ABSTRACT
Focusing on the protracted post-dictatorship transition in Argentina, and the ongoing attempt to grapple with the state violence committed during the last dictatorship (1976–1983), this chapter explores the contestations and proposals around the question of what to do with well-known buildings and sites previously used as clandestine torture and extermination centers. I concentrate, specifically, with the debates and aspirations vested in one of the most infamous sites of horror in the city of Buenos Aires, the Navy School Mechanics complex (known by its Spanish acronym as ESMA). The chapter hones-in and retraces the history of the debate as to whether to include artworks, installations, and an art gallery within the former ESMA. The debate about the limits and possibility of art and an art gallery in such a site is important to trace and think with as it brings to the fore the contested memorial aspirations, political imaginaries, and worries that certain traumatic sites and buildings evoke in a transitional period. In particular, the chapter is concerned with registering how the work of art in such a site can help to forge a pedagogical act of memory, one that can render collective meaning to the unsettled fears and highly charged memories that this site evokes across the new post-dictatorship urban landscape.
