16.00-17.30hrs 8 February 2017

Strand S-3.20

The fraught business of bearing witness and providing adequate testimony to the terror of the Second World War and the Holocaust has occupied many thinkers across the humanities and social sciences since 1945.  Further, the struggle to establish appropriate monumental forms at the actual sites of persecution has proved especially difficult given the competing claims of different victim-groups over these places, and the desire of other groups to forget or elide these histories.  This paper outlines the geographies and afterlife of the Risiera di San Sabba: a Nazi concentration and death camp in Trieste (1943-1945).  As the only death camp in Italy and a subsequent national monument, the Risiera inherited a complex role in post-war remembrance.  The camp was monumentalised between 1969 and 1975 by the city council and their appointed architect Romano Boico.  The stark, abstract forms that resulted reflect a struggle to represent terror through established monumental traditions. However, the design chosen deliberately abstracts the site from its urban and historical context: the thick, high walls contain this site of terror and detach it from Trieste’s troubled twentieth-century. Given that the camp was embedded in the suburbs of Trieste, this memorial form, a ghostly site of trauma, sits uneasily within a modern European city.  

Biography David Atkinson works in the fields of cultural and historical geography.  He explores the histories of geographical knowledge and how people have thought, represented, and understood geographically at various times and in different places.  He also studies how these ways of knowing the world have consequences for, and help to produce, material spaces.  He also works on the intersections of memory and geography and how the past in the present is shaped by space, place and landscape.  His research spans Modern Italy, the Italian colonial empire and modern Britain.