MEMORIA HISTÓRICA DE LA ALAMEDA

 

Memoria Histórica de la Alameda (MHA) examines the relationship between public space and contested memory in Santiago de Chile. The project addresses the period extending from Salvador Allende’s presidency and the 1973 military coup to the end of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in 1990.

The project centres on Avenida Libertador General Bernardo O’Higgins, commonly known as La Alameda. Since its establishment in the early nineteenth century, the avenue has occupied an emblematic position in Chilean public life. It has served as a promenade, a site of political demonstrations and social unrest, a route for religious and civic processions, and a major axis of transportation, commerce, and everyday movement.

This accumulation of events makes La Alameda a repository of both institutional and personal memories. MHA brings fragments of this history back into contact with the places in which they occurred, temporarily superimposing archival records and individual recollections onto the contemporary urban landscape. The avenue is approached not as a neutral setting, but as a space in which conflicting narratives of remembrance and forgetting continue to coexist.

Cultural Luggage

The project operates through Cultural Luggage, an experimental DIY locative-media platform developed specifically for collective urban exploration. The portable system consists of a backpack containing a laptop, a GPS receiver, and a handheld device through which participants access georeferenced audiovisual material while walking along La Alameda.

As participants move through the city, their physical location activates archival images, documentary footage, interviews, and personal accounts associated with particular sites. This encounter creates a temporal overlap between the visible present and the memories embedded in the same location. Digital information does not replace the experience of the street; it introduces other historical and subjective layers into it.

Process

Memoria Histórica de la Alameda was conceived and developed during the workshop Aesthetics for a Calm Technologyat the Department of Visual Arts, Universidad de Chile.

Students and artists collaboratively produced the project’s content through archival research, the collection of documentary footage, street interviews, and recordings of personal memories concerning the political history and everyday life of La Alameda. These materials were subsequently edited, adapted for portable devices, and georeferenced to specific locations along the avenue.

Through this collective process, the project constructs a situated and fragmentary archive—one activated by walking and continually reinterpreted through the relationship between body, technological mediation, urban space, and memory.

 

Memoria Histórica de la Alameda: Revisited

In 2014, Memoria Histórica de la Alameda was revisited for Cities in Dialogue, an exhibition held at FACT Liverpool in collaboration with the University of Liverpool and the Liverpool Independents Biennial.

Nearly a decade after the project was first developed, the technological context in which it operated had changed substantially. In 2005, assembling a low-cost locative-media platform required custom software, technical experimentation, and the adaptation of portable hardware. By 2014, GPS receivers and advanced computational capabilities had become standard features of widely accessible mobile devices.

Seen from this later perspective, Cultural Luggage—the custom-built backpack used in the original project—had acquired the character of a technological artefact: a form of media archaeology embodying an earlier moment in the development of locative media. Its apparent obsolescence did not diminish its significance. Instead, it revealed how rapidly the technical conditions through which urban space is recorded and interpreted can change.

The 2014 presentation maintained the project’s central concern with the relationship between memory and urban space while reconsidering the possibilities offered by contemporary media platforms. In the original version, producing and accessing content was largely limited to members of the project team and participants carrying the Cultural Luggagedevice. Mobile networks and personal devices subsequently made it possible for a broader public to produce, collect, access, and circulate georeferenced accounts of the city and its history.

This expanded accessibility also transformed the project’s participatory potential. Rather than treating digital platforms solely as channels for distributing information, MHA explored how they might support encounters, conversations, and collective forms of memory production. Digital interaction remained connected to physical presence: participants encountered media while moving through the city and sharing the spaces to which the material referred.

The project continued to approach urban space as a texture composed of overlapping historical, social, and personal meanings. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s understanding of space as something produced through social relations and practices, MHA considered walking, remembering, recording, and exchanging stories as actions through which the city is continually interpreted and reconstructed.

In this sense, the technological transformation between 2005 and 2014 became part of the work itself. The project connected two moments in the history of locative media while maintaining its underlying question: how can technological systems contribute to situated and collective forms of remembering without separating digital participation from embodied experience in public space?

Presentation

Cities in Dialogue: Latin(o) American Digital Artists
FACT Liverpool, United Kingdom, 13–21 October 2014
In collaboration with the University of Liverpool and the Liverpool Independents Biennial.

Project team

Iván Atencio Abarca, David Boardman, Pablo Cottet, Diego Mometti, Enrique Morales, Bárbara Palomino and Melissa Trojani.

www.memorialameda.cl