Rethinking Urban Inclusion
Spaces, Mobilizations, Interventions
Nancy Duxbury, Editor
Co-editors:
Gonçalo Canto Moniz
Gianluca Sgueo
Nº
02
June 2013
1
Propriedade e Edição/Property and Edition
Centro de Estudos Sociais/Centre for Social Studies
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Universidade de Coimbra/University of Coimbra
www.ces.uc.pt
Colégio de S. Jerónimo, Apartado 3087
3000-995 Coimbra - Portugal
E-mail: [email protected]
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Comissão Editorial/Editorial Board
Coordenação Geral/General Coordination: Sílvia Portugal
Coordenação Debates/Debates Collection Coordination: Ana Raquel Matos
ISSN 2192-908X
© Centro de Estudos Sociais, Universidade de Coimbra, 2013
Acknowledgements
The Rethinking Urban Inclusion: Spaces, Mobilisations, Interventions international
conference was an occasion to bring together the work of several thematic working groups,
projects and observatories at CES, which often work on overlapping topics. Thank you to the
members of the Scientific and Organizing Committees; the chairs and moderators of the
parallel sessions, roundtables and plenaries; the keynote speakers who informed and inspired
our discussions; and the CES staff who managed logistics and enabled the event to occur. The
conference was supported by the United Cities and Local Governments Committee on Social
Inclusion, Participatory Democracy and Human Rights.
Scientific Committee
Organizing Committee
Coordination of Scientific Committee
Boaventura De Sousa Santos
Pedro Hespanha
Members of the Committee
Giovanni Allegretti
Paula Meneses
Nancy Duxbury
Mathias Thaler
Stefania Barca
Mauro Serapioni
Tiago Castela
Michele Grigolo
Paulo Peixoto
Sisay Alemahu
Gonçalo Canto Moniz
Ana Cristina Santos
Isabel Guerra
José António Bandeirinha
Researchers and PhD Students
Giovanni Allegretti
Nancy Duxbury
Stefania Barca
Paula Meneses
Mauro Serapioni
Tiago Castela
Michele Grigolo
Paulo Peixoto
Sisay Alemahu
Gonçalo Canto Moniz
Ana Cristina Santos
Iside Gjergji
Elsa Lechner
Gianluca Sgueo
António Leitão
Maria Margareth Rossal
Administrative Staff
Alberto Pereira
Rita Oliveira
Alexandra Pereira
André Caiado
Lassalete Paiva
Contents
Nancy Duxbury, Gonçalo Canto Moniz, Stefania Barca, Michele Grigolo, Giovanni
Allegretti, Tiago Castela and Gianluca Sgueo
Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 10
Local Government, the Social and Evictions for the New City
Anselmo Amílcar, Marina Carreiras, Bárbara Ferreira and Jorge Malheiros
Social Mix, Utopia or Reality: Portuguese Cases ................................................................... 16
Isabel Raposo and Sílvia Jorge
Public Participation in the Urban Planning of Maputo and Lisbon Suburban Neighborhoods:
Virtues and Ambiguities .......................................................................................................... 33
Diego Beja Inglez de Souza
Brasilia Teimosa and the Intervention of the Ministry of the Cities, or the Amazing Quest of
the Human Crabs and the Mangrove Boys against the Real Estate Sharks ............................ 49
Camille Morel
When Urban Exclusion Enters Planning Policies: The Issue of the ‘Public Spaces
Humanization’ Program of the Buenos Aires Government – Two Cases of Manipulated Public
Spaces ...................................................................................................................................... 64
Massimo Allulli, Ernesto d’Albergo and Giulio Moini
Reframing Social Inclusion in a Context of Neo-liberal Hegemony: The Agenda of the Rightwing Government in Rome ..................................................................................................... 75
Federica Gatta
Temporality and Spaces of the Moving City: Informal Actors and Urban Transformations in
the Era of the Greater Paris ..................................................................................................... 92
Ananda Martins Carvalho, Bárbara de Moraes Rezende, Daniel Geraldo Oliveira
Santos, Isabella Gonçalves Miranda, Fábio André Diniz Merladet, Luana Xavier
Pinto Coelho, Ricardo Alexandre Pereira de Oliveira, and Thaís Lopes Santana Isaías
Vila Viva, a Project of Urban, Social and Political Organization of Aglomerado da Serra:
Analysis of Effect ................................................................................................................. 113
Aslı Sarıoğlu
Displaced Women: Practices of Urban Transformation in Istanbul on the Isolated Effect on
Women's Lives ..................................................................................................................... 128
Leonora Grcheva
The Planning Aporia in Slum Upgrading: The Case of Old Topaana, Skopje ..................... 145
Mokhtar Kheladi
Liberalization, Urbanization, and Eviction Effect in Béjaia ................................................ 156
Urban Environmental Justices and Greening the City
Isabelle Anguelovski
