Curating the forensic gaze in traumatic memorial sites: Recalibrating the sense of materiality in Santiago's Londres‐38

Abstract This paper focusses on the forensic work put on display at Londres‐38, a building in Santiago Chile designated as a National Monument, which once functioned as a torture and extermination centre under Pinochet's dictatorship. Striving to avoid conventional memorial practices, or didactic strategies that would morbidly represent the past horror, Londres‐38 curatorially opts for very few educational props, so that visitors can have a peculiarly direct encounter with the materiality of the building. The paper engages with one of the few displays employed at Londres‐38: a time‐looped video detailing the forensic work undertaken on a small washroom. Despite the years that have passed, remaining within its walls, floors, and on the surfaces of the National Monument are material traces left by the detainees‐disappeared: scratches and inscriptions, as well as DNA, that are still being forensically harvested. The paper discusses how the video exhibit documents a pedagogical performance of how the unperceived can come to light, how the erasure of the violent past can be made to re‐appear as a matter of public concern through a certain sensibility to materiality that is unique to forensics. At issue in the paper is the curatorial–pedagogical strategy employed that invites us to immerse and try out for ourselves the forensic sensibility that tends to and gazes at the materiality of the building in a particular way so that the embedded evidence therein can come to matter and move us to hear the unsettled call for justice in our present.