Moving memories in a place of memory: actors, meanings and practices in a former clandestine detention center (Rosario, Argentina)

AGUSTINA CINTO

Madrid

Conferencia; Third Memory Studies Association Conference- MSA Forward; 2019

Memory Studies Association- Universidad Complutense de Madrid

The purpose of this paper is to explain the moving memories built around the former clandestine detention center (CDC) Information Service (IS) of Santa Fe´s state police department, located in the Argentinian city of Rosario. The IS functioned as a CDC during the last dictatorship in Argentina (1976-1986), being a part of the clandestine repression scheme that was developed through all the country. Around of 1800 and 3000 people were illegally detained there between 1976 and 1979, which makes the IS one of the biggest CDC of the region. Since 2002, by a commodate signed with the Santa Fe's state government, a local group of Human Rights organizations "recovered" the place and created the Popular Center of memory. After the maturity of the commodate in 2012, the Santa Fe?s state government reassumed the administration of the IS and opened it as Space of Memory in 2015. As part of an ongoing PHD research with an ethnographic approach, in this paper we intend to define the different actors that took part in the ex CDC, from its "recovery" to present. In the same way, we try to approach to the diverse forms in which those actors have conceived and participated in the CDC as well as the interrelations produced between them, with the intention of explaining the movements built by the memories in this particular place.