Empathic unsettlement and the outsider within Argentine spaces of memory

Empathy and empathic unsettlement

It is difficult to make claims about how people respond to encounters with narratives and representations of atrocious pasts. Literatures on curation, new museology, and the like tend to focus on the narratives and representations themselves and to speculate about how different kinds of listeners or visitors will receive narratives, how they might feel, what impressions might stay with them, and what might be passed on and even “paid forward” (Andermann and Arnold-de Simine, 2012; Falk, 2009; Lehrer et al., 2011; Vergo, 1989). I myself have had to recognize the serious analytical leap between experiencing a space of memory, on the one hand, and imagining that experience as something that might produce solidarity across a host of publics, on the other. Thinking and feeling within a given space is not the same as empathy. Empathy may also be fleeting, and is certainly no guarantor of solidaristic action.

In my work on Latin America over many years (Hite, 2012), I have deployed what Amy Shuman terms “strategic romanticism,” or perhaps more forgivably, what Lila Abu-Lughod calls “tactical humanism” (Abu-Lughod, 1991; Shuman, 2011). I have privileged left struggles against imperial violences and their consequences. While I do not entirely glaze over errors, shortcomings, or fatal decisions of my subjects, I do highlight the beauty of grassroots efforts, the worthiness of major left political projects, and the possibility of a global progressive imagination. I am in a constant search for a politics of empathy and global solidarity. My intent is fairly explicitly political. Inspired in good part by the work of Judith Butler (2004), I am searching for the ways memorializing connects us, that there is something deeply shared about mourning, or even grieving, that perhaps can tap into the best of who we can be as human beings, in our grief, to reach, to feel for one another across serious distances. Just because I believe this, however, does not mean I think that I invent an empathetic politics where there is none. And just because I may agree with Clifford Geertz that ethnographers’ claims to empathic approaches can be guises for their own dispositions does not mean that I think the researcher’s quest for empathy, in communication with her subjects, is unattainable (Hollan and Throop, 2011).

There are clearly limits to empathy. Beyond the “flaws” we may choose to ignore or downplay in ourselves and in our inter-subjectivity, we can embrace particular political subjects and projects wholeheartedly, but we cannot deny contexts in which such subjects or projects are shut down, ignored, dismissed, or rendered virtually non-existent or invisible by much of society. In her study of empathic unsettlement and ethnography regarding US families living with children with disabilities, Shuman (2011) (herself a parent of a child with disabilities) argues there is a “misalignment” between the parents who recognize the virtues of their children, on the one hand, and the social stigma cast on them on the other, that no matter how embraced a child may be, there is a broader social context that often denies the embrace. Here, I want to take care not to exaggerate empathetic experiences within our group, nor to project such experiences onto broader spheres and constituencies. In addition, while I would argue that in Argentina there is a great deal of consciousness and discussion about the painful past, I do not wish to claim that Argentine memory projects and spaces are wholeheartedly embraced or wrestled with by society. Indeed, recent advances in human-rights legislation and cultural and political practices are being contested very strongly on behalf of a great part of the media and political opposition in Argentina (Andermann, 2014). This “wrestling” thus takes many and quite contradictory forms, including pushback.

Empathy studies possess deep traditions in philosophy, psychology, anthropology, and aesthetics (for the fields of philosophy and psychology, see Coplan and Goldie, 2011). Somewhat more recent discoveries regarding “mirror neurons” in neuroscience suggest an intrinsic human capacity to feel empathy, a discovery that has contributed to re-energizing several disciplines’ study of empathy (Hollan and Throop, 2011; Keen, 2006). Given this attention and disciplinary range, scholars conceive of empathy in distinct ways. Here, I borrow a simple conceptualization from Jodi Halpern and David Weinstein (2004), who urge more systematic attention to social and psychosocial processes that foster ongoing, productive if difficult dialogue, even collaboration, among former enemies. Halpern and Weinstein emphasize that empathy must be understood as distinct from sympathy: “Sympathy is about experiencing shared emotion; empathy involves imagining and seeking to understand the perspective of another person” (p. 568). As a doctor and a psychiatrist, Halpern (2001) focuses her analysis on the ways individuals imagine and attempt to understand the distinct perspectives of other individuals (pp. 17–18). Imagining particularities of others, being curious about other individual human beings, Halpern argues, is a fundamental precursor to countering “dehumanization,” “stereotyping,” “generalizing,” and “distancing” (Halpern and Weinstein, 2004: 568). Intertwined with this is the fact that social context clearly matters, including the ways that states and societies provide spaces conducive to such individual imaginings. Elaborating spaces of memory, I would argue, can constitute such processes, and I would like to suggest that we can extend Halpern and Weinstein’s call to include difficult dialogues between those committed to people and projects repressed by their political regimes (as in Argentina) and those whose regimes colluded with and supported the repression (the United States). Holocaust studies scholar Dominick LaCapra (2001) is most widely credited with the notion of “empathic unsettlement,” that shaky middle, between narratives being able to engage readers to understand the represented other, on the one hand, and making clear that the trauma of another is beyond understanding, on the other.