Towards New Directions in Urban Environmental Justice: Re-Building Place and Nurturing
Community ........................................................................................................................... 176
Luciana Nicolau Ferrara and Karina de Oliveira Leitão
Regulation of Land Use and Occupation in Protected Water Source Regions in Brazil: The
Case of the Billings Basin, Located in the Metropolitan Area of São Paulo ....................... 192
Márcia Saeko Hirata and Sérgio da Silva Bispo
Urban Inclusion from an ‘Urban View’: Spatial and Social Appropriation by Collectors of
Recyclable Materials in São Paulo’s Downtown ................................................................. 210
Céline Felício Veríssimo
Challenging
Marginalisation
in
the
Decentralised
Neighbourhoods
of
Dondo,
Mozambique ......................................................................................................................... 222
Giovanni Attili
Urban Agricultures: Spatial, Social and Environmental Transformations in Rome ............. 245
Leonardo Veronez de Sousa
Urban Agricultures in Maputo: Other Forms of Production ................................................. 257
Teresa Madeira da Silva and Marianna Monte
Social Inclusion as a Collective Urban Project: Urban Farm in Lisbon and Street Vendors in
Rio de Janeiro ........................................................................................................................ 269
Le To Luong and Wilhelm Steingrube
Lifestyle Change Raises a Stronger Claim for Public Parks in Hanoi, Vietnam .................. 282
Practices of Urban Protest and the Right to the City
Eden Gallanter
Whose City? Occupy Wall Street and Public Space in the United States ............................. 302
Dorothy Kidd
#Occupy in the San Francisco Bay ....................................................................................... 312
Tamara Steger
Occupy Wall Street: A Counter Discourse ........................................................................... 327
Jordi Nofre and Carles Feixa
Policies of Inclusion? Some Thoughts on the ‘Los Indignados’ Movement, the Emerging of
the Neoliberal Penal State and the Criminalization of ‘Being Young’ in Southern
Europe ................................................................................................................................... 338
Assembleia Popular de Coimbra
(Pedro Alípio, Francisco Norega, Oriana Bras, Tiago Gomes, Esther Moya)
Occupying Democracy .......................................................................................................... 351
Adina Janine Edwards
Living Spaces in Public View: Contested Space in the Downtown Eastside o f Vancouver,
Canada .................................................................................................................................. 365
Fiammetta Bonfigli
Security Policies in a Multicultural Area of Milan: Power and Resistance ......................... 374
Chris Mizes
Taking Up Space in the Vacant City: The Politics of Inclusion in Philadelphia ................. 390
Aditya Mohanty
The Production of Governmentality in the Postcolonial Megalopolis of Delhi ................... 404
Richard Filčák and Daniel Škobla
Another Brick in the Wall: Ghettos, Spatial Segregation and the Roma Ethnic Minority in
Central and Eastern Europe .................................................................................................. 413
Eva Garcia Chueca
Towards a Cosmopolitan Notion of Human Rights: Social Movements and Local
Governments – Two Different Actors Spearheading the Right to the City ......................... 429
Armindo dos Santos de Sousa Teodósio, Sylmara Lopes Francelino Gonçalves-Dias,
Patrícia Maria Emerenciano de Mendonça, and Maria Cecília Loschiavo dos Santos
Waste Pickers Movement and Right to the City: The Impacts in the Homeless Lives in
Brazil .................................................................................................................................... 443
Henrique Botelho Frota
Right to the City and Soccer: Strategies of Mobilization to the Right to Remain in the Place of
Residence .............................................................................................................................. 476
Christien Klaufus
The Right to a City: Changing Peri-urban Landscapes in Latin America ............................ 487
Urban Histories, Architecture, Public Spaces and Participation Practices
Ana Pires Quintais
Postmemory and Art in the Urban Space .............................................................................. 505
A. Remesar, X. Salas, E. Padilla, and D. Esparza
Public Art by Citizens: Inclusion and Empowerment ........................................................... 512
Rui Mendes
Shedding Light on the Still- not- happened: Dérive, Terrain Vague, Áreas de Impunidad .... 523
Michele Morbidoni
