Introduction Questioning Traumatic Heritages and Spaces of Memory

This book marks the conclusion of a six-year international and interdisciplinary European Research Project “SPEME Questioning Traumatic Heritage in Europe, Argentina, Colombia” (2018-2024) in which university researchers and heritage professionals debated the role played by urban spaces in the construction and representation of events and subjectivities involved in collective traumatic experiences. The project took into consideration how a difficult past can be articulated in the spaces of museums and heritage sites, not only to represent what happened, thus freezing the past in a historical sense, but also to understand what practices and narratives are possible so that trauma can become a springboard for reflection on contemporary societies, and how countries and communities relate to an unbearable history. In the field of heritage and memory studies, debates on the narration of traumatic pasts through space are certainly not a new topic.