Site of Memory (Lieu de Mémoire)

Definition

The site of memory — Pierre Nora's lieu de mémoire — is "any significant entity, whether material or non-material in nature, which by dint of human will or the work of time has become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community." Nora's inventory is broad: "places such as archives, museums, cathedrals, palaces, cemeteries, and memorials; concepts and practices; and objects" (Realms of Memory, p. 27, quoted via Downey n. 7). The concept names the modern displacement of milieux de mémoire — living environments of memory — by deliberate sites erected to hold what no longer lives in practice: memory externalized into heritage. Georgina Downey applies it to the "famous person house museum," of which the architect's house "can be classified as a subcategory": "The historic house as museum stands as a site of memory; it reflects its times, its environment, and its encompassing society with appeals to the mind and heart." Crucially, she adds the modernist condition the lieu de mémoire presupposes: "the notion of a site of memory that was once somebody's home is reliant on the modern conception (explored by Walter Benjamin, among others) that the domestic interior is both an extension and a representation of the modern individual" — making the musealized home "a kind of double modernist text."

Key Thinkers

• Pierre Nora — the concept's author: the lieu de mémoire as symbolic element of a community's memorial heritage, from archives to concepts (not yet paged — see log).
• Georgina Downey — the architect's-house application: the historic house museum as site of memory whose modern warrant is the interior's status as the individual's extension and representation (2018).
• Walter Benjamin — the conception Downey names as the site-of-memory's precondition: the domestic interior as extension and representation of the modern individual (via Downey).
• Emily Stokes-Rees — the wiki's adjacent register: the museum as commemorative spatial practice where "visitors – whether consciously or unconsciously – participate in the creation and maintenance of collective national identity" (2018).

Related Concepts

• Memory — the parent category: the site of memory is memory's materialized, institutional form; see also the dialectical image's flash of "what has been."
• House Museum — the concept's dwelling-scale instance: the home converted to memorial site, "the building itself… part of the collection."
• Narrative Space — the museum interior as narrated memory; the site of memory as its biographical subspecies.
• Period Room — the display form through which the site of memory "reflects its times… with appeals to the mind and heart" — and through which the present remakes it.
• Interior as Biography — the premise that makes the famous-person house readable as memory at all: the interior as the occupant's involuntary biography.
• Patrimonial Interior — the transgenerational family form of transmission that the public site of memory both extends and replaces when family transmission fails.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• To dwell means to leave traces (Downey 2018) — the architect's house museum as the subcategory case: "The historic house as museum stands as a site of memory; it reflects its times, its environment, and its encompassing society with appeals to the mind and heart that continue to attract growing numbers of visitors around the world"; Nora's definition quoted (n. 7, p. 27); the Benjamin-derived modern condition ("the domestic interior is both an extension and a representation of the modern individual") that makes the house museum "a kind of double modernist text."
• Symbiotic spaces (Stokes-Rees 2018) — the national-scale lieu de mémoire: "Moving through the space of the museum…, visitors – whether consciously or unconsciously – participate in the creation and maintenance of collective national identity"; the museum as "both product and producer" of the spatialized past. See memory, narrative-space.
• Lines of Enquiry (Spankie 2018) — the psychoanalytic house museum as site of memory: the Vienna/London split ("the empty study and consulting room may be viewed in Vienna, but the contents of the rooms are found in London") as the site of memory's most literal division of the remembered interior.
• Becoming Places (Dovey 2010) — the monument as the national site of memory, with the memorial machinery exposed: Monas as the way "Indonesia was imagined and embodied, just as climbing the Washington obelisk, the Statue of Liberty or the Eiffel Tower are keys to imagining the United States and France" (p. 157, via Anderson's imagined community); the monument as museum — "the journey through the monument proceeds from the past to the present where one occupies the centre of the nation" (p. 156); "Architecture was deployed to keep the moment alive, space was deployed to hold time" (p. 156); the site's contested authorship — Suharto's basement dioramas as "a false history of his own rise to power" and the deleted buffalo podiums (pp. 158–159); the Arjuna Wijaya chariot as "a symbolic re-welding" of cosmology and history "that marks Suharto's order as both new and old" (p. 159); and the site's fenced present — "The emptiness that is left after the real has been fenced out is at once a fantasy of wealth and harmony and also a collective void from which the search for national identity proceeds" (p. 164). The Dovey register gives the site of memory its becoming-side: "The monument has been framed and reframed several times and its meanings are far from exhausted" (p. 165). See legitimation, place-identity, power-and-space.

Open Questions

• Nora's lieu de mémoire exists because living milieux de mémoire have withered. Is the architect's house museum a site of memory for a community (the discipline, the tourist public) or for a single person — and can a single biography bear a community's memory?
• Downey's "double modernist text": if the musealized home reflects "the attitudes, values, and ideologies" of its presenters (Aynsley), then the site of memory is always two sites — the remembered past and the remembering present. Can the two be distinguished in practice, or is the layering (Keeble) the definition?
• The wiki's memory sources split memory's carriers between bodies (Colley), psychical traces (Freud/Spankie), materials (Dubbeldam's smart surfaces), cities (Benjamin) and museums (Stokes-Rees, Brown). Where does the house museum's trace sit — and is the "trace that is signed as authentic or not" (Downey) a memory or a signature effect?
• Park Güell became a UNESCO "Cultural Heritage of Humanity site" and its house museum funds an unfinished basilica: is the site of memory, once institutionalized, structurally an economic apparatus — and does heritage funding reshape which memories the site preserves?