Aesthetics of the Informal Urban Landscape: A Potential Factor of Social Inclusion ......... 534
Cláudia Rodrigues
Night at the City, City at Night: Cosmopolitan and Colonization Rhythms in the
Neo-Bohemian Inner Porto ................................................................................................... 557
Roberto Falanga and Matteo Antonini
Transforming Cities, Societies and Policies: Psychological Reflections on Participatory
Processes’ Experiences ......................................................................................................... 572
Nelson Mota
Engagement and Estrangement: Participation and Disciplinary Autonomy in Álvaro Siza’s
S. Victor Neighbourhood ...................................................................................................... 588
Andreia Santana Margarido
Evolution of Coimbra's Town Center and the Emergence of Downtown Re-creation ......... 596
Márcia Saeko Hirata and Patrícia Rodrigues Samora
Participatory Urban Plans for ‘Special Zones of Social Interest’ in São Paulo: Fostering Dense
Central Areas ......................................................................................................................... 612
Cátia Sofia Viana Ramos
Understanding the Present-day City through Urban History: An Approach to Guarda ........ 627
Manuel Villaverde
The Other Inhabitants of Bourgeois Dwellings: The Case of the Iberian Boulevards in Late
Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries ........................................................................... 636
José Sequeira, Ana Delgado, and Francisca Ramalhosa
Urban Regeneration Interventions from the Inside Out: Peer Reviews through a CrossEuropean Project .................................................................................................................. 643
Mai Barghouty
Influence of Relations of Power on Local Development Planning Processes: Two Cases of
Palestinian Joint Community Planning Processes ................................................................ 661
Spaces, Differences and Cultural Actors as Agents in Urban Change
Armina Pilav
Territory Imagery: A Planning Tool for Seeking Spatial Justice ......................................... 682
Liangping Hong and Juliana Forero
Recognizing Cultural Heritage for Social-cultural Sustainability: A Spirit of Place Perspective
for Urban Renewal – a Case Study of the Park Mirador de los Nevados ............................ 696
Natalie J.K. Baloy
Lopsided
Inclusion:
Recognition,
Reconciliation,
and
Reckoning
in
Postcolonial
Vancouver ............................................................................................................................. 710
Katrina Sandbach
‘Westies’ No More: Towards a More Inclusive and Authentic Place Identity .................... 724
Raúl Abeledo Sanchis
Cultural Organizations and Social Innovation: The Case of Bunker (Slovenia) .................. 733
Michelle Catanzaro
Reclaimed Space: Mapping Urban Assemblages in Sydney ................................................ 747
Cláudia Pato Carvalho
Biographies for Artistic and Social Intervention ................................................................... 753
Christopher Alton and Jaimie Cudmore
Stigmatized Communities Reacting to ‘Creative Class’ Imposition: Lessons from Montreal
and Edmonton ....................................................................................................................... 765
Julie Chamberlain
Problem Place, Problem People: Spatialized Racial Discourses in an Urban Planning Project
in Hamburg, Germany ........................................................................................................... 780
Claudia Roselli
Urban Negotiations: The Case of Delhi ................................................................................ 793
Ana Bruno and Elisabete X. Gomes
Walkscapes of Children’s Participation in a World of Common Things .............................. 804
Pedro Filipe Rodrigues Pousada
The Misfit Eye: Scoping Space Inequality, Planned Obsolescence, Isolation and
Commodification through the Eyes of Contemporary Art .................................................... 816
Urban Histories, Architecture, Public Spaces
and Participation Practices
Postmemory and Art in the Urban Space
Ana Pires Quintais,1 Coimbra / Portugal
[email protected]
Abstract: Pierre Nora’s “lieux de mémoire” highlights the multiple forms by which memory
connects to material or immaterial places, establishing links between urban practices and
collective memory. In what way can landscapes and urban b uildings appeal to the memories
of the city’s inhabitants? The aim of this paper is to bring forward the memorial work of The
Missing House (1990) by French artist Christian Boltanski in the light of the notion of
postmemory (Hirsch, 2001), and the necessity of a participative public art which can open up
to inclusive urban practices.
