At a moment of widespread digitalisation of archival collections, the creation of virtual reality heritage ‘experiences,’ and the presentation of sounds, objects, and testimonies from the past in official memory sites through multi-media displays, this chapter insists in the irreplaceability of the material in understanding how memory not so much pierces the present, but ongoingly comprises it through our sensory experiences. It advocates an approach to official and state-sponsored memory sites that interrogates how sensory experience is central for shaping visitors’ understandings of site-specific historical narrative and its capacity to heighten and nuance empathetic connections with memory sites.
As such, it treats memory sites as locations of emergent experience that we encounter through our senses as well as our intellectual and imaginative understandings. This allows us to think of sensory experience in terms of its potential to make new ways of understanding the past possible, but also what those understandings might do to cohere (or fracture) collective identity. In making this argument, I build on the notion that
These arguments, however, must be prefaced with three important points. Firstly, it is not sensible to categorise people’s surrounding environments into discrete sites of memory, because all places can carry the echoes of the past in various ways. Our own knowledge of our homes, towns, and cities or workplaces obviously evoke spatially specific memories that condition how we feel about these locations. Having said that, this chapter is focused on state-sponsored memory sites, those that have been identified, refurbished, designed, and narrated by official bodies, and that usually have pedagogical aims for visitor audiences that seek to frame the state and its past in particular terms. But this is not to suggest that these meanings are fixed or comprehensive, or that they end when visitors leave the site – indeed, such places often resonate in our memories long after our visits have ended.
Secondly, it follows that place as a spatially bounded category that somehow has memories stuck to it is in itself problematic. This is because where place begins and ends has been thoroughly problematised, not least in significant works in anthropology (Ingold 2015) and human geography (Massey 2005). However, state-sponsored memory sites are often treated as internally coherent, not least because they are spatially delineated in their larger spatial contexts and subject to planning or design regulations. They are resourced and designed in ways that often define them in limited spatial terms. This means, however, that when we think of them (and do research about them) as spatially bounded places, we can lose sight of their larger significance.
Finally, I do not seek to dispute the importance of representation, narrative, or discourse in providing the contours for specific forms of collective memory which may take the form of rituals at commemorative events, the evocative testimonies at memorial sites or the oral histories that are powerful in directing post-conflict restorative justice. However, memory as a set of specifically configured stories about the past – as particular representations of official forms of history – here should not be conflated with memory as a part of how we understand the world as a process of ongoing and emerging encounter (Muzaini 2015), or how it is very much a part of an anticipatory mode of engaging with and making sense of our surroundings (Sumartojo 2016). In this chapter, while I am interested in sensory experience as a path to understanding the significance and impact of official memory sites, the representations of the past in such places remains crucially important to their meanings.
There is now a robust body of work that attends to the affective entanglements of memory sites at all scales, and that draws together how people emotionally and sensorially feel such places, and how this makes memory piquant in particular ways. Sather-Wagstaff (2017: 18), for example, highlights the emergent and unpredictable nature of memory when she asks us to attend to ‘the dynamic relationship between the senses, feeling, emotion, cognition and memory as continually in process.’ Others highlight how the senses provide a route for memory to interrupt our daily lives, diverting our attention to the past as it suddenly springs into notice. Drozdzewski et al. (2016: 447), for example, insist that ‘sensory cues provoke remembrance; they install pauses and digressions in our normative thought processes; and they transport us, however momentarily, to different times and different places.’ This shows how memory accessed through the senses is part of the ebb and flow of our everyday lives as we move through urban landscapes (Muzaini 2015), handle particular objects (Zhang & Crang 2016; Freeman et al. 2016), or visit official sites such as museums or memorials (Waterton & Dittmer 2014; Turner & Peters 2015; Sumartojo 2016).
This last category of official site carries particular connections to national narratives, often related to war or violence. These are important to attend to because they can give rise to intense encounters where affective and emotional engagement become part of the narratives themselves; or, put differently, affect becomes part of how discourse ‘sticks’ (Ahmed 2010), with flow-on effects for the work that these narratives might do in terms of cohering national groups, defining who belongs in them and who does not, and crafting a version of the national group with an eye towards preserving aspects of it (and forgetting others). Apprehending such places in affective terms is closely entwined with sensory experience as we have bodily encounters that also have emotional impact.
For example, in research on Anzac Day (Sumartojo 2015: 283), Australia’s national day for war commemoration, I have argued that, during the annual Dawn Service, ‘darkness retells and reinforces the narrative of the Anzac attack at Gallipoli, working this into the bodies of commemorants through their sympathetic experience of dimness, stillness and anticipation.’ Here, participants’ sensory experience of dark, cool pre-dawn conditions; the gradually increasing illumination of sunrise that changes how they perceive their surroundings; and the repetition of well-known ritual phrases alongside thousands of other visitors create powerful emotional and atmospheric experiences that are anchored in the senses.
