Estela Schindel: Project Description

Spaces of Terror, Sites of Exception: Anxiety, the Everyday, and Spatial Practices at Former Sites of State Terror in Argentina.

The repressive methods of making persons disappear during the last Argentine military dictatorship served the purpose of not leaving behind any traces of a crime. While the physical sites of illegal state repression were hidden, they were also integrated within “normal” urban grids, producing a certain continuity with the rest of the city. The interaction with former locations of terror and the contours of everyday life in the vicinity of these places – then and now – have been little researched. Such sites include not only former detention centers but also other locations that served as part of the repressive structure, like illegal graves or even the Rio de la Plata. This project will investigate how these locations affect neighborhoods, which social symptoms, narratives, and images they generate, and how neighbors, witnesses, and survivors deal with them. Using the methods of ethnographical observation, the project will reconstruct and analyze the spatial practices of everyday life around these sites.