In June 2012, cultural theorist and memory studies scholar Marita Sturken invited me to co-teach with her a NYU MA course. The intensive 3-week course, entitled “Visual Culture and the Politics of Memory,” was based at NYU’s satellite campus in Buenos Aires. The students came primarily from interdisciplinary MA programs in Media, Communication and Culture and from Museum Studies. Roughly half the group spoke at least some Spanish, the other half did not. One student had previously studied in Buenos Aires. We met each day to discuss major conceptual readings and case studies on memory, well-known academics, urban planners, and artists came to our classroom, and we conducted several site visits.

In an important sense, the course and our site visits allowed me to experience, to observe, and in some instances, to mediate (both successfully and unsuccessfully) outsider experiences within these spaces. As a co-professor with Sturken, I was also uniquely situated with someone who has thought a great deal about visitor engagement with spaces of memory. Sturken’s (2007) last book provocatively analyzed US “tourists of history,” men and women who approach tragic sites like Oklahoma City or Ground Zero rather like comfort-seeking consumers as opposed to deeply reflective mourners. Sturken pays close attention to the ways the US state and society structure out the hard work of contemplating loss in relation to histories of power, violence, and imperialism. Sturken was thus an ideal partner to think about our situatedness as Americans (though one of our students was South Korean) within these spaces.

Here, I have also deliberately structured our “outsider within” exploration as a fairly crude “us and them” encounter, not because I would argue that we all responded the same way to the spaces, but because our spaces of encounter were so structured, with the guides in each site acutely conscious of us as US outsiders. And, while I am familiar with literature on “trauma tourism,” I am somewhat resistant to classifying us as trauma tourists (Bilbija and Payne, 2011; Sharpley and Stone, 2009). We were studying, debating, comparing, and feeling each day, immersed in concepts and imagery and testimonials, intensively. And while clearly we were tourists in some sense, our sites and our guides resisted the terminology of tourism, including many of the trappings, so I would like to respect that intent here.

Memory Park and Monument to the Victims of State Terrorism

On 5 June 2012, and as our first site visit in Buenos Aires, our group went to Memory Park. For me, it was a return to a space I have visited several times over the years, my most recent experience having taken place 2 years before. It is a space that brings several memorial forms together as distinct interpretations of the violences of the dictatorship. The 35-acre expanse features several outdoor sculptures, the Monument to the Victims of State Terrorism with the names of nearly 9000 dead and disappeared, and an indoor documentation center with an art exhibition space. The Park is located along the River Plate, a haunting reminder of a key site of atrocities, as many of the kidnapped, detained, tortured, and disappeared were assassinated by being thrown from airplanes into this river.

