CASE STUDIES
Restorative Justice
* For image references, please scroll to the bottom of the page.
Author of case study: Greg Labrosse
Geopolitical location of space:
Libertador Ave 8151/8571
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Extant? Yes
In use as a museum since 2015.
On May 19th of 2015, the ESMA Memory Site Museum was inaugurated as a permanent museum and historical landmark. Principally, the museum is a site of culturally memory to safeguard the victims’ stories and to promote the non repetition of State terrorism. Given its status as judicial evidence, the museum has not altered the building from the state in which it was received. The museum’s content is created primarily through testimonies of survivors from the 1985 Trials of the Juntas and in the human rights trials restarted in 2004.
Encounters between victims and perpetrators do not take place in this space. Its function is to preserve memory by honouring the victims’ stories and educating the general public on the events that took place during Argentina’s dictatorship. That said, it has the potential to become a place for restorative practices.
The general public and researchers interested in the fields of political history, memory and transitional justice.
The museum is accessible to the general public from Tuesday to Sunday between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m.
The ESMA Museum and Site of Memory operates in what used to be ESMA’s Officers’ Club, a 5,390 sq. m building inaugurated in 1948 to be a leisure and rest area for high-ranking Navy officers. The construction has an independent pavilion, three floors in comb design, basements, and a large attic. Located on one of the principle avenues in the city of Buenos Aires, the building of the Casino de Oficiales (Officer’s Quarters) was the nucleus of repression by the clandestine centre for detention, torture and extermination. Between 1976 and 1983, this building had two functions: a space of enjoyment and rest for higher-ranking Navy officers and, at the same time, a place for the confinement of the detained-disappeared.
The conservation of the Officers’ Quarters is a result of the work of human rights organisations, who fought for its preservation for more than 40 years. The same organisations that were the first to denounce the ESMA’s operation as a clandestine centre now promote all sorts of actions to preserve it.
According to the museum website, the ESMA was an emblematic Clandestine Center in South America: “Due to its size, its location in an urban center, the co-existence of naval officers and the detained-disappeared, and its unique concentration features of imprisonment and extermination, its role transcended its own borders and transformed it into a heritage of outstanding universal value.”
Since the years of the dictatorship, the Officers’ Club building has been the object of many interventions and threats meant to erase the remaining traces of its former role as a clandestine center. Most of these changes occurred in 1979 in order to hide the clandestine center from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), which visited Argentina and ESMA due to the accusations made by survivors and families of the victims.
Today, the ESMA is a space that denounces State terrorism and helps foster cultural memory. Its mission is to contribute to the knowledge, experience, and understanding of human rights violations committed by the Argentine State by promoting intra and intergenerational dialogue between the past, present and future. The Museum is on UNESCO’s list of candidates to potentially receive status as a World Heritage Site.
is an author, speaker, columnist, and podcaster in the fields of architecture and decorative arts. She is completing her MA in Art History at Concordia University, Montréal, and holds a Bachelor of Commerce with a major in Marketing from John Molson School of Business. She studied Industrial Psychology in Los Angeles, California. Sicotte is the author of two published books on design (2015, 2018) published by Les Éditions Cardinal.
is a Colombian PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at Concordia University. She has a background in architectural design and community activism and holds a master’s degree in Building and Urban Design from the Bartlett School of Architecture in London, England. Her interests focus on socially-engaged art, social movements, collaborative activism in post-conflict scenarios, collectively-produced art, and art produced in relation to the built environment.
is a PhD candidate in Humanities at Concordia University. His research focuses on spatial agency, social aesthetics, youth narratives, and graphic representations of urban memory. He has published on the relationship between children, play, and public space in Cartagena, Colombia. He has also worked as an editor on literary projects, including Territorio Fértil, which received the María Nelly Murillo Hinestroza award for Afro-Colombian literature.
is Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Architectures of Spatial Justice (Tier 2) at the Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture at McGill University, Montréal, Québec, Canada. Her research interests include low-income housing and participatory design, civil protest and urban design, and campus landscapes and race. Her publications include the co-edited book, Orienting Istanbul (2010) and solo-authored book, Istanbul Open City (2018).
is an artist and a professor of Art History at Concordia University. Her work focuses on women and the history of the built environment, urban landscapes, research-creation, and oral history. She has published on the spatial history of the suffrage movement, public art, gardens, and the politics of urban change. In addition to her research on the spaces of restorative and transitional justice, she is leading an oral history project on the urban memories of diverse Montrealers.
is Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre at Concordia University, Montreal (Quebec, Canada). He is also the second co-director of Concordia’s Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling. His latest publications explore listening in the context of post-conflict performances of memory. For instance, see ‘Facilitating voicing and listening in the context of post-conflict performances of memory. The Colombian scenario.’ In: De Nardi, S., Orange, H., et al. Routledge Handbook of Memoryscapes. Routledge: London. (2019), and his article ‘Not being able to speak is torture: performing listening to painful narratives’. International Journal of Transitional Justice, Special Issue Creative Approaches to Transitional Justice: Contributions of Arts and Culture. (March, 2020)
