The struggles for the future: victims and experts in the face of three commemoratives infrastructures

Abstract

In our contemporary world, critical events often give rise to commemorative spaces that remember what happened. Here I propose an approach to the commemorative infrastructures produced as a consequence of a fire that occurred in Buenos Aires in 2004 during a rock concert in which 194 young people died. The article is based on extensive fieldwork carried out in the movement for justice made up of survivors and relatives of the deceased, as well as on the analysis of secondary sources (press materials, documents, etc.). I identify and reconstruct the disputes that took place over a long period of fifteen years around three spaces: the Sanctuary, the Plaza de la Memoria and the Memorial. I analyse the role of the victims as well as that of experts and professionals such as architects, psychologists and politicians. I address the conflictive processes in the framework of which these infrastructures were built, transformed and destroyed. While memory studies have analysed these kinds of spaces by addressing the struggles for the meaning of the past represented in them, here I argue that the disputes surrounding those infrastructures do not so much express struggles for the past but rather struggles for the future: struggles over the paths that the movement should take to achieve justice and ensure that those responsible for the fire were condemned.