Indeed, attending to the sensory allows us to move beyond the poles of memory and history (Nora 1989) that have dominated memory studies, and engage with official lieux de mémoire in fruitful, more-than-representational ways. As I have argued elsewhere, foregrounding the sensory carries with it an approach that finds an alternative way into official memory sites: ‘a better understanding of the political heft and potential of memory sites can come into focus by attending to the minor, by rehabilitating the emergent, and from an understanding of the concomitant subtle and unpredictable slippage of multiple pasts into the perception and experience of the present’ (Sumartojo & Graves 2018: 340). By centring sensory experience, we might be able to notice what usually goes unremarked, which creates possibility for reimagined ways of doing things. Attuning to experience makes potential visible – that something new could be made possible that escapes control, in this case perhaps the control of the state, or of established and conventional ways of designing, promulgating, or encountering official memory. Here Massumi (2015: 57–58) offers an opening via affect:
This has an echo in my point above that place should not be treated as bounded or constrained. Instead, using feelings – both sensory and emotional – as a way to understand our surroundings offers productive possibilities to make sense of state-sponsored sites that can move us beyond what we might already know about them.
Such a reorientation offers, I suggest, a range of implications for how we might understand official memory sites, what they do, and what they make possible. These begin with the vital role that materiality plays in terms of how we come to know the past. As I said at the beginning of this chapter, while this has been thoroughly discussed by others, it bears repeating in an era of digitalisation where changes to the mode of sensory encounter with historical material often goes unremarked and unchallenged. Virtual encounters with historical sites, archives, or testimonies certainly can make aspects of them accessible to a wider audience, but the material and sensory aspects of this encounter are inevitably transformed. The implications of this change need to be understood given the established importance of sensory and material encounters at official sites. The manual handling of archival documents, for example, affords very different material encounters and bodily sensations that viewing the same documents on a screen, from the physical environment of the archival space, to the smell and feel of the paper, to the small thrill transmitted through the pencil marks made by another hand years before – all these open the imagination to the lives and bodies of others and enrich understanding overall.
It follows that objects, sites, buildings, landscapes, and the range of other physical and spatial substance of lieux de mémoire are alive with affects, both mundane and intense, that work to lodge them in visitors’ bodies and minds, by way of the spatial encounter and its evocation of personal memory, empathetic imagination, and bodily resonance (Waterton & Dittmer 2014; Sumartojo & Graves 2018). Ahmed (2010) reminds us that affect slides between and sticks together objects, representations, and our understandings of them, making things meaningful and significant. At the same time, she insists on the ‘messiness of the experiential, the unfolding of bodies into worlds’ (Ahmed 2010: 30), which reminds us of the complexity of how people come at official narrative – or how we all ‘take away’ official discourse based on our own terms of engagement with it. This might be shared with larger groups, but is also intimate to our individual experiences, values, and aspirations.
This complexity of encounter, response, and assimilation of state-sponsored memory sites extends to the tangled chronologies that emerge in such places. Or, put differently, the paradoxically relative unimportance of linear chronology in places dedicated to telling stories in a particular order. Indeed, Crouch (2015: 178) describes heritage as a set of entanglements in the present that unfold for each visitor in unique ways: ‘Memory is not simply “placed” in time in a linear “ordering” of being but tumbles among the memories of others, or exists in a net with others, open to being regrasped anew in other moments.’ In my own research (Sumartojo & Graves 2018: 341), participants described how personal memories were evoked by official memory sites, and how these blended together with and tinted their understanding of the site in the present. It also shaped how they understood the experiences of people who had previously dwelt in the site:
Indeed, such understandings, made possible by affective encounters as much as by material ones, rely on the empathetic imagination of the visitor (Sumartojo & Pink 2017). Sensory experience provides a route to such imaginative engagement, drawing visitors closer to others, potentially including groups or individuals who may have been excluded from previous official histories. Here we begin to see how attending to sensory experience can open up, complicate, or recast who belongs and whose stories might be told and recognised in official sites (Sumartojo 2019).
This begins to show how state-sponsored memory sites – which are so often subject to relatively fixed narratives about the state, its histories, and how these are meaningful in the present – might have the potential to offer something that exceeds the limits of official discourse. In other words, attending to sensory experience – and the associated unfolding and emergent encounters, affective engagements, and connections with personal memory they pull into being – allows us to move beyond what the state intends in such sites and probe a richer vein of meaning based in experience. Memory is thus revealed as a part of the ongoing present and potential future as much as a version of the past.
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