Keywords: postmemory; absence; landscape; memorial artwork; place of memory
Somet imes it seems as though we are not going anywhere as we
walk through the city, that we are only looking for a way to pass the
time, and that it is only our fatigue that tells us where and when we
should stop. But just as one step will inevitably lead to the next step,
so it is that one thought inevitably leads to the next thought [...] so
that what we are really doing when we walk through the city is
thinking, and thinking in such a way that our thoughts compose a
journey, and this journey is no mo re or less than the steps we have
taken.
Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude (1988[1982]: 122)
In 1990 Christian Boltanski creates The Missing House as his contribution for Die Endlichkeit
der Freiheit (The Finitude of Freedom) exhibition, organized that year to include international
artistic answers to the political situation in Berlin, after the fall of the Wall:
The artists were charged with creating a public and ephemeral art that would inform the city but not
decorate it or provide it with new monu ments. The art works were to articu late the individual significance
and history of their specific urban sites, and each artistic commentary or intervention was to join in an
informat ive network uniting the two halves of the city in a dialogue of East and West. (Czap licka, 1995:
159)
Boltanski is a visual artist known for multiple installations that address Nazi genocide.
Son of a Jewish father who escaped deportation during the German occupation in France,
Boltanski is, according to Marianne Hirsch (2012[1997]), a member of a second generation
whose artistic work obeys to the uneasiness of postmemory. The notion of postmemory
1
Ana Pires Quintais holds Bachelor and M aster degrees in Psychology and Postgraduate in Family Analysis and
Intervention. As a PhD student in Languages and Heterodoxies: History, Poetics and Social Practices (FLUC/CES) she is
currently writing her thesis entitled “Literature, Image and Postmemory”. Areas of investigation/interests: postmemory,
visual arts, literature, representations of violence, Holocaust studies.
505
concerns the offspring of those who testified in first-hand cultural and/or collective trauma,
namely, the relationship that the generation who came after those who experienced the trauma
has with that experience. In this way, the second or third generation remembers, not because
they were there but because they have grown up in a particular family narrative webbed by
the previous generation’s trauma through stories, images and behaviors:
[...] postmemory characterizes the experience of those who [...] have gro wn up do minated by narratives
that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are displaced by the powerful stories of the prev ious
generation, shaped by monumental t rau matic events that resist understanding and integration. It describes
as well the relationship of the second generation to the experiences of the first —their curiosity and desire,
as well as their ambivalences about wanting to own their parents' knowledge. (Hirsch, 2001: 12)
According to Hirsch (2001), postmemory work is based in some sort of investigation, an
excavation beyond the surface, trying to understand what, for example, images of destruction
unveil and conceal. Boltanski’s memorial piece, which is discussed here, seems to obey this
postmemory work. The Missing House devised for Berlin’s oriental area is part of a two-set
piece which included also The Museum exhibit, located in the West part of the city and which
consisted of a sequence of vitrines displayed near Lehrter train station, setting a comunicative
link between the two sites. Located in Grosse Hamburger-Strasse 15-16, The Missing House
refers to an empty space formerly occupied by a house where Jewish (and non-Jewish)
families lived and who mostly perished in the Nazi death camps. In 1945 the bombs from the
Allies were dropped in the center of Berlin striking down the house. This episode eventually
led to its demolition thus leaving a vacant lot between two buildings. Boltanski gathered up
an amount of information about the former residents, found in the local archives, and arranged
in rectangular plates the names, professions and residence dates, which he placed on the walls
of the buildings adjacent to the empty lot. Some distance away, in the West side of the city,
inside the vitrines that shaped The Museum, one could find postcards, copies of documents
concerning deportation procedures, photographs and other material about the former residents
of The Missing House. At the end of the exhibition these vitrines were removed. The Missing
House however, was favoured by a request from the population to be preserved and, with the
support of the Berlin Senate this memorial work has remained untill now.
