ABSTRACT
This chapter explores one aspect of the embodiment, practice and performance of buildings in places of terror and violence: its “silence.” It addresses political conflict between affective worlds, affective circulation of silence, and the embodied architectural experience of forced disappearance. The leading questions are: How does experiencing landscapes of memory shaped by forced disappearance become a complex embodied process of meaning and sense-making outside discourse? How is architecture related to traumatic and violent events mediated by affective worlds and bodily experiences that shape its reception? How does architecture engage with the affective and emotional distribution of the intimate in the public experience? To flesh this out, the paper examines the affective dimension of the Estadio Nacional de Santiago de Chile, a sport stadium formerly used in the 1970s as a concentration camp during Augusto Pinochet's military coup d’état. It explores the borderlands of the sayable and unsayable beyond discourse, and the individual and collective spatial engagement with remembrance and forgetfulness. Thus, the paper briefly examines two conflicts around affective architecture and silence: the tension between what is remembered and what remains forgotten, and the spatial dimension of the sayable and the unsayable between the bodily experience of a former prisoner and public architectural embodiment.
