[ oficina de arquitectura ] Women in the Memory Monument

Architects: oficina de arquitectura - Emilio Marín + Nicolás Norero
Location: Santiago, Chile
Project year: 2007
Photography: Cristobal Palma


Within the imaginary of the relatives of disappeared prisoners, not only of Chile, there are a series of recurrent images that are constituted as a sensitive alphabet. Candles put on the ground like an act spontaneous reminder, the posters of the disappeared that the relatives hang over their chests, etc., these are constituent examples of this alphabet.

These images with the passage of time have become true emblems of the fight for truth and justice. The project of the memorial (re) constructs from this sensitive alphabet, the architecture is divested of all figuration, in order to be able to accede thus to a state of pure sensitivity, that never finishes occurring.

The economy of the materials; of the significant objects, the stone, the glass, the lights; they are united and transformed by there manipulation, arrangement and effective, affective and intellective disposition, in pure eloquent meaning. Eloquence and visibility. The metaphor of the location, repairs, reinstates and replaces, a latent space. Finally the project in words of Sandra Palestro, is “a transparent wall that does not divide the lives, that at any time and from any place, allows us to watch towards the past and the future, through the absent faces in the posters that the relatives of the victims of repression take tight to the heart.” (Sandra Palestro, Award Presentation Speech Memorial Memory Woman, Santiago, September 27, 2004).