Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos

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Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos
Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos.jpg
Data
place Santiago de Chile Coordinates: 33 ° 26 ′ 23.4 ″  S , 70 ° 40 ′ 45.8 ″  WWorld icon
architect Mario Figueroa, Lucas Fehr, Carlos Dias, Roberto Ibieta
opening January 11, 2010
Number of visitors (annually) 503,498 (2014)
management
Francisco Estévez Valencia (as of January 2017)
Website

The Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos ( Museum of Memory and Human Rights ) is a museum in Santiago de Chile . It is dedicated to the memory of the victims of the military dictatorship under Augusto Pinochet . Parts of his collection are part of the UNESCO - World Soundtrack Awards .

history

President Michelle Bachelet at the inauguration of the museum with her two predecessors Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle and Ricardo Lagos , January 11, 2010

The idea of ​​a place of remembrance for the victims of the military dictatorship was raised by the Rettig Report published in 1991 by Raúl Rettig , which documented the crimes of the dictatorship. Conservative political forces and the constant presence of Augusto Pinochet in Chilean politics prevented an open debate about the memory of the victims for a long time. In addition, there were concerns about how the victims and their surviving relatives were dealing with personal rights . In 2007, Chilean President Michelle Bachelet announced that a museum of memory and human rights would be built in Santiago de Chile. Bachelet, who herself was imprisoned as a political prisoner under the military dictatorship, set up a government commission that worked out a concept for the museum and the exhibition concept for two years. A competition was announced for the planning of the building, in which the Brazilian architecture firm Estudio América was selected from 56 proposals . Bachelet opened the museum on January 11, 2010 as one of her final acts of her first presidency. The opening was part of the celebrations for Chile's 200th Independence Day. The first female director of the museum was the scientist and politician Romy Schmidt , who had previously been a minister in Bachelet's first cabinet. The state-funded museum is run by an association of Chilean human rights organizations.

A few weeks after the opening, the earthquake on February 27, 2010 destroyed large parts of the exhibition. The building remained intact, but the museum had to be closed for six months.

On September 9, 2013, the memorial ceremony for the 40th anniversary of the coup took place in the museum .

Federal President Joachim Gauck visited the museum with President Bachelet on his trip to Chile on July 13, 2016.

building

Santiago museo de la memoria.jpg
Museo de Memoria y los Derechos Humanos from the north
Memoria (15007105429) .jpg
Detail of the facade

The museum was designed by the architects Mario Figueroa, Lucas Fehr and Carlos Dias from the São Paulo- based architecture firm Estudio América and implemented in collaboration with the Chilean architect Roberto Ibieta. At both ends, the building rests on a two-part substructure, which compensates for the unevenness of the building site and makes it possible to pass under the museum. The entrance foyer is located in the substructure, so that the museum can be entered from below. The center of the museum is a room that extends over all three floors and shows photos of the people tortured , disappeared and murdered under the Pinochet dictatorship on one wall . The exhibition rooms extend over three floors on an exhibition area of ​​5,000 m 2 . There is also a library and a documentation center, seminar rooms and offices for the museum administration. The facade cladding made of perforated copper plates is translucent and allows a view outside from inside the building. The wide forecourt of the museum, the Plaza de la Memoria , is designed for open-air events. In the center of the square is the underground memorial La Geometría de la Conciencia by the Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar . The artist Jorge Tacla designed one of the outer walls with an excerpt from the last poem by the singer Víctor Jara , which he wrote as a prisoner in the (today named after him) Estadio Chile . The way to the museum entrance is accompanied by the 30 articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights .

exhibition

The basis of the collection is the human rights archive of Chile , which UNESCO included in the world document heritage in 2003 . There were also numerous private donations. The collection contains more than 40,000 exhibits, including photos, letters from prisoners, newspaper articles, sound and film recordings with testimonies from survivors and personal memorabilia.

The basement of the museum shows a world map of the truth commissions and pictures of all the memorials in Chile that commemorate the dictatorship. The rest of the exhibition shows the history of the military coup on September 11, 1973 and the repression of the military government against the population as well as the resistance within Chile and the international solidarity movement up to the referendum in 1988 , which meant Chile's return to democracy. There is a rest and memorial room on the second floor. There is room for temporary exhibitions on the third floor.

Several of the museum's exhibitions have been transformed into traveling exhibitions and shown in numerous cities in Chile.

Digital library

Documentation center

The museum's digital library offers a database for research into the museum's collection area. It enables online access to texts, manuscripts, photos and images, sound and film recordings, as well as information on personal belongings and documents of victims of the dictatorship.

Reactions

The opening of the museum received international attention and was highlighted as a historical act. In many comments - both positively and negatively - it was observed that Bachelet had erected a monument to herself at the end of her term in office. Around 50,000 people visited the museum in the first six weeks. The number of visitors rose steadily in the following years: In the first year, the museum was visited by around 100,000 people, despite the fact that it was closed for months after the earthquake; in 2014 it was over half a million.

The indigenous movement in Chile accused the museum of failing to live up to its universal claim to human rights. During Bachelet's opening speech, two activists climbed a floodlight tower in the forecourt of the museum to draw attention to the fact that the Mapuche saw their human rights violated even under Bachelet's government. They forced Bachelet to interrupt her speech and defend her political position against the Mapuche.

Victims' associations complained that the museum also remembered members of the military and security forces killed in Pinochet. It is not acceptable to remember them and those who were persecuted and murdered under the dictatorship in the same place.

