This June, an unprecedented book launched in Rio de Janeiro. In an effort to revive forgotten memories from the dictatorship period, Lugares de Memória: Ditadura militar e resistências no estado do Rio de Janeiro (Sites of Memory: Military Dictatorship and Resistance in the State of Rio de Janeiro) contains historical narratives about 101 spaces in the state of Rio de Janeiro that relate to violence or resistance to the authoritarian regime. Each space included in the book connects to a point on a map and includes photos and original research grounded in witness testimony.
José Maria Gomez coordinated the project as part of a research initiative in the Center for Human Rights in the Department of Law (NDH) at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio). Originally from Córdoba, Argentina, Gomez is currently an associate professor at PUC-Rio and a full professor at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). His research focuses on contemporary political theory and explores themes including human rights, citizenship, transnational social movements, and democracy in Latin America.
Artememoria sat down with Gomez in order to ask about this ambitious project – its origin, its structure, and political role in today’s Brazil. Read on for the full conversation.
Artememoria: How did you get the idea to organize Lugares de Memória?
José Maria Gomez: My initial inspiration was the book Memorias en la ciudad: siñales del terrorismo del estado en Buenos Aires (Memories in the City: Signs of State Violence in the State of Buenos Aires) organized by the Argentinian human rights organization Memoria Abierta. The idea was that Brazil needed something like that. We started working on this project in May 2014 as a way to achieve the goals set out by the Rio de Janeiro Truth Commission. The book would be one of four publications; it would be the Center for Human Rights’ main contribution to the truth commission, one focused on memory in public policy aimed towards preventing these historical events from repeating.
Other than Memorias en la ciudad, no other projects like this exist. So we organized an international workshop to delegate the different aspects of the project, which included the book and also other research. Our proposal for the State Truth Commission was to take on a comparative analysis of Latin America that included Brazil, and to build concrete signposting for memories. That’s the current struggle. At the time, the construction of the first Center for Memory and Human Rights in Rio de Janeiro seemed very likely – but not any more.
At the workshop, we invited not only people who run memorials and sites of memory, but also memory specialists. Among them was Gonzalo Conte, coordinator of the Memória Aberta book. There were three people from Argentina, one from Uruguay, two from Chile, one from Colombia, and a professor from South Africa. We became friends through these meetings and started to develop our ideas around the basic concept that the book would contribute to the Truth Commission’s goals. We wanted informal pedagogical material for the everyday person. That way, we can revive memory from Brazil’s ignored, forgotten, negated history.
We had to think of a distinctive approach. In Argentina and in Chile, marks of the past are everywhere. There, public memory is extremely – well, not consolidated, because that is never the case, but at least its social presence is strong, unlike in Brazil. In that sense, this project had to come from a totally different starting point. A major triumph of the Brazilian dictatorship continues to be strategic and constant forgetting imposed on the public. It has caused widespread indifference towards ignorance amongst the vast majority of the population, regardless of class or age. It’s shocking. And it is through this lack of memory that the dictatorship triumphs.
So, how do we take on a book project that aims to make at least some improvement in this area, without trivializing academic research and or cosigning that research to the closed bubbles of the academy? How could it be useful to readers regardless of the circumstances, in moments when interest strikes?
That’s where the importance of organizing the texts around spaces comes into play. These texts narrate stories with clear and accessible language so that non-experts can follow along. That style was important, but so was the idea that the texts would be visual, too. Not just in terms of the photos and locations that accompany each place, but also with the possibility for the reader to start reading about any of the sites, which are organized around themes. From there our concept for the book grew: the photos together with the thematic map bring together space, time, and concepts.
Artememoria: Why is the spatial dimension of memory important to public memory?
Gomez: First because memory evokes temporality, almost by definition. Memories arise in the present in relation to the past, but they also inevitably project themselves with expectations for the future. That’s the complexity and richness of memory, and that’s why it’s necessary to be clear about what happened, how it happened, when, where, and why it happened. We are contributing to rescuing, recuperating, and, above all, reconstructing this memory. So there’s nothing better than incentivizing inhabitants of a city or a region where conflicts took place to encounter the materiality (and immateriality) that only a physical social space can bring. It’s one way to walk through history and memory that is unknown – or perhaps that is very weak and fragile. Residents or even the occasional visitor, the tourist, can now move about in a way that evokes history.