Pierre Nora’s “lieux de mémoire” (apud Hoelscher and Alderman, 2004), seems relevant
in this case since it pays particular attention to the ways in which memory is spatially
constituted. For the French historian, memory is connected to places that can be material or
immaterial, places that wake up past rumors. Similarly, Crinson (2005) speaks about an
“urban memory”, whose meaning lies in a city which collects practices and objects that make
a particular past allusion, while the city makes and re- makes itself. Thus, urban memory is
something that refers the city as a place where one lives and where once one has lived, a place
where we can find traces of the ones who no longer inhabit the city. About these traces which
suggest a particular past, Brett Ashley Kaplan (2011), in Landscapes of Holocaust
Postmemory, deals with the relation between memory and landscape, offering guidelines
about how the Holocaust has been revealing itself in the landscape. Landscape is here
understood in an extensive way including literary and urban landscape. Kaplan asks herself:
“How much do we know about the history of certain places? [...] How can we read spaces
decades after a traumatic event?” (95).
According to Hirsch and Spitzer (2010), place authenticates narrative, namely, place
validates what happened, although risking swallowing the observer into a traumatic past. Like
Marcel Proust’s madeleine, objects and places can work like mnesic triggers that connect us
to the history of the world where we live and to the memory of the city where we inhabit. The
506
word landscape is also used by Susan Suleiman (2006) to describe her work, which she
defines by the incursions through a literary or physical territory which is dominated by
memory. The Holocaust can be perceived as a global phenomenon that can be remembered
through a certain landscape which attends to the traces or clues of the traumatic events, spaceembebbed, places of memory. And what happens when this place is an empty lot which used
to be the site of a house, the setting of a forced abandonment caused by the Nazi’s ethnic
cleansing? This traumatized landscape can offer the observer some kind of landscape
embedded in loss, in ruin, in which absence is not equal to forgetfulness or muteness, but
appears as a gap that constitutes testimony. This omission is summoned by Henri
Raczymow’s “mémoire trouée”, a memory that is perhaps absent but that is felt in all places
after Auschwitz. It is about these post-Holocaust places, these places of postmemory, that in
his recent book Como Se Desenha Uma Casa (2011) Portuguese poet Manuel António Pina
seems to be writing:
Dir-se-ia antes uma casa,/ um pouco mais alta que um império/ e u m pouco mais indecifrável/ que a palavra
casa; não fulge. / Em certas noites, porém, sai de si e de mim/ e fica suspensa lá fora/ entre a memória e o
remorso de outra vida./ Então, co m as luzes apagadas,/ ouço vozes chamando,/ palavras mortas nunca
pronunciadas/ e a agonia interminável das coisas acabadas. (pp. 14-15)
Through The Missing House, Boltanski becomes the archivist of an absent lot in the
center of Berlin, telling stories that appear to redeem memory and to re- map the city in
different ways. For Czaplicka (1995) Boltanski’s piece makes use of a visual rhetoric of
absence combined with historical information, producing in the observer or visitor not only a
calling for his/her imaginative abilities, but also for his/her remembrance and reflection of
things past. According to Czaplicka it is the combination of physical and material elements of
the archive that characterizes Boltanski’s installation, serving as an indicator of the
unrepresentable and calling up not only the observer’s imagination but also his/her knowlegde
and (post) memory:
As far as this engagement follows the material presence and archival excerpts to reconstruct the past in the
present, the experience may lead to a consciousness of history or to a process of analytical co mmemoration,
whereby the informed v iewer may reflect on the causes and effects of the violent eradication extant in
evident absence. (p. 168)
This house, which is absent, is in itself a powerful symbol for the destruction of what it
stands for: a sense of comunity, of the everyday, of family, of home – lost, making The
Missing House one of the few exceptions, for Czaplicka (1995), of the commemorative
practice in post-war Germany by avoiding the representation of the Nazi atrocity through a
monument or physical construction which, sometimes and paradoxically, can cause an
obliviousness effect. Artist and writer Nuno Ramos (2010[2008]), speaks precisely of an
“indivisible border, a non-commemorative monument made of soft steel, of a frail marble like
floss”2 (127; my translation), seeing this apparent contradictions as certifyers of the place’s
(of memory) authenticity:
“de uma fronteira que não divida, de um monumento que não celebre, feito de um aço mole, de um mármore frágil como
penugem.” (in the original).
