Description
Traumatic acts leave a dent in collective memory and lead to the creation of ephemeral commemorative spaces in the public sphere. These spontaneous memorials may face opposing dynamics: towards heritagisation and inclusion within official memory; or towards political contestation, especially when contesting the dominant narratives. Following the Brussels attacks, right-wing hooligans confronted the spontaneous memorial at the Bourse, while town authorities later planned to include it in official heritage. In Valletta’s polarised environment, for the past two years every morning activists have been restoring the spontaneous memorial to murdered journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, which government officials would remove every night. In Banja Luka, a social movement calling for justice and the rule of law gathered around the spontaneous memorial to David Dragicevic in Trg Krajina, until it was repressed by force by the authorities. These three recent examples illustrate the tensions between bottom-up memorialisation and top-down official memory policies. Spontaneous memorials constitute arenas of contestation between various actors, including public authorities and social movements, in a battle to inscribe or remove their respective interpretation of political developments in the public landscape.
