Site of memory and site of forgetting: the repurposing of the Punta Carretas Prison

Abstract

Efforts to classify the Punta Carretas Prison, repurposed as a shopping center, into a “site of forgetting” imposed through the logic of the market obscure the ongoing productivity of the place as a vehicle of memory linked not only to the military dictatorship but also to the privatization of public patrimony. They fail to account for the dynamic and complex process of construction of a common past resulting from direct confrontations between different sectors of Uruguayan society. The increasing politicization and spatialization of collective memory, focusing on past experiences of repression, overlook the link between memory, history, nationstate, museum, everyday life, people’s dreams, their sense of the future, and utopia.