of this scenario, in its ethical-political vocation to discard any denialist attempt, the permanent exhibition has been mainly structured on the “humanitarian narrative”, appealing to juridical scene as a legitimation support and tying victims´s testimonial voices to the space-time limits of kidnapping / torture / captivity / murder series. In this context, we are interested in reflecting on the truth effects that are produced by these cuts, selections and forms of validation, as well as on the meanings and temporalities that are constructed in this narrative, their potentialities, their tensions and obliterations.