Walking through the park’s grounds, I was struck by the changes. What first began in 1997 has been a long road for the Park’s protagonists—constant battles with the local and federal government for support, and painful disagreements among the organizers that led to the exit of several individuals and organizations. For many years, only 3 of the 17 planned outdoor memorial sculptures were standing, and 2 of these 3 (impossible to deny the irony) were done by US artists (and the sculptures were notably quite abstract, compared to those of the Argentine sculptors, who have tended to avoid such abstraction here). In those many early years, the park was mostly mud and a shack for an office, surrounded by a chain-linked fence eerily reminiscent of a concentration camp (Buzaglo, n.d.). Now the space has seemingly come into its own, with more sculptures (the majority by Argentine artists), grass, a more manicured landscape that invites visitors to explore the grounds and to undertake the gentle climb alongside the Monument wall. The wall clearly evokes Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and for US visitors to Memory Park, this association with the Vietnam Memorial’s laden meanings, particularly the way the monument summons visitors to reflect on the enormity of the dead, is present. Unlike the Vietnam memorial, however, the Monument to the Victims of State Terrorism includes the victims’ ages, and in some instances, the word “embarazada,” “pregnant.” For us, this was especially chilling, as many of our students were the same ages, even a little older, than those named, and I watched as the students dwelled silently in front of the names of the young women.

Our group had arranged a tour and presentation there by Florencia Battiti, a well-known Argentine art historian and curator who has been central to the Park’s ongoing conception. Before she arrived, however, a Park staff member met us to begin the tour. He immediately intrigued us, particularly our students, as he was clearly their age, handsome, with long dreadlocks and a confident sensibility as well as a good command of English. Those interested in empathy commonly claim that empathy is more readily induced from “those who seem like us” (Keen, 2006: 214). The NYU students identified with the guide.

The earliest studies of empathy were in relation to art. At its most basic level, we can inherently imagine why this is so. Art strives to move us, aesthetics tap into our sentiments. And there is a way in which when we look at a painting or work of art, we often find ourselves imagining how it was orchestrated. Sometimes, we picture ourselves painting the painting (“I could have done that!”). And not so dissimilarly, when we are being guided about a museum, we often imagine ourselves in the guides’ shoes—sometimes correcting the guides in our heads, sometimes wondering what it would be like to do this work, to be this person.

The guide seemed to take our group on as a somewhat amusing project, neither conveying any curiosity about who we were, nor doing too much of the work for us in terms of our understandings of the memorials we were now contemplating. He pushed us to voice our reactions to the sculptures, and the students were reticent, as it was our first site visit, our first week, and the guide began us with the most abstract pieces in the Park. In subsequent discussions of our visit, several students commented on the guide’s “edge.” One student commented that she felt “judged” by the guide, as when she ventured a response to his question about the meaning of a particular sculpture, he “corrected” her interpretation. Yet, he drew some in, particularly when he invited them to join him to enter León Ferrari’s whimsical, musical sculpture demanding physical interaction—climbing into it, grabbing the steel tubes to make them sway. The guide illustrated and beckoned and several students joined in. The lightness of this form of engagement resonated, appealed. Ultimately, two to three students expressed interest in returning to the Park during their stay, both to study specific sculptural installations and to see the guide.

It was a cold, windy winter weekday and there were few visitors—a few couples, a father and daughter visiting a loved one’s name on the wall, a boisterous group of schoolchildren, and ourselves. The guide told us that on the weekends the park could be quite full, and that on warmer days it was clearly more visited. When we met with Florencia Battiti, she said that the park had become a place to picnic, with ready access to the river, and that most of the park’s founders had come to believe that this was a positive thing. She alluded to painful, angry discussions among Park and human rights representatives regarding this picnicking dimension, reminiscent of similar tensions in Berlin around the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Battiti claimed that human rights representatives who remained involved with the site had come to accept that if, in the course of the visit, an unknowing visitor learned something about the meaning of the park, then this was good. According to Battiti, virtually all visitors seem to acknowledge a somber, even sacred dimension of the park—no one plays loud music, or engages in “outrageous” or “egregious” behavior.

Among grassroots human rights activists, the Parque de la Memoria is sometimes a source of criticism, seen as too highbrow, elitist, a project of art snobs. Several insist that commemorative projects must be more participatory. There are also those who criticize the wall for its absences of particular names, namely, those assassinated by the Montoneros, Argentina’s urban guerrilla movement, who constitute a significant number of the named, and this raises a question regarding the relationship of empathy and empathic unsettlement to political ideological predispositions.

