ESMA Museum as a Place of "Hot" Memory

Veselova Irina PhD in History Senior Lecturer, Department of Foreign Languages, Faculty of the Humanities and Social Sciences, Peoples' Friendship University of Russia 117198, Russia, g. Moscow, ul. Miklukho-Maklaya, 10 korp. 2 irinaxochitl@gmail.com Other publications by this author

The busy twentieth century has made its own adjustments to the understanding of what functions a historical museum should perform. If earlier museums mainly gave an idea of the cultural achievements of previous generations, told about the formation of the state and glorious victories, then after the Second World War and the public recognition of the Holocaust, museums dedicated to the black pages of the history of some states arose. Such memorial museums, or memory museums, have their own specifics: they appeal to the emotions of visitors, tell a story on behalf of victims and, in addition to telling about the past, contain the idea of the importance of the struggle for human rights ^{[1, pp. 120-121]}. In such museums, the key tool of dialogue with the public becomes affect, experience, an attempt to "feel" into the experience of Another.

In this series of modern museums, a special place is occupied by expositions placed not in museum buildings specially erected to perform these functions, but in places that themselves bear the trace of the story they want to tell. One of these museums is the ESMA Museum (la Escuela de Mec?nica de la Armada), located in the building of the former School of Mechanics of the Argentine Navy in Buenos Aires. During the "last" dictatorship (1976-1983), there was a secret prison where opponents of the regime were kept. After the fall of the dictatorship, it was decided to give the school premises for a memorial museum and a human rights center. The walls of ESMA remember the sufferings of thousands of people who were tortured here in the most brutal ways, which makes this space not just a museum, but a place of memory, where, according to Pierre Nord, "memory crystallizes and finds its refuge" ^{[2, p. 17]}, thus helping to preserve in material and symbolic unity the memory of social groups for subsequent generations. Places like ESMA, like physical spaces, are what Maurice Halbwax defined as a frame that helps to revive collective memory, gives the necessary impetus for its awakening ^[3].

When analyzing the ESMA museum space, it is necessary to refer to the concept of the German historian Jan Assmann, who, using the terminology of Karl Levi-Strauss, divides historical memory into "cold" and "hot" ^{[4, pp. 72-73]}. The first exists in societies that prevent the intrusion of history into their modernity, and the second – in societies that use history as a driving force for their development. For Argentina, the history of the "dirty war" unleashed by the military junta against its own population during the dictatorship is an element that excites the historical consciousness of society. In this context, the following research question is formed: what makes the ESMA Museum a place of "hot" memory? To answer it, it is necessary to consider the context of the transformation of ESMA into a museum space, its content, as well as the status of the object of memory policy.

ESMA during the "last" dictatorship in Argentina (1976-1983)On March 24, 1976, a coup d'etat took place in Argentina.

The military removed Isabel Peron, who held the post of president at that time, from power. The junta immediately began to implement a new political course, called the "Process of National Reorganization". Its integral part was the fight against the opponents of the new regime, which went down in history as the "Dirty War". From an ideological point of view, it was based on the search for an internal enemy, designated by the term subversivo – "bomber". The main tactic of eliminating enemies was their abduction. People simply disappeared, and their relatives could not get any information from the authorities about their whereabouts.

The junta organized a whole network of clandestine detention centers (centros clandestinos de detenci?n). According to official data, there were about 700 such centers in the country, the largest of which was located at the Naval Mechanics School in Buenos Aires.  The educational institution was a complex of several buildings. After the military junta came to power and the beginning of the "Process of National Reorganization", an underground detention center for people abducted by the military was organized in one of the ESMA buildings, which functioned next to the Naval educational institutions throughout the entire period of the dictatorship.

This dual function of ESMA as both a training center and an underground detention center sharpens the problem of perception of state terror by the Argentine society itself at the time of its implementation: since the center coexisted side by side with the educational institution for many years and was located almost in the center of the capital, many not only guessed what was happening within its walls, but even witnessed crimes, committed by the military. However, the silence in Argentine society that accompanied the existence of this center, the silence implicated in fear, and the propaganda-fueled belief in the existence of real criminals-"subversives", caused a deep trauma to society, subsequently giving rise to a sense of guilt for inaction.

During the period of operation of ESMA as an underground detention center, about 5,000 people passed through it. The prisoners were representatives of the most diverse categories of the population: both political and public figures, workers and trade union members, as well as students, religious figures, artists and intellectuals in general. At the same time, the Argentines could not completely protect themselves from being in the dungeons of the center, since almost everyone could fall under the extremely vague legislative definition of "subversivo". People who found themselves in underground detention centers were subjected to exhausting interrogations, torture and physical destruction. Children born in prison were taken from their mothers and given to military families and members of the nomenclature.