This idea is a very controversial topic, one of the most hotly debated in social sciences and the humanities. Memory scholars in cultural studies areas (anthropology, sociology) and career historians can be zealously possessive about the territory of the past. But it’s important for everyone focused on the question of memory and the other political-cultural issues at play to rescue and further foment a debate on memory. No one owns that work.
We know memory is unpredictable as a political category. That’s what moved me to research memory in Brazil, comparing it to what has happened in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. The contrast lies in the context of the National Truth Commission from 2012-2014, which was a culminating moment of what was already an an-amnesiac phase in Brazil (2007-2014). Consistently, there was a strong, negative reaction from the Armed Forces, with efforts to prevent memory from arising due to the commission or social actions undertaken by any public authority. Historians have a monopoly over the truth and over history – that is, it stays totally within an academic sphere, one that doesn’t share its version with public memory in the slightest.
The spokespeople from the Armed Forces, both in the reserves and in active duty, make it crystal clear that there is no reason to begin a public conversation about the military dictatorship. This is political retaliation. Forgetting is the direct result of the larger political struggle over memory.
Artememoria: In that context, what was most difficult for your team in organizing this public history book?
Gomez: Articulating historical knowledge. Through different programs, research initiatives, and even this very project, Brazilian historiography has advanced so much. The Brazilian dictatorship was a crucial and transformative period for the country from an institutional, political, cultural, and economic perspective. There is a richness of accumulated knowledge that cannot be ignored, but there is also a rupture between historical knowledge and memory in Brazil. That’s a deliberate strategy for forgetting. History is for the historian, but not for the public. Memory would cause conflict in the sense that the past could affect the present, causing huge problems for Brazil’s current regime. But by making sure this history doesn’t enter public debate, those conflicts don’t happen. History stays in the past.
So, how do you translate all of that into a tool, one that incentivizes the everyday person to read and fuels their curiosity, even when everything else tells them not to? How to you facilitate that while also not creating something totally simplified, like alternative memorial tourism? It needed to be something consistent with the research but also accessible.
Artememoria: How did you organize the book in order to achieve that?
Gomez: That was the issue. We were banging our heads against the wall, trying to find a yet nonexistent formula. Memorias en la ciudad, the Argentinian book, is a guide for a country whose citizens are extremely involved and implicated in their history, emotionally, cognitively, politically, which is not the case here in Brazil.
We started with the fundamental concept of joining spatial, temporal, and thematic dimensions. Themes are hooks for different audiences. Some people will feel motivated to read about the repressive apparatus of the regime, others by the university student movement, the involvement of the church, the LGBT community, rural conflicts, or by workers.
But for each space, how can a single condensed text serve as receptacle for layers of memory and historical knowledge? The structure of each text includes the historical origins of the space and also a dimension about memory, in addition to our historical knowledge about the dictatorship period. Another consideration was how to make witnesses the protagonist of the text, an issue that is especially important from my perspective. Witnesses, with all of their subjectivity, have a way of producing truth. Only they were in clandestine, informal detention centers, suffering from the dictatorship’s torture mechanisms. Only they can communicate that experience. So, we needed historical context and a contained analysis, one that maintains academic rigor. We had to balance testimony with an analysis that, when possible, projects the past onto the present.
All of this that I’m explaining now is not something that I had fully formulated when we began. It was a back and forth process, fumbling through errors and correcting them bit by bit. Some spaces caused us to totally reformulate what we were doing, how we tried to heighten the reader’s curiosity. We give total freedom for readers to begin reading and then find themselves hooked by a different issue. The reader completes the meaning of the book, it’s 50-50.
I remember a moment when I said, “good lord, it’s slipping away!” you know? Like when you want to pick up a bar of soap from water: it slips out of your hand. We had to make mistakes and start over. We knew we would get there, just not when or how. This is the research process as seen from the inside, riddled with doubt and uncertainty, especially in a collective task with different styles, interests, and theoretical ideas at play.
