Palermo 1992: La Costituzione materiale della memoria antimafia

The loss of Judge Giovanni Falcone is a traumatic event that started a mourning process deeply engraved in the cityscape of Palermo. That pro- cess engaged the formation of new forms of subjectivity for the Antimafia movement, which became a resource of Nation Building during the political crisis leading to the “Second Republic”. Moving from works in anthropology and public history with critical posture toward the social construction of mafia and antimafia memory, we propose a semiotic account of the uses of public spaces in overcoming the grief of Capaci massacre. In the article, we oppose material constitution of memory to its formal constitution by com- memoratives laws marking italian memoryscape in the first decades of XXI century. In order to do so, we analyse the tension between two key sites: the Capaci-Palermo highway and the Falcone Tree. In each site, we point out the different functions of tracing as core mechanism for assemblying space and memory. We argue that this comparison allows to characterize a turning point in antimafia memorial rhetoric and that, in conclusion, that turning point is a key element for a critical comparison of formal and material anti- mafia memory constitution.