Back in the classroom the day after our visit, we discussed what had most resonated and why. Two students signaled Claudia Fontes’ sculpture of Pablo Míquez, an adolescent who was the same age as the artist when he disappeared. Fontes had tried to obtain as much information and feel for him as she could—through his family, through forensics—but then she created the sculpture of Pablo facing out, in the waters of the River Plate, his face inaccessible to the viewers. Fontes’ piece seems to embody empathic unsettling, the reaching for yet not being able to grasp someone both familiar and unfamiliar.

For our group, the installation that drew the most interest, as evidenced in our post-visit discussions, student writings, and in the photographs students shared with me when I asked them for photos from our visits to the three sites some months later, was the street sign project of the Grupo de Arte Callejero (GAC). Founded in 1997, the GAC is a women’s collective that, among many anti-monument projects over the years, has created a series of Buenos Aires street signs marking specific sites, connections, actors, and ideologies. The NYU students were clearly intrigued by the universality of the signs that nonetheless carry provocative messages, warnings, and assertions. Several of the signs depict US National Security Doctrine—one: “Doctrina de Seguridad Nacional,” a second one: “U.S. Army/Escuela de las Américas,” and another: Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)/Plan Condor.

The street sign project felt very familiar, and very in the here and now, perhaps particularly for a group of students from New York City used to walking along streets much like those of Buenos Aires. In fact, perhaps the strongest final written paper for our course closely analyzed the GAC installation, theorizing the spatial and design elements that made the installation so powerful, and comparing the project to somewhat similar projects elsewhere. The student argued that the project produced in the viewers something unsettling within the ordinary, a kind of double take that denies the otherwise dissociative tendencies of urban life. She also speculated that upon her return to New York City, memories of the Buenos Aires signs would linger with her, would have her imagine comparable possibilities along her daily walks. My sense is that the student was quite taken by the spatial design of the project, perhaps more than by the politics, and I wondered about what politics might linger for her. What kinds of contents might she imagine for the New York City signage? ¹

Ex-ESMA

In order to secure an English language tour of the Ex-ESMA (the former Naval Academy of Mechanics), one needed to reserve months in advance, not the 3 weeks or so that we had allowed. The Ex-ESMA is Argentina’s iconic site of memory of the atrocities of the dictatorship, an enormous area where an estimated 5000 citizens were clandestinely detained, tortured, and, with only very few exceptions, disappeared. As an iconic, even sacred site, the Ex-ESMA has also served as the locus for major battles over memory, first, in the immediate post-dictatorship years, to wrest the site from the Navy to have the ESMA become a national historic site, and second, in an ongoing, fitful way, to establish appropriate representations, uses, and narratives within the Ex-ESMA’s gates (Brodsky, 2005; Jozami, 2014; Morandini, 2014).

We were first informed that a tour during our time in Buenos Aires would be impossible. In the end, the Ex-ESMA staff added us to a collection of already scheduled visitors from Australia, Italy, Poland, and Argentina.

When we arrived, we met our guide, who introduced herself as an activist and theater student, who like the Parque de la Memoria guide, could easily have been mistaken for one of our NYU students. She informed me that while she spoke English, the tour would be in Spanish and that I would not be allowed to translate for the several non-Spanish speaking students in our group, other than in moments when we were moving from one building to the next. She said that translation would be distracting to others in the group and that she had a great deal to convey. There was, then, a strong sense of control. From the outset, our guide seemed purposely to structure the visit’s dramaturgy in an antagonistic edge to our particular experience, an edge that matched her narrative of a black and white, us versus them, good guys and bad guys history of the country’s past. It was as though we were engaged in a co-performance with our guide that unfolded as a mutual knowing between our guide and me, initially unbeknownst to my group. Our guide was judging us, and I, in turn, was judging her.

