Abstract
The Parque por la Paz Villa Grimaldi opened its doors to the public in 1997, at the place where, at the times of military dictatorship (1973-1989), Pinochet’s political police tortured until death. One of the first cases of a site of barbarism turned into a site of culture and of memory, the park shows however that the opposition between “memory” and “repression” (in the Freudian sense) is not enough to sum up the actual situation of an opposition between an amnesia organized by (ex-)militaries through laws of (auto-)amnesty and the struggle for recognition leaded by families of the victims, be it in Chile, in Argentine, in Brazil, or in another part of the world. It is a good example that a voluntarist memory attempting to structure a public memory also presupposes a cut that doesn’t prevent the chosen site to make resurfacing an unexpected memory.
Collective memory; Dictatorship; Chile; Villa Grimaldi; Realm of memory
