«Plazoleta Lídice» de Canelones: lugar de memorias, desplazamientos y resignificaciones en el espacio público. Fundamentos de un proyecto de investigación

Abstract

«Plazoleta Lidice» Canelones: Place of Memories, Displacement and Resignifications in Public Space. Basics of a Research Project

Linked to recent history, the massacre by the Nazis in Lidice, a village in what is now the Czech Republic, on June 10 1942, led the Departmental Board of Canelones (Uruguay) to dedicate a public space in the city. Lidice is not an isolated phenomenon: the event triggered the appropriation and political action of allocating public spaces in its memory in various Latin American cities and towns. Memory is a mechanism for relating with a past that is beyond reach, elusive in its entire reality. Communities seek the presence of the past in the present; it is an existential requirement that forges us as a group, the presence of absence in memory. As public space is the place favored for political action, we start from the republican hypothesis that democracy really begins when citizens are actively involved in matters of public interest. Plazoleta Lidice highlights the importance of memory in a fleeting and transient historical and cultural context. We will discuss events touched by dehumanization to prevent them slipping into oblivion, a process that forces us to continue reinvigorating the concept of human rights, making it part of our living and sharing.