Fundamental protests against the concept of the museum were expressed primarily by right-wing and right-wing extremist groups. The museum only shows part of the truth, because it emphasizes too little that Salvador Allende's left-wing electoral alliance Unidad Popular was partly militant and that this is the only way to explain the violent backlash of the putschists. It is also wrong to speak of the victims of a dictatorship, because Chile was in a civil war, which is why it is more about war losses. This historical revisionist view is considered refuted, but is still sporadically represented. The right-wing extremist activist Juan González, who organized a memorial event in honor of Pinochet in 2012, announced that he would like to found a “Museo de la verdad” ( Museum of Truth ) as a counter-program . In her opening speech, Bachelet referred to these opposing positions by stating that there could be many explanations for the cruel deeds, but no justification. The crisis, in which Chile undoubtedly found itself before the coup, does not justify the serious human rights violations of the military government. A more moderate criticism claims that the museum chose too narrow a section of the history of Chile. It neglects the time before the coup and thus does not make it clear how it could come about. So the museum could not live up to its pedagogical standards. This view was represented by Magdalena Krebs, the head of the state libraries, archives and museums under the right-wing conservative government of Sebastián Piñera . The directorate of the museum responded directly to Krebs' criticism and made it clear that it did not see the museum's task as historiographical or legal . The aim of the exhibition is to promote public awareness of the systematic human rights violations under the military dictatorship.

Mauro Basaure, sociologist at the Universidad Andrés Bello , launched a long-term research project on the social discourse around the museum. The museum will involve the scientist in the future exhibition design.

Publications

The Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos publishes a large number of publications on the history and culture of remembrance in Chile, including the Signos de la Memoria monograph series . With a competition, the museum annually funds ten theses and doctoral theses that deal with the human rights violations of the military dictatorship and their coming to terms. The selected works will be published in the Tesis de Memoria series.

Digital versions of the publications, including the museum and exhibition catalogs, are available free of charge on the museum's website.

Web links

Commons : Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. a b Human Rights Archive of Chile on the UNESCO website , accessed on January 14, 2017 (English).
  2. a b Ricardo Brodsky B .: Un museo vivo para la memoria de Chile / A Living Museum for Chile's Memory. In: Museo de la Memoria y los derechos humanos. Midia, Santiago de Chile 2011, ISBN 978-9-5691-4400-4 , pp. 9-12.
  3. a b c Vincent Auzas: Las polémicas en torno al Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos en Chile avec Manuel Gárate Chateau . In: Carnet de l'Institut d'histoire du temps présent. Center national de la recherche scientifique , November 21, 2015, accessed January 12, 2017.
  4. a b c d e f g h i Rainer Huhle: Chile sets an example - The Museo de Memoria y los Derechos Humanos (Museum of Remembrance and Human Rights) in Santiago. In: Nuremberg Human Rights Center . January 14, 2011, accessed January 12, 2017 .
  5. a b Diseño para la reflexión. In: Museo de la Memoria y los derechos humanos. Midia, Santiago de Chile 2011, ISBN 978-9-5691-4400-4 , pp. 34-39.
  6. a b c d Revista 5 años Museo de la Memoria , brochure on the 5th anniversary of the museum, 2015, accessed on January 15, 2017 (Spanish).
  7. a b Official website of the museum - Sobre el museo , accessed on January 14, 2017 (Spanish).
  8. Pacto Nueva Mayoría realiza acto de conmemoración de los 40 años del golpe. In: CNN Chile. September 9, 2013, Retrieved January 15, 2017 (Spanish).
  9. Travel to Chile and Uruguay , official website of the Federal President, July 16, 2016, accessed on January 12, 2017.
  10. Santiago de Chile: Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos. In: Arquitectura Viva. February 18, 2010, Retrieved January 14, 2017 (Spanish).
  11. Paulina Jarpa García-Vinuesa: Museu de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos / Mario Figueroa, Lucas Fehr y Carlos Dias. In: Plataforma Arquitectura. January 22, 2010, Retrieved January 14, 2017 (Spanish).
  12. ^ Official website of the museum - Sobre las colecciones , accessed on January 14, 2017 (Spanish).
  13. ^ Official website of the museum - Exposición permanente , accessed on January 14, 2017 (Spanish).
  14. ^ Official website of the museum - Exposiciones itinerantes , accessed on January 15, 2017 (Spanish).
  15. Mirco Lomoth: The memory comes back. In: The daily newspaper . June 26, 2010. Retrieved January 15, 2017 .
  16. Karina Morales: Incidentes empañan Inauguración del Museo de la Memoria. In: Emol.com. January 11, 2010, accessed January 14, 2017 (Spanish).
  17. The Museum of Memory. In: The daily newspaper . January 12, 2010, accessed January 15, 2017 .
  18. Chile's place of remembrance. In: Deutsche Welle . January 11, 2010, accessed January 15, 2017 .
  19. a b c Mauro Basaure: Museo de la Memoria en Conflicto . In: Anuari del conflicte social. 2014 ISSN  2014-6760 , pp. 659-685.
  20. Juan González: “Callamos durante 20 años mientras tergiversaban la verdad de Chile”. In: La Nación. June 10, 2012, Retrieved January 14, 2017 (Spanish).
  21. Michelle Bachelet's opening address on January 11, 2010 , accessed on January 15, 2017 (Spanish).
  22. ^ La respuesta del Directorio del Museo de la Memoria a Magdalena Krebs. In: El Dínamo. June 28, 2012, Retrieved January 15, 2017 (Spanish).
  23. ^ Carlos Brito: Dr. Mauro Basaure: Las disputas de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos / Disputes on cultural memory and human rights. In: Universidad Andrés Bello - Centro para la Comunicación de la Ciencia. January 10, 2017, accessed January 14, 2017 (Spanish, English).