2.3 Conflicting memories

process brings fresh insights into the way citizens recognise buildings and acknowledge their heritage.

2.3 Conflicting memories

According to Mare (2007), the function of memory has a degree of complexity, as memory constitutes aspects of personal and communal memory. The predicament arises when memory becomes biased, highly selective, and misleading regarding the narrated events. Monuments and statues serve the purpose of endorsing and upholding political ideologies. In light of this, memory is concluded to be a factor in the interpretation of history.

Cabrera (1998:29) raises the question of forgetting:

When considering the question should we remember? It is very important to firstly ask, has any victim forgotten? Could they ever forget? Secondly, we should ask, who wants to forget? Who benefits when all the atrocities stay silent in the past?

Hökerberg (2017) insists that through the contextualisation of the Casa del Fascio frieze in Bolzano in Italy, politically charged infrastructures can be castrated of their character and can give birth to new interpretations. The process reveals the possibility for controversial, politically significant structures to become legitimate parts of a community’s modern heritage. The Caso del Fascio monument was built between 1939 and 1942 to remember Italian soldiers who fell in the First World War. There were long-standing calls for the monument to be demolished, specifically from the political groups offended by the fascist propaganda displayed. In 2017, the original inscription was altered from “Believe, Obey, Combat” to include “No-one has the right to obey”. This initiative offers a rather new interpretation of the monument with a physical alteration that still leaves the original largely intact.

Memory influences how history is interpreted; therefore, it is not surprising that the past keeps changing (Albarracín & Wyer, 2000). Thelen (1993:119) states that “a memory becomes not a fixed or fully-formed record of past reality but an invention that can be assembled with any contents and styles”. In colonial heritage structures, memory has always had political or ideological overtones embedded in the material through the design philosophies. Mare (2007) furthers the school of thought that