This book takes as its object of investigation an array of traumatic heritage sites and spaces of memory, including museums, former detention camps, and sites of commemoration, in Europe, Argentina, and Colombia, to investigate how various traumatic pasts can be preserved and transmitted through space, and which kind of actions might be taken both to improve knowledge of the past and to serve as an opening to a discussion of current social issues.

Ihab Saloul is Professor of Heritage, Memory and Narrative, founder and Academic Director of the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture (AHM), University of Amsterdam. His interests include heritage and memory studies, cultural studies, narrative theory and semiotics, postcolonialism, aesthetics, and diaspora and exile in contemporary cultural thought in Europe and beyond. His latest publications include W.G. Sebald’s Artistic Legacies: Memory, Word and Image (2023), and Diasporic Heritage and Identity (2023).

Patrizia Violi is an Alma Mater Professor at the University of Bologna and the founder of ‘TraMe - Centre for the Semiotic Study of Memory’ at the same university. She was director of the ‘Centro Internazionale di Studi Umberto Eco’ and PI of various European funded projects on trauma and urban space. She has published internationally on the relationship between trauma and memory, with a specific focus on Chile, Argentina and Colombia. Her latest publications include Landscapes of Memory: Trauma, Space, History (2017), and Reading Memory Sites Through Signs: Hiding into Landscape (2023).

Anna Maria Lorusso is Professor of Semiotics at the Department of Arts of the University of Bologna. Lorusso was President of the Italian Association of Semiotics (2017-2021). Her research is focused on the semiotics of culture, logic of information and cultural memory. Lorusso is the editor of Memosur/ Memosouth: Memory, Commemoration and Trauma in Post-Dictatorship Argentina and Chile (2017), and the special issue “Perspectives on Post-Truth” (2023).

Cristina Demaria is Professor of Semiotics at the Department of the Arts of the University of Bologna, where she teaches semiotics of conflict, gender studies and semiotics of social sciences. She has worked extensively on traumatic memories and their representation, on visual culture and documentary films, and on gender studies and post-feminism. Her latest publications include Post-Conflict Cultures. A Reader (2021), and Reading Memory Sites Through Signs: Hiding into Landscape (2023).

Doris Salcedo’s Material Memorial Movements - Mieke Bal
3. Trauma and Allegory
Truthfulness in Fact and Fiction and Making a Private Archive Productive - Lars Ebert
4. Hypermnesia and Amnesia
Remembering (with) the Body and Post-Conflict Memorials and Architectures - Andrea Borsari and Giovanni Leoni
5. Art & Memory
Magdalenas por el Cauca - Neyla Graciela Pardo Abril
6. “Adapt or Resist?”
Narratives of Implication and Perpetration in the Verzetsmuseum in Amsterdam - Mario Panico
7. Entanglements of Art and Memory Activism in Hungary’s Illiberal Democracy - Reka Deim
8. Memory, Art and Intergenerational Transmission
Artistic practices with Young People in Memory Sites in Argentina - Lizel Tornay, Victoria Alvarez, Fabricio Laino Sanchis, and Mariana Paganini
9. Representing the Trauma of Colonialism in Museum Exhibitions
Cape Coast Castle and the International Slavery Museum - Sarike van Slooten
10. The Dogma of Irrepresentability and the Double Bind of Holocaust Memory - Valentina Pisanty
11. Entangled Memories of Colonialism and Antisemitism
The Scandal of Taring Padi’s “People’s Justice” at Documenta 15 (2022) - David Duindam
12. Objects Despite Everything
Testimonial Objects Between Memory and Trauma - Patrizia Violi