Creation of a museumIn 1983, the National Commission on the Case of Mass Disappearance of People (CONADEP) was established, the result of which was a report entitled "Never again" (Nunca m?s), which contained lists of missing persons.

It was published in 1985.  But the transition to democracy has not solved the problem inherent in society. The courts that took place after the fall of the dictatorship punished only key individuals and organizers of mass terror. In 1986, the "Law on the Final Point" (Ley de Punto Final 23 492) was adopted, according to which, after the 60-day period of complaints, the military could not be charged, and in 1987, the "Law on the Need for Submission" (Ley de Obediencia Debida 23 521) was released, exempting ordinary soldiers from responsibility members of the army and police ^{[5, pp. 144-145]}. These legislative acts made it possible to avoid punishment for those who participated in State terror, even if only by following the orders of their superiors.

            In 1998, Argentine President Carlos Menem (1989-1999) proposed a bill to demolish the ESMA complex. A monument of national unity was supposed to be built in its place. However, this initiative was opposed by representatives of various Argentine public human rights organizations ^{[6, p. 110-111]} and, above all, activists of the Mothers of May Square – women who were looking for their children who were victims of the dictatorship. They did not give up trying to achieve justice, demanding to continue the search for missing relatives and punish the perpetrators of state terror. Therefore, it was important for them to defend ESMA as material evidence of the crimes of the military junta. This conflict became a clear example of the clash of different memory policies: the one that came from the state, and the one that was proposed by members of public organizations.

The first attempts to return to the conversation about the traumatic past at the state level were made in the early 2000s. The pressure of the public and human rights organizations on the authorities led to the institutionalization of responsibility ^{[5, pp. 151-154]}. In 2001, the country's federal justice system declared the oblivion laws unconstitutional, and in 2003 Congress repealed them. After that, trials of the military who carried out terror resumed in 2005. In particular, since the year 2007 there have been trials of those accused of crimes in the ESMA underground detention center. The largest of them lasted from 2012 to 2017. According to the court's decision, 29 of the 54 defendants were sentenced to life imprisonment.

The Government of Nestor Kirchner, who took over the presidency in 2003, made a serious contribution to understanding the difficult past. On his initiative, in 2004, the land property of the Navy, on which ESMA was located, was transferred to the state. A Space of Memory and Human Rights (Espacio de Memoria y Derechos Humanos) was created in the former school building. Now there are various non-profit organizations engaged in preserving the historical memory of the victims of the dictatorship, as well as promoting ideas for the protection of human rights. The space is positioned as a link "between the repressive past and the present in continuous construction for the transformation of our collective future" ^[7].

In 2008, one of the buildings of the complex was allocated for a physical exhibition. The museum received the official name "ESMA Memorial Museum". From 1948 until it was handed over to the government, it was used as an officer's recreation club for the high command of the Argentine Navy. The building with an area of 5,390 m2 is a three-storey pavilion with a basement and a large attic.

The task of the museumThe main task of the ESMA Museum is to preserve the memory of crimes against humanity committed by the military in Argentina during the last dictatorship.

The official website of the museum states that ESMA is not only a historical monument, but also "evidence accepted by the court" and "material evidence" of the plan of systematic disappearance, torture and destruction, which was implemented by the state ^[8]. You should pay attention to this clarification. There are museums specially built for storing objects, and there are those in which events unfolded directly. The ESMA Museum is essentially similar to the concentration camps of Nazi Germany turned into places of remembrance. They are also not just historical monuments, but also physical evidence of crimes against humanity.

Speaking about museums, German researcher Aleida Assman notes that they are associated with two types of memory: cumulative and functional ^{[9, p. 56]}. The first is manifested in the collection and preservation of historical artifacts, and the second is in the formation of a certain picture of the past. In the case of the ESMA Museum, it is primarily about functional memory. Strategies for how to make such places of memory "talk" can be very diverse. The current concept of the ESMA Memorial Museum is not an attempt to reconstruct the voices of the junta victims who have gone into oblivion, but to provide an opportunity to speak to prisoners who were able to go through all the torments and survive. The museum's exposition is built in such a way that the survivors themselves give voice to the deceased victims through memories of them, as well as preserved testimony made by them at trials. As a result, those killed by the regime not only begin to acquire the same voice, but the power of this voice increases many times, due to the fact that they come from the living memory of people who testify about them every day through the materials of expositions in the walls of the museum. This living memory generates and retransmits the main message of the museum – the need for daily reproduction of the national consensus about "Never again" ^[10].

The main exposition of the museumThe British literary critic J.

