Horror remains: effects of dictatorship, memory and mourning here and there

• Grant number: 19/13385-4
• Support Opportunities: Regular Research Grants
• Start date: October 01, 2019
• End date: March 31, 2022
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Linguistic Theory and Analysis
• Principal Investigator: Lucília Maria Abrahão e Sousa
• Grantee: Lucília Maria Abrahão e Sousa
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Ciências e Letras de Ribeirão Preto (FFCLRP). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Ribeirão Preto , SP, Brazil
• Associated researchers: Dantielli Assumpcao Garcia ; Fábio Ramos Barbosa Filho ; Lauro José Siqueira Baldini

Abstract

With this project, we aim to analyze, in the light of the discursive theory proposed by Michel Pêcheux and his successors, the way in which places dedicated to the practice of torture in the 1960s and 1970s have come to be denominated memorials of resistance in different countries of Latin America (Brazil , Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Colombia and Peru) and in Europe (Portugal), that is, houses of memory to save effects of mourning, torture and dictatorship at the present time. Locations in which memory became institutionalized, materializing remains, vestiges and residual marks of the nameless death, composing a spectacle another to be visited, seen, photographed and documented. We are interested in mobilizing the concepts of Michel Pêcheux's theory, especially the concepts of subject, file, memory and discursive event, to reflect, analyze and interpret some points that immediately instigated us in relation to this discursive space: 1) the effects of the testimony in the plot of these memorials; 2) the discursiveness inscribed in the architectural design of each one, in general, where prisons and torture rooms used to operate; 3) the voice of the thematic exhibitions and also of the curatorships that are presented there, besides the slides of meanings placed at each scene of the materials on display; 4) The way in which the mourning (s) installs (or not) effects of entertainment, interactivity or spectacle with the readers. The corpus will be constituted from on-the-spot field visits by invited proponents and researchers, from exhibit clippings and permanent collections of these memorials in the years 2018, 2019 and 2020. Attempts are made to reflect on the unfolding of the discursive archive, memory and the constitution of the institutional voice (and that which escapes the institutionality of memory) in museological spaces, now having another thickness of object at play and in speech, that is, language games that involve procedures of visibility and invisibility, dizible and unspeakable, in what the dictatorship presents itself in the now of contemporary times. (AU)