Blue birds dance across a childhood mural. Painted flowers creep up from the shiny wooden floorboards. A clutter of books lie waiting for chubby hands and inquisitive minds. But this is not a nursery, nor a bedroom, nor a bookshop. This is The Provincial Memory Commission and Archive, former Provincial Police Intelligence Department and torture centre.
The books sitting on the shelves are those banned during the Dirty War, for fear that children would develop an imagination and thoughts against the dictatorship. Today, a red beanbag invites escapism and fantasy galore.
A few meters away stand the scratched walls of dark cells, signed with desperation by the disappeared. Above wait interrogation cells, where barred windows halted last hopes.
Such a contrast between playful and pain seems cruel, in a world where the traces of genocide are displayed as a shocking reminder of Never Again. But whilst a tower of skulls in Cambodia and a mountain of plaits in Poland will scar the visitors’ memory, the horrors remain so inhuman as to stay dislocated from today’s reality.
And so behind the cobbled streets of Cordoba, a transformation in collective memory is taking place, where victims´ lives are brought within the walls where they were broken. Only then, it seems, can visitors face the cell walls with the understanding necessary to prevent repetition.
One room in ´D2´ detention centre is a picture of 70´s youth; stripy jackets hang from green curtains, a Vespa is parked carefully next to an acoustic guitar. But with each item comes a black and white photo, and stories from the smiling owners whose possessions could never be passed on.
Onwards, and through the dusty corridor seeps the smell of fresh paint; a white-washed room with Ikea-inspired chairs and a flatscreen TV hanging on the wall. And in this room of clean lines and familiar modernity the survivors speak of unspeakable sins. Thirty years on, atrocities once more creep into a familiar setting, and it is only this identification which truly means Never Again.
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