Turning Spaces of Memory into Memoryscapes. Cinema as Counter-monument in Jonathan Perel's El Predio and Tabula Rasa

How might cinema turn a space into a mediated landscape of memory? How can it interrogate what is remembered in a lieu de memoire, intervening in the porous borders that, simultaneously, separates and connects an event, its experience, and its representation? Could cinema’s role be that of a monument or, even, that of a counter-monument? I shall address these questions through the semiotic analysis of the ways in which the ESMA -Space for Memory and for the Promotion and Defence of Human Rights, a memory site located in Buenos Aires, has been framed by two documentary films directed by Jonathan Perel: El Predio (2010) and Tabula Rasa (2013). Both films deal with the large, stratified, and troubled trauma site of the former ESMA compound - the Escuela Superior de Mecánica de la Armada (Naval Academy of Mechanics) the most notorious of the clandestine centres of detention, torture and extermination operational in Argentina during the military regime’s ‘Dirty War’. Both films stand as peculiar recordings of the making of ESMA’s new “identity” after the end of the dictatorship, and the many layers it is composed of, thanks to a challenging audio-visual enunciative strategy, a cinematic ethical gaze depicting the transition from a space of suffering, to, supposedly, a landscape of remembering.