De Groot considers the impact to be one of the most important features of a modern museum, which, being a place of participation, itself changes the visitor ^{[11, p. 234]}. In the case of the ESMA Museum, the affect is achieved through the narrative of the exposition, the use of photos, videos and sounds. Visitors to the museum can get acquainted with the main exposition, located in 17 halls filled with both traditional museum exhibits in the form of museum-exhibited artifacts of the detention center, and modern light and sound projection equipment, which provides visitors with testimonies of surviving prisoners, materials of trials of representatives of the military junta, as well as a constantly replenished collection in an interactive format declassified documents of state bodies responsible for carrying out terror against Argentines ^[12]. The main hall of the museum is a space called "cappuccino" - a room on the third floor of the club, which is a long corridor with cramped compartments for prisoners. The "bombers" were lying there on mattresses, bound hand and foot and with hoods pulled over their faces. The jailers identified them not by their names, but by their numbers. Prisoners could be in this state not just for days or months, some stayed in clandestine detention centers for years.

Tourists coming to the "cappuccino" get into a room bounded by a wooden platform that runs through the entire third floor and ends in its farthest corner, where there is a cell in which Norma Arrostito, a terrorist who played a key role in the kidnapping and murder of President Pedro Eugenio Aramburu in 1970, was held. Visitors, getting into the "cappuccino", make the way that Norma herself did when she was taken to the cell. The testimonies of survivors who have passed the underground detention center are displayed on a special screen, as well as played through speakers. Such a decision grants the right to vote to those who were previously silenced, and also has a strong emotional effect on the listener.

An attic was used as an additional space for keeping prisoners. As part of the tour, it is noted that external sounds were clearly heard in this space, such as the noise from cars passing along the central avenue of Buenos Aires, the rumble of planes landing at a nearby airport and the screams of spectators watching the next sports competition at the stadium, by which some prisoners could determine where geographically they are located ^[13]. This served as an important piece of evidence that allowed the survivors to point to ESMA as one of the underground detention centers.

The theme of sound memory is an important component of the exposition. Andrea Melo and Julieta Astorino, referring to G. Simmel's "sociology of feelings", consider the sounds with which the underground content center was filled as one of the factors forming collective memory ^[14]. Both the external sounds that reached the prisoners held in the attic and the sounds of the radio in the basement that accompanied the torture process are complemented by the voices of the victims recorded on tape, which in the museum confuses the events and their subsequent experience. This is an example of the timeless essence of the museum. 

In the main exhibition of ESMA, the place of a woman is emphasized only in connection with the birth of children in custody. In the attic, along with the usual prison cells, since 1977 there have also been cells for pregnant women, to which the repressive authorities have become less and less condescending every year. The women held here did not have any access to medical care. After giving birth, the children were separated from their mother and either handed over to relatives or ESMA employees, after which they were placed in orphanages in other parts of the country. During the museumification in this space, it was decided to create an exhibition that would make it possible to comprehend the context of the birth of life in a place that takes it away. The affect is achieved here due to the color contrast: the maternity cells are flooded with bright white light, symbolizing the arrival of a new life in this world, which is accompanied by the voice of Sarah Solars de Osatinsky, a surviving prisoner who found the birth of many children in these cells ^[15].

The next important space of the museum is the basement - the first and also the last place where prisoners got into. There were rooms for torture, in which some suspects of crimes against the state, going through a series of extremely cruel "interrogations", were waiting for placement in a "cappuccino", and others were waiting for "translation" - this is how the death penalty of detainees was called in the language of ESMA employees ^[16]. However, in both cases, they went through a mandatory photographing procedure, which was carried out for a long time by Victor Basterra, a photographer and graphic artist who was abducted in 1979 by ESMA officers and placed in a basement to perform forced labor in his main specialization. In addition, on the orders of his kidnappers, he forged documents and photographed their family members. All this allowed him to secretly compile a dossier on both the employees of the center and the victims of the junta photographed by him, which was called the "Basterra Report".  It formed the basis of the court's conviction against the kidnappers and helped to identify some prisoners who spent the last moments of their lives under the numbers on prison clothes. Basterra's photographs of the guards and victims were subsequently exhibited in 2007 at another memorial museum, the Museum of Art and Memory of La Plata ^{[17, p. 82]}.

In addition to spaces that testify to the inhumane conditions of detention and torture of prisoners, ESMA has a hall that provides information about the economic crimes that accompanied the abduction process. There is also a space proving the use of forced labor of prisoners.  The museum emphasizes that the reconstruction of repressive practices used in ESMA is not the task of a permanent exhibition ^[18]. The reason for this is both the desire to avoid emotional overload of visitors ^{[1, p. 126]} and respect for the victims.