It is very rare that I become defensive about my place of origin. More often than not, I apologize to my hosts for being a gringa, I deplore my country’s record in Latin America and around the world. Yet, there was something in the set-up, in our guide’s presentation of the Cold War, National Security Doctrine, the United States as duplicitous, all the while projecting this onto us, looking at us. Our guide was a theater student, and I would venture to guess she’s a very good one. Her stare our way had the effect of shifting the entire international and Argentine group’s gaze onto us. Every once in a while an Italian visitor would echo her denunciation and punctuate it with his own remark, like, “We all remember Henry Kissinger.” And our guide would ask my students in a rather uninviting way, “Do you have anything to say about this?” It was disarming, as many of the students had no idea what was being said, what was being asked of them. They could only guess why the glares, they looked to me to translate, but given there were no pauses in the guide’s narrative, other than this occasional, “Do you care to comment?” I could only shrug my shoulders apologetically. I found myself projecting onto the guide a doctrinaire, overbearing attitude from someone who claimed to be facilitating a dialogue while rendering an hour-long monologue outside, in the cold. That standing outside in one place in the windy cold was deliberate, intended for the visitors to feel discomfort that clearly paled in comparison with those who were murdered years ago inside.

We entered the main detention building and were given time to study the layout, the minimalist display. It was an empty and yet loaded sacred space. Our guide continued her lecture, detailing the atrocities that were committed in the space, referencing it as a concentration camp. Our visit was characterized by confusion, discomfort, some tension, frustration. It was unsettling. And, I would argue, the visit will stick with the students—the discomfort but also the haunting, and the insistence on the United States as a primary contributor to the atrocities. There is a way in which this site, more than any other of our visit, produced empathic unsettlement in many of us.

In her study of addiction and deep memories of dispossession, Angela García (2010) suggests that spaces where people experience dramatic rupture together can produce connection, across class and racial difference. Shared, unsettling anxiety reveals the commonality of being human. In my correspondence with the NYU students months later, several claimed that the Ex-ESMA was what they most remembered and felt. Yet, I am not sure how or if the students relate such memories, such affect, to political phenomena, political projects underway at home.

El Olimpo

It is important to note that our visit to the ex-clandestine detention center El Olimpo took place toward the end of our stay, after we had been on guided visits at the ESMA, Memory Park, the Museum of Memory, and a former clandestine detention center in the city of Rosario. Our guide at El Olimpo was made aware of this, and rather than recounting National Security Doctrine and the historic contours of Argentine politics, her narrative clearly focused on what distinguished the history and functioning of El Olimpo from other memory sites we had visited. El Olimpo operated as a site of secret kidnapping, torture, and disappearance for a very brief but intense period of time, in which anywhere from 500 to 700 were detained and only 50–100 survived (Mesa de Trabajo y Consenso del ex CCDTyE “Olimpo”, 2011; Messina, 2011). The disappeared included citizens from Chile and Uruguay as well as Argentina. While under the same public institutional umbrella as the Ex-ESMA, El Olimpo has focused strongly on forging close relationships with the people and popular organizations of the surrounding neighborhood (Schindel, 2012).

The guide’s narrative situated us in the “ordinariness” of El Olimpo’s physical structure as a former tramway station, built in what was a nascent working-class neighborhood in the early twentieth century in order to shuttle workers to the city center and to nearby slaughterhouses and refrigerated meatpacking plants. In contrast to the ESMA, El Olimpo was not a military establishment but rather a civilian building intimately related to the working-class barrio, Floresta. And those who mobilized to recover the site as an ex-clandestine detention center were neighborhood political militants, working-class organizers, and political survivors as well as families of former political prisoners who had been detained, tortured, and disappeared inside El Olimpo as well as elsewhere. Today, an average of 21 local as well as national organizations participate in El Olimpo’s Mesa de Trabajo, including the women’s weaving group, an unemployed workers organization, a group of Bolivian immigrant community educators, a local radio station, as well as representatives from the national Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, and Hijos por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olivido y el Silencio (HIJOS).

In stark contrast to our ESMA guide’s having us stand with her in the cold and wind for an hour outside the buildings, our Olimpo guide had us sit with her in a circle on a floor inside a cozy, well-lit room with a low ceiling—the building’s second floor. On the white walls were selections of photographs of people who were killed and people who survived, and next to the photographs were brief excerpts about their lives from friends and family members. In one corner of the room was an old mimeograph machine, meant to evoke memories of fliers and messages produced by the resistance to the dictatorship. On the tops of two to three small tables and amidst throw pillows scattered in the room were beautiful, bright, hand-decorated scrapbooks, each one containing stories, drawings, news clips, and photos of individual lost loved ones. Our guide explained that the scrapbooks were made by a women’s weaving and discussion circle that met regularly in the space. The space emphasized the intimacy of individual stories and familial relationships, the power of intimate connection as well as political militancy.

