Academic literature on the topic 'Punta Carretas Shopping Center'

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, nation-state, museum, everyday life, people’s dreams, their sense of the future, and utopia. Los esfuerzos para clasificar la prisión de Punta Carretas (ahora transformada en un centro comercial) como un “lugar del olvido” impuesto por medio de la lógica del mercado ocultan la productividad en curso del lugar como vehículo de la memoria ligado no unicamente a la dictadura militar pero también a la privatización del patrimonio público. No toman en cuenta el proceso dinámico y complejo de la creación de un pasado común que es el resultado de los enfrentamientos directos entre diferentes sectores de la sociedad uruguaya. La creciente politicización y espacialización de la memoria colectiva, con el énfasis en las experiencias pasadas de represión, pasa por alto el vínculo entre la memoria, la historia, el estado nacional, el museo, la vida cotidiana, los sueños de la gente, el sentido del futuro y la utopía.

Resumen: En el marco de los esfuerzos por delimitar o demarcar algunos lugares de memoria, con el fin de no perder esas huellas dentro de la construcción de memoria colectiva en torno a lo que fue la dictadura cívico-militar uruguaya (1973-1985), se vuelve inteligible en la ciudad de Montevideo la existencia de algunos sitios de memoria que fueron creados a partir de la ley 19.641 aprobada en julio de 2018, configurando determinados paisajes de la memoria. Este artículo busca reflexionar acerca del establecimiento de estos sitios, con el fin de exponer la lógica de la demarcación y del recuerdo. Hace hincapie en uno de ellos el centro comercial Punta Carretas Shopping, que funcionó como cárcel y ha sido parte de un proceso complejo de demarcación que responde al neoliberalismo. Este artículo busca exponer los debates que encierran estas demarcaciones, las diferentes concepciones y las configuraciones que termina adoptando la ciudad de Montevideo.

This essay compares postdictatorial transformations of former spaces of confinement for political prisoners into shopping malls, such as the Buen Pastor prison in Córdoba (Argentina) and the Punta Carretas prison in Montevideo (Uruguay). It places these within the context of past and current debates on the human rights of “common prisoners,” as distinct from those of “political ones.” Yet precisely the omission of the political is mirrored at the prison-malls in the architectural erasure of territorial marks of repression (the cells) but also of all material traces of a poetics of freedom within the site, such as a window through which political prisoners had once successfully plotted a mass escape. These erasures can be read, I suggest, within a program of invisibilization of acts of freedom in the reconfiguration of memorial practices and places. Here, I want to ask, How are escapes being remembered/forgotten in current sites of memory, where the dominant imaginary neutralizes political content? Can we conceive of an “architecture of affect” that would relate to memories of escape?

The urban landscapes of Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay lay bare the markings of these countries‘ turbulent political and economic pasts, their transition to democracy, and diverse efforts to preserve memory. Claudia Feld‘s observation that these countries have experienced a 'memory boom‘—not a deficit—in recent years manifests itself as much culturally and politically as it does spatially, through the creation of memorials, memory parks, museums, and memory-related performances and discourses. Along these same lines, narratives of memory recur among artistic and cultural works of the post-dictatorial Southern Cone—not exclusively among memorials and other designated sites of recollection, but along the everyday corridors and causeways of some of South America‘s most populous cities, and rather unexpectedly, among seemingly generic sites of consumerism and transit. In fact, my reading of literary and cinematic works by Alberto Fuguet, Sergio Chejfec, Ignacio Agüero, and Fabián Bielinsky, and my examination of Uruguay‘s Punta Carretas Shopping Center, suggests that memory has not been easily corralled into designated sites nor erased through modern spaces and lifestyles; instead, each of the works analyzed in this study reveals that palimpsests of memory can appear often and, in many cases, spontaneously among all angles of the cityscape.