The main exhibition contains only a small number of material artifacts that have survived since the dictatorship. The main focus of the museum is built around the perception of the intangible component, the experience of the victim of an ESMA prisoner. This minimalism of the main exposition also has its historical roots and comes, among other things, from the fact that in 2004, when the Argentine Navy handed over the building of the officers' club to the state, they left it completely empty and almost completely cleaned of any traces of the presence of an underground detention center there. The museum staff had to turn to former prisoners, as well as their relatives to fill the collection. It includes items made in prison by prisoners themselves, such as the simplest household tools, maps and personal hygiene items, as well as handcuffs, prison clothing, case files, photographs of prisoners and products of their virtually slave labor ^[19].

With the resumption of military trials, the courts and the Prosecutor's office of Argentina began to send documents from their archives to the museum in order to preserve the memory of the junta years. On the basis of requests to state bodies compiled based on these materials, it was possible to detect previously unknown episodes of crimes committed by ESMA employees and to restore the identities of many victims. Thus, the museum not only fulfills its main task, which is to preserve and broadcast the memory of the victims of the junta, but also helps to restore justice to the victims of the regime.

The digital revolution that took place not so long ago, when museum visitors were able to get acquainted with their collections not only in their real physical space, but also in a virtual one, led to a serious conceptual shift, since people had the opportunity to get acquainted with expositions from anywhere in the world, even without physically visiting the museum itself. Many museums have begun to digitize their collections and transfer them to the virtual world, but this practically does not apply to the ESMA museum, which, by its specifics, is primarily focused on personal visits, since it involves interaction not with artifacts of the era, but with the intangible semantic load that accompanies the building itself and the events that took place in it. Museums like ESMA have become an example of a new type of museum. Their structure and basic idea confirms the thesis that visiting a museum departs from the interaction of a person with a specific artifact bearing the stamp of some event or time in the direction of immersing the visitor in a different experience ^{[11, p. 247]}. This experience can be obtained only with physical presence.

ESMA Museum in the context of the problem of Memory Policy

An important mission for the staff of the Memory Center and the Museum is to preserve and disseminate information about crimes against humanity. The archive of witness testimonies is in the process of constant updating, since former prisoners who have passed through the ESMA prison continue to participate both in the trials that have not yet been completed, and in the scientific work of the museum itself, providing new material for research into the crimes of the junta ^[20]. The museum staff also prepares publications based on these materials.

Over the long history of the museum's existence as a physical space, ESMA has been and remains a place of tension in the context of the clash of various memory policies and approaches to its preservation. In particular, despite the consensus of the authorities and public organizations located in the main ESMA building, criticism of the official memory policy has not faded. For example, Claudio Martynyuk criticizes the one-sided political view created in the museum at the instigation of the authorities. In his opinion, the exhibition "takes the place of what exactly shows (showed) emptiness" and is an attempt "to preserve memory and justice by turning the space of disappearance into a museological space; to update the past by placing it in the place of objects of the non-present" ^{[21, p. 265]}. Another researcher Claudia Feld believes that there is a contradiction between the original value of this place as a place of historical events and its current value as a memorial space telling visitors about what the victims experienced in the past ^{[6, p. 105]}. Analyzing ESMA, she notes that "the durability and stability of structures on the territory are overlaid with symbolic and material signs that are less durable, in many cases ephemeral, and memory policies that can have greater variability" ^{[6, p. 106]}. Feld comes to the conclusion that in the case of the ESMA debate, the memory policy itself is transformed as the goals are achieved, which is a positive sign, since it indicates the vividness of memory ^{[6, p. 128]}. Perhaps the final consensus on the functioning of ESMA can indeed lead to partial or even complete oblivion of this space as a place of "hot" memory.

***

According to Jerome De Groot, the modern museum has turned from a place of storage of historical objects into "something transitional, self-reflecting and self-conscious" ^{[11, p. 235]}.  In this context, ESMA is not only a physical evidence of the crimes of the dictatorship era, but also a memory space formed by people who put their own meanings into it. "Overgrown" with an additional intangible context, this museum space is a vivid example of the evolution of a place of memory. The museum not only immerses in the atmosphere of the prisoner's experience, but also gives the experience of a silent resident of Argentina who witnessed crimes against his compatriots, but did nothing to save them. And if earlier various kinds of fears served as an obstacle to this, such as the loss of work, health and sometimes life itself, then in the museum space this inability to stop other people's suffering manifests itself in being in a different temporal dimension: a museum visitor, realizing the gravity of the crimes committed here, even with all his will, cannot put an end to them, because they they have already been committed, and he cannot change the past. This emotional affect encourages visitors to fight for such events to never happen again. In this context, ESMA remains a place of "hot" memory as a museum-experience. It is a striking example of a memorial-type museum, not only allowing Argentines to reflect on their own past, but also reminding new generations of the value of human life and inalienable human rights.