2
507
O monu mento esquecido ganharia do próprio esquecimento seu atestado de autenticidade, e neste paradoxo
se encerraria. Mas aos poucos, quem sabe, sua história seria reconstituída por historiadores, [...] Então
ruiria por si mesmo, intocado, a começar pelo telhado [...] Então uma nova etapa seria inaugurada, co m o
vão de uma quadra quase inteira vazia, obedecendo ao formato do prédio original, sem muros nem grades,
mas onde ninguém entraria. Po is seria de péssimo alvitre ult rapassar a linha imag inária entre a calçada e o
espaço onde o prédio estivera. Crianças s eriam educadas, por gerações a fio, a não pisar além dessa linha,
deixando aquele terreno vazio no coração da cidade superpovoada. [...] E desfeito, derrubado pelo tempo,
vazio até mes mo de seu piso e de suas paredes, o antigo edifício ofereceria à cidade o património h istórico
de uma pergunta. (128-129)
The question asked by Ramos is perhaps the question that Shoshana Felman (1992) asks
about the meaning of living in a former Jewish quarter, in her words, how can we inhabit
history understood as a place of the Other’s annihilation?
The Missing House is a powerful artwork maybe because it tries to represent something
that touches us in a very particular way, the idea of living in a community, of life in a
neighborhood, the idea of something ordinary and of the everyday, like living in a house.
According to Czaplicka (1995), the material traces and names, dates and professions that
are in the plates placed in the adjacent walls of the vacant lot, summon up not only the
presence of the former residents in the urban space but also their connection to the
professional life of the city, placing the artwork in a context where we can contemplate the
experience of loss and emptiness as personal:
To the extent that the commemo rative insight into the place involves se lf-reflection and personal
involvement, the contemplat ive subject may empathize enough to gain a consciousness of self in history
and even to experience the loss mediated here as a personal one. It seems appropriate that this loss be
experienced in Germany on a street once called Toleranzstrasse. (p. 171)
As van Alphen (1997) remarks, Boltanski’s archivist mission is not, in this case, to
release information about the Holocaust, but to put the observer in the immediate experience
of a certain aspect of Nazism or a certain aspect of the Holocaust. In this way, what is
happening is not only listening to the account of a witness, but being placed in a position
from which one lives the past in a subjective way. However, an aesthetic of ruin, of the
fragment, threatens to take the observer to call up “romantic” images of melancholy, losing
him/herself in a sense of loss. According to Czaplicka (1995), the documental information
included in Boltanski’s artwork breaks this connection by incorporating a presence in t he
form of documents and historical traces. In this way, the artist points to an idea of recognition
of loss: “Not a sense of loss but a recognition of loss should be the result: mourning (the sense
of loss and the melancholic engagement) becomes reasoned in the recognition of what or who
has been lost” (p. 185).
