Parque de la Memoria, Buenos Aires

The Parque de la Memoria was the first major memorial site for the events of the dictatorship, with its foundational stone laid in 1999. This was before the memory boom that would coincide with the Kirchner presidencies in the early to mid 2000's.

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Its status as part memorial and part urban renewal project made its creation controversial, with human rights groups HIJOS and the Madres de la Plaza de Maya (Asociacion Line) notably boycotting the 1999 ceremony.

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The park's location alongside the Rio de la Plata and that river's relationship to the infamous Death Flights of the dictatorship gives it a tangential spatial relationship to the dictatorship, a relationship that is accentuated in marketing material. The marketing also accentuates the international architecture competition that led to the creation of many of its memorial pieces, pieces that often follow the trends we are used to seeing in memorials to mass violence (walls of names, abstract artwork, etc.)

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But does its non-spatial element allow the Park to participate in powerful forms of memorialization in a way that ESMA (just down the road) cannot?

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