Cristina Demaria – författare

This book takes as its object of investigation an array of traumatic heritage sites and spaces of memory, including museums, former detention camps, and sites of commemoration, in Europe, Argentina, and Colombia, to investigate how various traumatic pasts can be preserved and transmitted through space, and which kind of actions might be taken both to improve knowledge of the past and to serve as an opening to a discussion of current social issues.

What can space tell us about our past? Which stories do memory sites narrate? Which memories do they transmit? And, more importantly, how can we read their meanings? Semiotics can provide us with a homogeneous, shareable and theoretically sound methodology to analyse space within a comparable and common frame of reference for scholars of memory studies and traumatic heritage, as well as for historians, architects and museum curators. The book describes in clear and understandable language the main semiotic concepts that can be used to analyse space, illustrating them with carefully chosen case studies of memory spaces – monuments, museums, post-war urban restoration, filmed and virtual space – in order to show the applicability and efficacy of a semiotic methodology.

The book describes the main semiotic concepts that can be used to analyse space, illustrating them with carefully chosen case studies of memory spaces – monuments, museums, post-war urban restoration, filmed and virtual space – in order to show the applicability and efficacy of a semiotic methodology.