The guide, who spoke to us in fluent English, first had us explain who we were. She stated at the outset that she planned to have our visit be “as reflexive as possible.” We were all made to feel comfortable with her, on a more or less level playing field. “There are many ways of telling a story,” the guide said, and El Olimpo’s story can be told as “a place of conflict,” ever in motion. Here she referenced Annette Wieviorka’s Auschwitz Sixty Years Later, to say that like Auschwitz, El Olimpo is “continually developing, open.”

She said that normally she would begin with us on the first floor, but we could see that a school class was underway there. It was a group of middle school students who were struggling with regular classes, and El Olimpo was sponsoring an alternative class to support them. This immediately conveyed the importance of El Olimpo’s work in the present, a point the guide emphasized throughout our visit.

On the walls surrounding El Olimpo are colorful, eye-catching, varied murals, denouncing the atrocities of the past, but also engaging local and international struggles in the here and now—in the neighborhood, migrants’, and workers’ struggles.

What proved most distinctive was the guide’s care in trying to meet us where “we’re at.” We found ourselves recommending a visit to El Olimpo to the NYU–Buenos Aires director as an inviting educational space for upcoming NYU exchange students, though later I wondered what an onslaught of US students might mean for the site. For Sturken and for two other students who responded to my post-Argentina query several months on, El Olimpo was the most meaningful site, feeling the importance of the space to the neighborhood and the warmth of the guide to the visitors. There were multiple narratives running through the site.

Tentative conclusion

So where does this leave us in terms of empathic unsettlement? I think I would argue that each of the sites certainly opens up the possibility of this unsettling, and then it becomes up to the visitors to process, to retain the unsettlement, and to push the implications, to do the memory work, the “labors of memory” (Jelin, 2003). Just as El Olimpo site protagonists have worked hard to invite once fearful and still hesitant neighbors into this former space of repression, to bring outsiders within (Schindel, 2012), my class and I can imagine work to bring ourselves into unsettling repressive spaces within as well as beyond our own borders.

I want to imagine that news and imagery of the Guantánamo detention camps evoke flashbacks to the Ex-ESMA, and more than that, that here my students and I begin to associate what Argentine scholar Pilar Calveiro (1998) termed the “concentrationist and disappearist” project with our own forms of disappearing and concentrating, within our jails at home, as well as in camps beyond our national borders. In her visit to our classroom, noted memory scholar Elizabeth Jelin emphasized that it is not so much the comparisons of this or that atrocity, but rather the relationships among them that bring meaning to political life (Jelin classroom visit, Buenos Aires, 18 June 2012).

As Sturken and other scholars of US collective memory have analyzed, the United States is a society of deep denial that nonetheless lives the violences of past atrocities very much in the present. We can trace this from the genocidal foundations whose legacies are much in evidence in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, and on reservations throughout the US west, to the legacies of enslavement and the reproduction of slavery’s architecture in today’s social structure and the institutionalized racism of the US incarceration system. It is clearly not up to Argentine guides to unearth these denials in encounters with US outsiders within, and I very much support Judith Butler’s (2004) notion of decentering the United States to feel humanity in multiple loci. Yet, as I imagine what it would mean to realize a shared mourning project toward less violence, toward perhaps more activism to stop the violences being carried out in our names, I feel that there needs to be a way to reveal and evoke both the comparisons and relationships, those both deep in our histories and very much in the present.

In distinctive ways, through the stark historical narrative of the Ex-ESMA, the artistic representations of Memory Park, and the individual, familial, and collective stories of El Olimpo, each of the sites provokes, invites, and perhaps expects visitors to listen respectfully, to learn appreciably, and in turn, to represent responsibly. Yet, there is neither instinctual nor mechanical connection. There are clear overarching tensions and politics here, of not sacrificing the specificity of the individual story, nor the national within the global, while resisting the detachment, othering, and ephemerality that exiting the spaces can render.