Picturing Ghosts

Figures

Figure 1.An illustration of prisoners being escorted past the palace, from Claudio Gay’s Atlas of the Physical and Political History of Chile (1854).

Figure 2.La Moneda Palace and the adjoining Plaza de la Constitución (Constitution Plaza) (Ministerio Secretaría General de Gobierno, 2000), via Wikimedia Commons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Palacio_de_la_ Moneda_desde_Plaza_de_la_Constituci%C3%B3n.jpg.

Figure 3.A model of La Moneda being paraded around the Plaza de la Dignidad (formerly Plaza Italia) during the estallido social (author’s photograph).

Figure 4.The Battle of Chile. Part 1: The Insurrection of the Bourgeoisie (1975). The bombardment of La Moneda Palace, as represented in the opening scene.

Figure 5.Still from Latent Image (1990).

Figure 6.Still from Latent Image (1990).

Figure 7.Still from The Waltz of the Useless (2013).

Figure 8.Still from The Battle of Chile. Part 3: The Power of the People (1979).

Figure 9.‘General View of Grounds and Works’, Oficina Alianza and Port of Iquique 1899. Album 12, Fondo Fotográfico Fundación Universidad de Navarra/Museo Universidad de Navarra, Pamplona.

Acknowledgements

This book is born of many years of conversations, some actual, some imagined. Many took place as a doctoral student at the University of Brighton, sat in a cramped office with my supervisors, Graham Dawson, Victoria Margree and Thomas Carter. It was in dialogue with these three scholars, each working in different disciplines, that my nebulous thoughts about ghosts and space and time and transition started to coalesce into a distinct project. Their attentive readings sharpened my arguments and unsettled my conclusions at every stage.

Other conversations took place in an ongoing reading group, affectionately named ‘complex temporalities’, composed for the most part of doctoral students in Brighton’s Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories. This informal interdisciplinary space, barely visible to the institution in which it is based, has had a profound impact on my thinking about the politics of time and memory, and has strengthened by belief in the importance of friendship, collaboration and mutual support in the research process. My thanks go to Fearghus Roulston, Andrea García González, Kate Newby, Hélène Marie Abiraad, Garikoitz Gómez Alfaro, Jessica Matteo, Helen Dixon, Melina Sadiković, Kasia Tomasiewicz, Tim Huzar, Vanessa Tautter, Ian Cantoni, Kristin O’Donnell, Áine McKenny and everyone else who has made the reading group such a happy and inspiring space.

Various readers of have offered valuable comments and guidance along the way, as examiners, reviewers, collaborators and friends. Among them, I would like to thank Phillipa Page, Aris Mousoutzanis, Anthony Leaker, Daniel Willis, César Barros, Darren Newbury, Louise Purbrick and Douglas McNaughton. I am particularly grateful to Iñaki Garcia-Blanco, who first nurtured the belief that I could do this.

This book is for my parents, Kim and Stuart, from whom I still have much to learn about landscape. And for Giulia, who has read and re-read every draft, and has loved and supported me throughout.

Introduction

I park in front of the locked gates of Chacabuco. It is 18 September, Chile’s Independence Day, which perhaps is not the best time to visit a disused nitrate mine in the Atacama Desert. I look for a side entrance, but the lingering possibility of unexploded mines puts me off the idea. A handwritten sign on the gate says ‘back in a bit’, though I imagine the caretaker is enjoying the national holiday far from the silence and solitude of the desert. After twenty minutes of waiting, a car arrives and two German tourists get out. They, like me, have been drawn to the mine for the mix of histories it contains. Founded by a British corporation in 1924, Chacabuco was a mining town for fourteen years, providing European nations with powdered fertiliser, and a key ingredient in the production of explosives (Vilches 2011). The site, however, is better known as a concentration camp where the military regime of Gen. Augusto Pinochet detained around 1,800 political prisoners in 1974. After posing for a photograph, the German tourists leave, but soon after the dust from their car settles, another vehicle arrives. This time, two elderly Chilean men step out. They are clearly disappointed by the locked gates. We are over 100 km from the nearest settlement, so only the most determined of visitors make their way here. They engage me in conversation, ask me if I know the history of the place and tell me that a friend of theirs served as a conscript in the camp, guarding over the prisoners. ‘Bad things happened here,’ says one of the men, and we all nod in silence. They give the gates a doubtful nudge, then bid me farewell and drive back to the highway.

I see no other option than to climb over the perimeter wall, which proves easier than expected. Just inside the entrance, a recently erected sign announces ‘[a]‌ country’s heritage [patrimonio] is part of its wealth [riqueza]’. Another says ‘[t]hese ruins represent our history’. One describes the daily lives of mine workers, while another focuses on political prisoners. The latter states ‘[t]hese prisoners gave new life to this place, creating an organized detention camp, with a council of elders, school, library, churches, ←1 | 2→amateur theatre, health centre’; a message that focuses on the solidarity and resilience of the prisoners, as opposed to the brutality of those that imprisoned them. The buildings themselves are decrepit shells of compacted mud and corrugated iron. Traces of murals and graffiti remain, though to my untrained eye it is unclear to which epoch they belong.

My work forms part of a growing body of scholarship that challenges a tendency in ‘postdictatorship’ and ‘post-conflict’ literature to characterise the present past as primarily traumatic or repressive (Richard 2004; Draper 2012; Sosa 2014b; Blejmar 2016). The affective landscape portrayed by the films I analyse includes nostalgia, fear, rage, inertia and impatience, often underpinned by an urgent desire for social transformation. By critically interrogating these emotions, I challenge prevalent transitional discourses about the importance of working through or overcoming the ‘dark past’ and ask instead how the past can productively inhabit contemporary imaginaries of social and political change. This task involves the interrogation of a broader physical landscape of dictatorship memory than is often acknowledged, including schools, shanty towns and shopping malls. It ←3 | 4→also demands critical reflection on the politics of time and temporality, recognising the ways linear chronological temporality can be mobilised to disappear and delegitimise certain groups and ideas. Crucially my focus contests and moves away from the normative frameworks of reconciliation and democratisation consistently offered by the field of transitional justice, an area that, in seeking to ‘overcome’ traumatic pasts, too often denies a continuity of injustice.