Tourist Productions 2007

Two years ago, I spent two months in Lima, Peru, doing research on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s strategies to social rebuilding following the civil war connected to the activities of the indigenous socialist movement called “Shining Path” (Sendero Luminoso). I conducted numerous interviews with people working in the Commission, went through archives of confessions and trials, read academic books, watched documentaries, and talked to many people about their experiences of the war; yet, after all that, I still felt I was not “sensing” the experiences of the civilians the in the conflict.
And then, just a week before I left, I heard about a photo exhibition of the Sendero Luminoso period. Those few images changed it all!
The exhibition was housed at an old colonial-style house, bombed during the civil war and left falling apart among its own ruins until that day in 2004. Thinking back at my experience there I realize that the “efficacy” of the memorialization that the site constructed was in a large extent due to the explicit physical look and the implicit message of the ruins of the surrounding ecology. The palpitating destruction moving all around as I walked from room to room molded an air of destituted past, which seemed to be asking me to help it be born again, gain strength, and bring the untold stories of the past suffering to our present-day understandings of history. In this performative site representing performances of suffering through subtle light and shadow, it was the performance that helped me understand and feel the past more deeply that the actual real interviews with victims and public officials I had been conducting for two months. I almost felt obliged to the people looking at me, from those moments of their tragedy right into my own comfortable position of a researcher, to breathe new life into their bodies and eyes and gasping mouths, through my own body and eye and mouth.
In this sense, the stories told in the memory exhibition in Lima did “provide a safe yet generative place from which to explore pressing questions we’re still grappling with today” (Sevcenko: 56), where the museum has the potential of turning the visitor into “a participant in collaborative problem solving” (57), as envisioned by the American Association of Museums (AAM). I myself felt becoming participant in this process of questioning and imagining the answers.
But I wonder, would the exhibition have worked in the same way for all other visitors? Do all become critical participants, or is it only those already fortunate to have the access to education and political participation (usually those who were not part of the suffering group but rather of the dominant classes) that manage to achieve those levels of analytical thinking required for a healthy dialogue? If this is so, and the actual victims still live under the limits of access to information and critical skills, the ideals of dialogue degenerate into a simplistic, one-sided, non-productive monologue on the elite-perceived importance of museums as incubators of civil change.
The Sendero Luminoso exhibition was controversial in the way it was interpreting and representing the past. On the one hand, it portrayed the Sendero fight in such gruesome colors that blatantly defy the opinions of many scholars that the communist strife began as a non-violent movement and turned into a civil war once the government militias and the paramilitary they trained, all equipped with American arms, started attacking the Senderistas and burnt whole villages blaming it on them. On the other side, the controversy was exacerbated by those who thought the past suffering was to be finally forgotten, as it was time for people to “move on.”
In addition to the controversial nature of the performance of memory, which seems inherently controversial and constantly contested, between those rugged brick walls and roofless rooms I sensed something I had not been able to comprehend before: the magnitude of how the killings between “brothers,” between people often from the same politically polarized village, destroyed first of all the personal universe. Up until that point, I had been focusing on the institutional aspect of civil war, the politics of reconciliation, the economy of settling disputes. But I was missing the personal, and I could not acquire a sense of that “personal” through interviews alone. I need the visual, I need to tangibly imagine and intangibly touch those experiences. It is in the precise force of the visual and tangible that I spot the locus of power of museums to generate engagement. However, what the results of this engagement would be is highly contingent on the approaches to understanding the connection of the past to the present. Is the past to be constantly remembered and expiated? Or is it to be transcended? And how do you transcend and go beyond empty repetition of guilt and suffering without forgetting? This fine balance is the key issue to consider in analyzing the effectiveness of museums of conscience.
Though I believe the potential of museums as cradles of dialogue still seems to me highly unexplored at the national levels within the circles of cultural policy-makers, Brazil is one exception, where I conducted interviews at the Ministry of Culture’s Department of Museums and Cultural Centers. There, the museum itself is seen as a “cultural center,” or a space whose goal is to both educate and nurture creativity and to also create a “culture” of understanding, tolerance, and respect for differences. The government itself has built a few community museums, and one in the oldest shantytown, as an effort to generate self-esteem in order to bring social mobility and strive for change. The International Coalition of Historic Site Museums of Conscience is a different kind of initiative since it originated in private, civil society ideas trying to break the vicious cycle of “museumized” (elitist, conservative, top-down) museums and turn them into a tool of voicing those stories that would otherwise never find an outlet. The three approaches offered by the Coalition (a. opening new perspectives on civic issues, b. fostering civil dialogue to activate those new perspectives, and c. creating new spaces for dialogue [Sevcenko: 60]) are crucial, but again each museum’s effectiveness is contingent upon the ideologies and perspectives of the people who implement them, the resources they have available, and certainly the levels of education and information access of their visitors: an important factor that needs larger policy strategies to be dealt with.
The UNESCO Slavery Route, an initiative at yet another level, the trans-national, than the previous two I looked at (national government and civil society), is another interesting reflection of a gradual global change in thinking about museums and the development of the “tourism of memory,” which is an important move toward a more holistic understanding of the past connections among events and the current implications of those processes as points on a continuum and not fixed dots in the past.
However, how can all these initiatives “contribute to the establishment of a culture of tolerance and peaceful coexistence between races and peoples,” as UNESCO has nicely but quite utopically set before itself as a goal? This is still a very difficult task, and certainly one that takes an ongoing effort on part of museums, governments, and civil society.