Artememoria: Do you have any advice for other groups trying to work on memory initiatives in Brazil?
Gomez: We all need to start by thinking about other initiatives. As I mentioned, Memorias en la ciudad was our trigger. But once you shoot ahead, you have to go forward elaborating and building the idea. As with any research, you can’t have the entire idea formulated ahead of time. You accumulate and discover, getting it right and also making mistakes. The formula we came to has merits and weak points, but we got there only after trying various strategies.
One thing I would say is to write something explicit about the current moment in the introduction, especially given the very grave context in which we live. All of the advances between 2007-2014 (including those achieved by the National Truth Commission) ended up paralyzed by the recent political and socioeconomic crisis. Then, the current government, established by a “parliamentary coup,” brought back that old, ever-existent strategy of imposed forgetting. In other words, there is this feeling now that everything we gained is now lost, forgotten, or ignored. And more than ever, you have to encourage people to remember.
Artememoria: In this current moment of political crisis in Brazil, polarization is very concerning, not just politically but also in terms of memory. There are groups that do remember the dictatorship era and others that forget its atrocities entirely. How is it that memory projects can make sure that their texts reach the groups that have forgotten?
Gomez: That’s something I bring up in the introduction. Brazil has extremely weak memory politics, not just about the dictatorship but also about the past in general. There is an enormous dynamic of forgetting that starts with the state but that also extends to civil society. An alarming number of people are absolutely ignorant about what the 1964 coup d’état was.
Artememoria: So how do you reach that public?
Gomez: Well that’s the issue. This lack of memory, this forgetting, this indifference is not due to the fact that Brazilians have a natural propensity for forgetting. There exist symbolically violent mechanisms, institutionally and legislatively, that have succeeded over time. And now, you see a presidential candidate polling 20% of the popular vote who is a soldier who defends the military dictatorship and even torture, and who recently invited a man to be his vice president who, while in the army high command just three months ago, called for military intervention. That’s because the dictatorship was an ideological matrix that involves more than propaganda. It meant fear, censorship, and self-censorship. And it did not end with the regime, since no action was taken during the transition from dictatorship to democracy, as the transition itself took place with support from the military and with continuity among some sectors of the political elite.
Projects like this one could be even more in the public eye, like in Chile or Argentina, where there are sites of memory. Brazil is so dissonant when compared with what is happening in other places in the Southern Cone. But I think that physical spaces can be the material and immaterial anchor that makes the past visible in all of its layers of meaning, memory, and history.
One important thing that our team did was to develop two seminars made up of our team and other people interested in memory and politics. Students just beginning their undergraduate education had access to our bibliography, and they grew so much. From my perspective as a researcher and professor, it was amazing, and constituted some of the most important impact we had. Then these students go into different fields, some into memory and art, some into memory and politics. It’s amazing.
One student who started out here at PUC years ago now works with art and memory at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona. His family history is very traumatic. He’s from a Jewish family, and some of his relatives were exterminated in the Holocaust. One day, he said to me, “my mom started painting.” At 50 years old she felt this need to paint, and with brute force this traumatic family memory came out. He told me that, and I was stunned. I went to coffee with her, she asked about the book, and I began to talk about the project. She showed me her paintings and I asked if I could put her painting in the book. She said, “I’m not going to give you this one. I’ll paint one for this book, because I think it relates to what I’m doing.”
Painting printed on the inside back cover of Lugares de Memória, next to a list of names of the dead and disappeared
An homage to the dead and disappeared, included at the end of over 500 pages of spaces tied to dictatorship violence and resistance to oppression.
She included pieces of fabric, vestiges of the past. She was reading Benjamin as she painted, but at the same time it’s not at all academic. These vestiges also project into the future, into the other fires that might alight. Like one we’re living through now, for example.
In the book there are the spaces, the memories, the homage to the disappeared, and then the painting. I wanted to end the book with an opening.
This interview, translated from the Portuguese by Lara Norgaard, was edited and condensed for clarity.