Speaking Justly: ‘Forums for Telling’ in Argentina and Chile

• In Event: Visuality, Truth, and Memory: Seeing and Affect in and from Twentieth-Century Latin America

Abstract

This paper will present key aspects of my current ESRC (UK) funded project ‘Re-emerging Pasts’ which focuses on how - by what processes, according to what criteria, and subject to what kinds of verification? - new truths emerge about the political violence that took place in the 1970s and 1980s in Argentina and Chile. The research will consider a range of diverse sites, understanding them as 'forums for telling' (Weizman, 2011, 2014). Its premise is that the importance of telling the past is intimately linked with Justice, but that this 'juris-diction' is not confined to legal forums, since the work of speaking justice (and justly) also takes place elsewhere (Nancy, 2003; Fitzpatrick, 2004). Indeed what is at stake is the relation between legal and other forums as sites for debate about the past. Our hypothesis, drawing on the work of Isabelle Stengers (2009; 2011), is that truths about the past are of different kinds at different sites because they have to pass through different processes of hypothesising, conditions of 'testing' and collective reflection before they are affirmed and allowed to emerge as relevant. The paper will consider how this process at a museum of memory differs from the production of truth by courts of law, or in other forums such as the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team's attempts to establish identities through the testing of human remains or DNA. Each involves distinct material and human witnesses, different procedures and crucially, place different constraints on the objects of their interrogations (Stengers, 2011b).

Author

• Vikki H Bell, Goldsmiths, University of London