IN-PERSON London Heritages. Section B

Abstract

Until today, northern Chile has been considered a key territory for displaying nation-state discourses of sovereignty, playing a fundamental role in national politics and natural resources economy. It was a major target for repression during Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973-1990), becoming a unique area for holding, interrogating and torturing political prisoners in the several detention centres there established. Today, many of these places have been informally recognised as sites of memory by the Chilean society. However, this recognition does not guarantee their protection, as this legal category is still absent from Chilean legislation. At the same time, many have been protected under the Historical National Monument category, which is unsurprisingly based on European heritage conservation guidelines. These guidelines only consider a narrow, official view of historical value as the main imput for heritage protection, limiting the recognition of the traces of state terrorism in Chilean sites of repression. I argue that those values should be considered obsolete and, in practice, an obscuring fact of past human rights’ violation crimes. In this presentation, and following Caitlin DeSilvey’s work, I explore the concept of postpreservation and how it could be applied to two cases of northern Chile, the ex-mining settlement Chacabuco and the Pisagua port, both used as a detention centre during Pinochet’s dictatorship and both protected as National Monuments. The aim is to reflect on the challenges of alternative approaches to the fate of their physical remains, and how they could better contribute to current heritage preservation practices within the existing Chilean legal framework.