Neighbourliness, Work and Familiy: Neighbours’ Testimonies of the ex Clandestine Detention Centre Sectional 1° in Santa Rosa-La Pampa, Argentina

MAURO GRECO

Congreso; Explorations of Counter Memory; 2022

2° Conference of the Memory Studies Association Nordic, Centre for Studies in Memory and Literature de la University of Iceland,

In the current conference I will focus upon one particular “counter-memory” I came across during my PhD research (2010-2016) on the aesthetic depictions of certain issues relating to the last Argentine dictatorship (1976-1983). I am speaking particularly of the memories of ‘common and ordinary women and men’ of an ex-clandestine detention centre, the Argentine equivalent of the Nazi and fascist concentration camps. In the context of fieldwork in the neighbourhood of the Sectional 1° in Santa Rosa-La Pampa, an inland city 600 km away from Buenos Aires (the capital of the country), I had the opportunity to meet some ‘counter-memories’ regarding the–at that moment– hegemonic human rights paradigm, first built by the Human Right’s Argentine movement and then retaken, from office, by Kirchnerism since 2003 to 2015. The particularity of those neighbourly (counter)memories is that, regarding the two analytical axes of my research (the collective responsibilities and small resistances vis-à-vis the dictatorship), those neighbours facilitated a highly uncomfortable and controversial (counter)memory: we could work, live and have family in the midst of the enforced disappearances. In the current conference, I will focus on how the aforementioned two dimensions (work and family) intersect problematically, built 'from below' by 'common people’s memories, regarding the State-sponsored aim to judge a radical past.First, I will reproduce selected fragments of the nine in-depth interviews I carried out with neighbours of the Sectional 1° in Santa Rosa-La Pampa, to illustrate how their testimonies show a normal conviviality during the last dictatorship. Second, I will articulate those findings with the theoretical frame from which both the concepts of collective responsibility and small resistances have been built. Regarding the former, the German tradition of work led by Karl Jaspers and Hannah Arendt was seminal on the subject. Concerning the latter, the French influence of the works by Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau and Guy Debord was fundamental to its building. Finally, I will systematise the findings of this articulation as well as justify my hypothesis that the category of ‘neighbour’, very fashionable nowadays thanks to the criticism of the citizen notion due to its abstraction (Lewkowicz, 2006), is the best equipped to study the micro-physic dynamics of repressions and its desires by common people.