Paine Memorial

Twenty miles from Santiago lies the rural community of Paine.  Before the 1960s, society there held an almost feudal relationship between landowning elites and bonded laborers. From the 1960s until 1973, the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR) promoted agrarian reform and organized local families and political parties to create peasant cooperatives.

A 1973 military coup brought a swift reversal of Paine’s reforms, and at least seventy local leaders disappeared. According to the 1991 “Rettig Report,” which was prepared by Chile’s National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation, the community of Paine suffered more disappearances per capita than any other Chilean settlement during the years of military dictatorship.

The Paine memorial consists of a timber “forest” composed of one thousand logs, seventy of which have been removed. These seventy absences represent the members of the community who went missing or were executed. The site intentionally emphasizes the concept of “una memoria viva” or “living memory,” with a layout that provides space for events and meetings. Relatives of those who died and disappeared lobbied for this element of the memorial to prevent the site from resembling a graveyard. 

The Association of Families of the Detained-Disappeared has struggled to secure funding to maintain the site. Although the original design called for the creation of a permanent structure to act as a cultural center, the Chilean government has only provided enough funds to install a semi-permanent trailer-like structure.

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References

Katherine Hite and Catherine Collins. "Memorial Fragments, Monumental Silences and Re-Awakenings in Twenty-First Century Chile." Paper presented at the annual meeting of the ISA's 50th Annual Convention, Exploring the Past, Anticipating the Future, Feb 15, 2009.

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Discussions

Discussion for the Paine Memorial

Rather than being designed by a single, professional designer, the Paine Memorial was created through a deeply participatory and consultative process. This approach not only…

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Design for Paine Memorial, Chile

The citizens of Paine not only actively participated in the process of creating the memorial, they helped to design and build it. Over the course…

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