For Hal Foster (2004), many artists have been using as groundwork several documentary
materials, images and historical texts, which leads Foster to speak of an “archival artist”,
someone who makes the archival procedure central in his work, in the sense that it opens up
the possibility for a type of alternative order to the one used by the museums or traditional
archives. Foster speaks of an “archival impulse” recalling the “archive fever” of Derrida
(2006 [1995]), in which the human psyche is understood as an archive by the French
philosopher, who uses Freud’s mind topography to speak about psychoanalysis as an archival
practice. According to Derrida, we suffer from an archival compulsion, something he calls
“mal d’archive”. However, Foster’s archival artist is one who offers an alternative approach
to the archive, understood here not simply as a database or as a device aimed at knowledge
objectification or with a regulatory function, about which Fo ucault warns us, but as an
508
archival work made by artists in the boundaries of a humanist tradition that explores the
archive as a tool which works upon collective memory:
As social scientist Arjun Appadurai suggests, the traditional humanist archive fits w ith the Cartesian duality
of body and soul, as a corpus of knowledge or informat ion that is animated by something less visible –
usually the spirit of a people, the people or humanity in general. (Gibbons, 2007: 135)
For Aleida Assmann (apud Olick et al., 2011), the archive is a kind of place of the “lost
and found” which captures what isn’t (still) necessary or what wasn’t (still) understood,
helping to position ourselves in time, serving as reference for social memory and thus creating
a meta-memory, a second-order memory which preserves what was forgotten. Information
about the former residents included in the plates of The Missing House re-builds and/or reworks out their memories, producing a memory of a memory which makes this artwork and
this place an artwork and a place of postmemory. A particular investigation or excavation has
brought to light the lives of the ones who inhabited a particular place, in a particular
neighborhood, before Second World War events brought down to debris those “small stories”
– the “small memories” which interest Boltanski (Kaplan, 2007) – and that are part of our
History and part of the city’s history.
The Missing House then conjures up, in a very powerful way, questions of loss related to
the German past, with all the phantasmatic burden that still pervades the city’s history. The
house’s absence is synonym of the absence of the Jewish people, their culture and their
engagement in the city. The Missing House as an artwork claims this absence by denying any
physical construction in the empty lot of Grosse Hamburger-Strasse, embodying the
emptiness as a containing site and allower of memory but also as an absence that can never be
fulfilled. This calling of absence seems to conspire to invoke memory and produce history,
predisposing the observer not only to a form of mourning for the vanished inhabitants, but to
a type of commemoration in which the artwork’s characteristics unveil individual stories
through the plates with the resident’s names, and to an opening of the conscio usness to a
social history through an absent house (Czaplicka, 1995). The memorial work of The Missing
House seems to bring forward a particular performance of cultural memory in the present
(Whybrow, 2011), namely, the cultural trauma translated in the virtual annihilation of a
people, which becomes a historical moment that continues to enfold, to re-work itself in the
present, simultaneously carrying a certain urban past thanks to the specific location of the
artwork.
As Mesch (2008) remarks, following Walter Benjamin, in this type of work the postwar
city becomes a “mnemotechnic device”, which aims the recall of destruction. The destroyed
or abandonned building serves as an echo of a traumatized landscape that seems to symbolize
the wounds of the past that are kept open. Open wounds whose lack of cure are destined to be
unsolved and never to be forgotten (Gibbons, 2007).
An obvious connection about place and memory brings us to the mnemonic techniques
that Francis A. Yates (1992 [1966]) recalls in The Art of Memory and which acknowledge the
ancient relation between site and memory. The art of memory can be translated into a
sophisticated set of techniques aimed to imprint places and images in the mind. Places where
images are put and whose presence and arrangement make us remember. In The Missing
House there is the need of a participative passer-by who, through his/her (post)memory,
seems to update the artwork. Thus, the inhabitants – those who interact with the city – are the
real “makers” of the city, building with the help of their memory, the groundwork of an
inclusive city which shelters, as Michel de Certeau notes, “the absence of that which has
passed by” (apud Gibbons, 2007: 102). In this way, we can consider that the artwork, framed
509
in a form of urban art, operates as a medium through which the passer-by discovers the place
of the city inside him/herself (Whybrow, 2011).
The postmemory’s work that seems to concern The Missing House is found in what
Hirsch (2008) notices as the “imaginative investment, projection and creation” (107), and that
can be attributed to the observer of Boltanski’s memorial, incorporating him/her in a
rememoration of the city’s past and allowing us, perhaps, to talk about an urban postmemory.
Without any explaining caption which can warn and inform the passer-by about the
memorial site, The Missing House seems to adopt the commitment of a place that doesn’t set
itself apart but mingles in the city, allowing only the less (or more) distracted and/or informed
observer/visitor/passer-by a powerful reflection about this place, about this absence, an
absence as a trace of a former presence, and through which memory is updated by the
observer who fulfills a role of a secondary witness or, in other words, the performance of a
postmemory work.
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